There is a cognitive phenomenon I’ve always enjoyed, but as I grow older it seems even more precious to me. It’s when a sudden flash of memory comes, unbidden and whole into the forefront of your mind and you inhabit for a fleeting second a fragment of your past – whole and entire, it seems. For that one moment, impelled by some shadowy association – a sound, perhaps, or a smell, or nothing you can consciously fathom, your experience returns to you, and you are embraced by things as they were, by your own experiences as if by warm bedclothes when you first awaken.
This experience is so precious because it isn’t how memory normally works. When I try to recall things consciously, I can often sense them building themselves to me, and the popular neuroscience I have read assures me that this is in fact so – that the brain retains only some information about an experience under normal circumstances, and then shades in the rest as seems appropriate when you recall things later. That’s one of the things this recent article rests on – at any given time, unless in extraordinary circumstances, we record very little of what’s going on around us. (The article focuses on research into an exception to that rule – when we feel in danger for our lives, it seems, we record much, much more than usual, leading to the experience of time stretching out that is familiar to those who have had brushes with death.)
So when my memory suddenly returns to me with a sense of completeness, it seems sweet and precious – for whatever reason, this one moment, this one sensation, was encoded in its entirety, and it has been waiting for me, hidden in my mind, ready to be triggered by a brush with something completely ordinary. It’s a thread tying the world I was, usually irretrievable, accessible only through interpretation, with the self I am, implying that they don’t always have to be unknowable to one another.
(Of course, it’s entirely possible that the sensation of completeness is illusory, and that I am, in fact, filling in many details that may be false or may now seem entirely different to me than they did at the time. Almost certainly, once the moment of recall is gone, and I am left with a memory of experiencing a memory, I will begin filling in and reshaping, though I am left with an impression of happy completeness and a philosophical reassurance that lasts for a while.)
When I try to think about it, I suspect these memory experiences are primarily visual. I don’t have a particularly strong visual memory, so a sudden recall of a picture from my past might account for some of the degree to which it seems unusual. I also tend to feel as if I am back in the scene, though, so there’s something more going on than the visual – though there’s almost never anything narrative about these memories. I can put together a narrative around them, but they aren’t memories of an ongoing part of a story, just of an experiential moment in time, separate from what came before or after. In other words, I don’t experience myself as an actor in these scenes, but as an inhabitant – like, I suppose you experience a particularly moving painting, only in this case you’re the painter and the subject as well as the viewer.
The other day I had one of these experiences, wherein something suddenly recalled to me, in full, the room in which I spent most of my time at a day camp I went to the summer when I was maybe four or five. It was the room I recalled, and how a part of it, near the window, looked, and how it felt to be there – sort of soft and dusty and red and friendly. I know from more ordinary memories that when this day camp ended I was very upset, because I felt a strong sense of group with the other kids and the teacher, and it distressed me to think that we would never all be together again. So I definitely enjoyed it.
I suppose I find these memories so comforting, and want to mull over them because I’ve always been afraid of losing things. I’ve written about it before – about this persistent fear of loss that used to drive me to hoard mementos of all kinds of events, from the ordinary to the extraordinary, and that leads me to experience an unusually potent sense of anxiety when a fictional character loses something that seems to me important.
When a memory returns, like a sudden gift, it reassures me that my experiences aren’t lost. Even though I may not be able consciously to recall my past, the sensation of it remains, strong enough to immerse me – even if only for a second – in what was gone.
This experience is so precious because it isn’t how memory normally works. When I try to recall things consciously, I can often sense them building themselves to me, and the popular neuroscience I have read assures me that this is in fact so – that the brain retains only some information about an experience under normal circumstances, and then shades in the rest as seems appropriate when you recall things later. That’s one of the things this recent article rests on – at any given time, unless in extraordinary circumstances, we record very little of what’s going on around us. (The article focuses on research into an exception to that rule – when we feel in danger for our lives, it seems, we record much, much more than usual, leading to the experience of time stretching out that is familiar to those who have had brushes with death.)
So when my memory suddenly returns to me with a sense of completeness, it seems sweet and precious – for whatever reason, this one moment, this one sensation, was encoded in its entirety, and it has been waiting for me, hidden in my mind, ready to be triggered by a brush with something completely ordinary. It’s a thread tying the world I was, usually irretrievable, accessible only through interpretation, with the self I am, implying that they don’t always have to be unknowable to one another.
(Of course, it’s entirely possible that the sensation of completeness is illusory, and that I am, in fact, filling in many details that may be false or may now seem entirely different to me than they did at the time. Almost certainly, once the moment of recall is gone, and I am left with a memory of experiencing a memory, I will begin filling in and reshaping, though I am left with an impression of happy completeness and a philosophical reassurance that lasts for a while.)
When I try to think about it, I suspect these memory experiences are primarily visual. I don’t have a particularly strong visual memory, so a sudden recall of a picture from my past might account for some of the degree to which it seems unusual. I also tend to feel as if I am back in the scene, though, so there’s something more going on than the visual – though there’s almost never anything narrative about these memories. I can put together a narrative around them, but they aren’t memories of an ongoing part of a story, just of an experiential moment in time, separate from what came before or after. In other words, I don’t experience myself as an actor in these scenes, but as an inhabitant – like, I suppose you experience a particularly moving painting, only in this case you’re the painter and the subject as well as the viewer.
The other day I had one of these experiences, wherein something suddenly recalled to me, in full, the room in which I spent most of my time at a day camp I went to the summer when I was maybe four or five. It was the room I recalled, and how a part of it, near the window, looked, and how it felt to be there – sort of soft and dusty and red and friendly. I know from more ordinary memories that when this day camp ended I was very upset, because I felt a strong sense of group with the other kids and the teacher, and it distressed me to think that we would never all be together again. So I definitely enjoyed it.
I suppose I find these memories so comforting, and want to mull over them because I’ve always been afraid of losing things. I’ve written about it before – about this persistent fear of loss that used to drive me to hoard mementos of all kinds of events, from the ordinary to the extraordinary, and that leads me to experience an unusually potent sense of anxiety when a fictional character loses something that seems to me important.
When a memory returns, like a sudden gift, it reassures me that my experiences aren’t lost. Even though I may not be able consciously to recall my past, the sensation of it remains, strong enough to immerse me – even if only for a second – in what was gone.
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