Memory and Me

You are your memory. Nothing shapes your being like what it is that you remember. That memory which plays tricks on us - and which becomes increasingly flaky as we age. Imagine this thought experiment; you wake up in a featureless room with no mirrors - and you have no recollection of how you got there or anything about your past. You know nothing about yourself - who you are, how you look. All you have is your powers of observation and your awareness of being conscious.

Do you exist? Of course you do. But are you... you? This makes you realise just to what extent you have been shaped by memory of past events - events receding away from you at an accelerating pace. At the age of ten, a year represents 10% of the total span of your life experience. At 50, a year's but 2%. If you're lucky enough to reach 100, that year will have reduced to just 1%. How much of any given year in your past will you have held on to?

The other day on Facebook, I read a post about the visit of Pope John Paul II to London, and a mass held in Crystal Palace in 1982 for Poles living in the UK. Was I there? Well, I remember remembering being there... but I have no actual recollection of any qualia from the day... I remember telling people, "Yeah, I was also there..." Was I? Like Schrodinger's cat, I'm currently in the situation of "yes I was there"/"no I wasn't there" until a conscious observer opens the box. [If you recall being there with me, please let me know!]

Today I discussed an event with my father that I clearly remember but he doesn't; the starter motor of my first car, a Morris Minor van, packed up; he helped me remove it from the car, take off the housing, pull out the armature windings, locate a broken copper wire and wind on new one. He does not remember the event. I remember the qualia; the feel of the weight of the starter motor, pulling back the housing to reveal the armatures, sitting in the garage on an old green revolving metal office chair, patiently winding the copper wire back onto the armatures, then replacing the housing and screwing the whole starter motor assembly back into the engine bay - and the immense satisfaction of it working.

Last summer, in Sopot I met Raymond, my best friend from primary school, and his wife Madeline. Ray and I talked for hours about our memories from half a century ago - it would make an interesting Venn diagram to show those events that both of us recalled, the ones he remembered and I didn't, and the ones that I remembered but he didn't. There was a fair amount of overlap (I remember) but also those odd ones where either he said "Wow! Really? Did that happen?" or where I said those same words.

Memory is selective. And yet it shapes who we are. We have a tendency to exaggerate, to story-tell, to create a bigger narrative around an event than it really merited - or talk down our own negative behaviour - on the basis of events dimly remembered, or worse - forgotten.

Memory of things that interested us in our childhood is the strongest. Ask me about British motor cars of the 1960s and '70s. How did the engine capacity of the BMC Mini grow over the years? 848cc, 998cc, 1098cc, 1275cc. Off the top of my head. No need to consult Wikipedia. Name the brands of Rootes Group cars in the1960s. Easy: Hillman, Singer, Sunbeam and Humber. These days if I want to remember something for good, it's a much bigger effort involving mnemonics. In my childhood, facts just tripped into the head and stayed there. Today memory requires effort, like doing press-ups.

Memory defines who we are. What we know defines who we are. Going back to that thought experiment I mentioned at the beginning of this post, if you are in that memory-free state and you learn that you are going to die within the next two hours - would that fact bother you, given that you have no frame of reference as to what your life was - or would you still want to postpone your death given that you have conscious awareness, your ability to observe the here-and-now, even though there was no past?

Cherish your memories. Especially those ones that come to you unbidden - those flashbacks to qualia - to those moments of absolute understanding and deep awareness. The texture of reality; the smell of diesel and sea salt on the deck of a ferry, the sound of its horn; the urgent ringing of a bell at a level crossing; snow crunching underfoot on a blue-sky frosty winter's morning; the smell of a fresh newspaper opened with a small espresso waiting on a copper table; the twinkling of stars seen from a mountainside on clear summer's night. Not so much events - when we pushed Steve T______ into the swimming pool on the biology field-trip or my hat coming off in a windy gust on ul. Puławska and ending up on a building site - but moments of pure awareness.

The collected memories of such moments makes us who we are. Rather than memories of events. And these profound memories link us to other humans, who have also felt them - not pleasure nor suffering - but moments of intense consciousness.

This time last year:
Sticks, carrots and nudge - a proposal

This time three years ago:
London vs. Warsaw pt 2: the demographic aspects