Down Memory Lane Interview: The Formation of Personal/Collective Memories and our Identity

Memory is the key to who you are. It’s the food and songs you enjoy, the people you love, your completely individual and shared collective identity. Memory is a strange, complex thing; it has in equal measure the capability to haunt and torment, but also to soothe and comfort. It can be unpredictable too, some smell or sound can trigger a memory drift into something you haven’t thought about for a decade, but you can just as easily forget where you placed your keys five minutes ago.

Despite its staggering importance to our daily lives (let alone the very existence of human civilisation), I for one don’t often pay it due consideration. We are probably all somewhat guilty of taking for granted how valuable our memory really is. I have no idea how, or why memory works the way it does (or even at all). But remembering to send my last article to a former lecturer of mine -Dr. Conrad Russell- led to an in-depth and very insightful interview on the topic.

Dr. Russell is a senior lecturer in Social Psychology at Leeds Beckett University. Memory is his primary area of research, and it is a subject in which he takes a deep personal interest. His thoughtful and thorough answers were able to shed some much-needed light onto the processes involved with the creation and consequent meaning of both our personal and collective memory.

“Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future”.

-Eli Wiesel

(M) Where does your interest in memory come from?

(CR) My interest in memory probably partly comes from my own memory. I don’t have a ‘photographic’ or ‘iconic’ memory, but my memory is (or at least used to be) a matter of some surprise for many people. I still now don’t easily forget things — I can remember names of people I met as a small child, and I just found a section in a book which I needed for a lecture in a few minutes…I last read it in 1991 (or 1990, OK it’s not perfect). I’m not ‘showing off’ here, as my particular memory skills do not make me any kind of genius. My memory was trained very early on, that’s all. I had to learn to function in a second language in mid-childhood, which involved memorising verb tables endlessly, and I was encouraged from early childhood to memorise anything I was interested in — which is why I am still (almost) unbeatable in a game of naming World Capitals. My not that exceptional experience shows how memory is a human achievement, not an innate ‘faculty’. And how what we remember is shaped by what we care about. Memory is shaped by desire. If you can’t remember something, this is not a biological fault, but a lack either of habit or interest. So that’s why I became interested in it. Also in psychology, you can’t really avoid memory. Every school of psychology has a theory of memory — because cognition, perception and emotion don’t make sense without it. Without memory we couldn’t think, make sense of unfamiliar objects, or use language. So, in a sense, it’s the key to everything.

How much do we know about memory?

Psychologists who carry out tests to ascertain short term memory ‘capacity’ or who test ‘priming’ (the use of cues to help retrieve words or lists of items) are pretty sure they know what memory is. There are a series of boxes — short-term memory, long-term memory, perhaps another ‘box’ for visual memories plus a central ‘controller’. Memory here is about recall and retrieval from a set list of items — words or pictures usually. In other words these researchers are describing a “mechanism”. What they aren’t really thinking about is meaning. Yes, ok a picture of a robin might help you remember that the missing word in the memory test is ‘Father Christmas’, but that’s a very narrow definition of meaning. As David Chalmers has famously pointed out, it’s easy to describe in common sense fashion how bits of consciousness work — that’s the so-called ‘easy’ problem. The hard problem is dealing with those issues of meaning.

In what sense?

For example, I think that the issue of memory ‘accuracy’ is pretty much nonsense, because all memory is reconstructed. Or more properly, it’s constructed in the first place. If you go on holiday to a Greek Island, you might take pictures of waves, or a bottle of Ouzo, or your lunch, to send to a friend via a messaging app. Or you might walk along the beach with a friend who is physically there with you, commenting on various other tourists on the beach and guessing their life stories from their appearance. These activities make certain kinds of memory of those events, rather than others (maybe you didn’t take a picture of the washing machine in the basement). You are literally making memories.

Like all forms of consciousness, memory is selective. The fact that you focused on certain aspects of the holiday scene rather than others might make your memory incomplete, viewed from the perspective of an omniscient being at least. But it doesn’t make it ‘inaccurate’. Once you start thinking of memory as a creative activity, which is inter-subjective (you are usually remembering something “for” someone) it becomes far more interesting, but also rather more mysterious. Human memory is not a mechanical storage device. Or at least, if it is, that is only a trivial part of it.

If we construct memory as we go — and I suppose a lot of our identity is based on memories from childhood — is our identity just a fiction of our own making?

This is of course the argument made by Daniel Dennett — who like Chalmers is a philosopher of consciousness. For Dennett, our various sensory systems are constantly making drafts of what we perceive in the outside world, revising and correcting them.

As there is no controlling centre (no little homunculus sitting behind a screen watching the world), there are multiple ‘drafts’ from different parts of the ‘system’ — auditory, visual, motor and so on. If we are called on to give a ‘status report’ (my words not his) in answer to a question — such as, ‘what did you do on holiday’? — then we present the most recent ‘draft’ to the questioner. But there is no ‘I’ separate from the flow of experience.

The process of presenting a ‘snapshot’ of these constant flows of consciousness gives the appearance of there being an ‘I’. And we can trick ourselves into believing it. I’m not an expert on consciousness. But my feeling is that this argument is in many ways very pertinent, but makes one key mistake — it assumes that that which is constructed through speech, through dialogue with others, is not real. Or that it can be reduced back to one biological organism responding to a request for information from another — truthfully or not depending upon whether its survival is threatened.

A lifetime ago, I made up the term ‘fictive time’. I don’t think anyone else has used it, although the idea behind it is much older than I am! ‘Fiction-al’ means made up, imaginary, fake. ‘Fict-ive’ means told in the form of a story. But a fictive account may be ‘truer’ than a mere technical description. Again it’s a question of meaning. This is why, if you were interviewing me ‘in real life’, you’d perhaps set the scene by describing my appearance, the fact I was chain-smoking through the interview, and other apparently irrelevant details. Because it’s part of the story, just as much as my slightly incoherent musings on the nature of memory.

So how does memory work in terms of our identity?

The idea that memory (‘status reports’ of ‘drafts’) is essentially a response to an Other — recalling, or constructing a ‘tale’ for a social purpose — predates Dennett by at least a century. Pierre Janet, a contemporary of Freud, describes it as precisely this kind of process. And in these dialogic, social memory tales, from about the age of two, there appears a central character, an ‘I’. How early the ‘I’ appears and how she appears (or if she appears at all) depends on what kinds of questions the child is asked — factual questions (‘what did you do’? who else was there?) or more ‘narrative’ questions (‘how did you feel about it? ‘why did they do that’?). So the ‘I’ is totally made up, a character in a story, agreed. But that ‘I’ then has its fictional (or fictive) life talking to other ‘I’s and proactively deciding what ‘drafts’ to prepare and present to particular ‘I’s in future.

For example, ‘I’ have been asking myself questions about memory since you suggested the interview — in other words trying to remember not only what I know about it, but based on what ‘I’ know of you, what might interest you, and the kinds of people who’d read your blog. Now, a fictional character that can, in the words of the great Social Psychologist Frederic Bartlett, ‘turn back’ on the messy multiple drafts being written in consciousness, and select parts of those drafts to represent to others as memories — for me, that capacity to ‘turn back’ means we are not dealing with an ‘illusion’ in any really meaningful sense.

I realise I’ve actually answered a question a little different from the one you asked — as I’ve been talking about the self. My point is that once you have an ‘I’ existing in an inter-subjective space, through dialogue with others, then that ‘I’ is real in the only senses that matter. Her existence as a fictive entity has an impact on others, and on her own actions of remembering. So if the ‘fictive I’ is real in that sense, so are her memories, because they are the episodes of her autobiography. If you ask someone to describe themselves, it’s a sure bet they will tell you about key episodes in their past life which made them who they are.

I read some stuff about children who seem to remember in quite some detail about their supposed “past lives”. Is this something that you have ever heard of? What could be at play in those cases?

This phenomenon is taken quite seriously by some parapsychologists, and there are ‘confirmed cases’ — in the sense that the past life identity corresponds to another child who died before the experiment was born, and that the child can recognise ‘past’ family members before being told their identities. As often in parapsychology, we can easily dismiss most cases as fraud, or suggestion, but not all of them. Plato, who with Aristotle is the founder of European psychology, believed that souls were eternal, passing forever between heaven and earth in endless re-incarnations. So I’d personally keep an open mind.

Could memory be inherited?

I personally don’t accept the idea of physically innate, inherited memory, although Freud believed that there was a collective unconscious of residual beliefs — ie. the ‘uncanny’ (familiar yet troubling) emotions we feel when seeing depictions of ghosts or magic in films might be, he speculated, the result of inherited, but now consciously repressed, beliefs in the spirit world.

I would however argue that we have collective memories, in the sense that certain events are told and retold as ‘exemplars’ — as stories exemplifying certain moral qualities shared by a collective group. For example the ‘Spirit of the Blitz’, or the wholly apocryphal story of George Washington confessing to chopping down a cherry tree. Collective memory, in legends, stories, songs, and in the formal teaching of history and official ‘narratives’ of national identity, is a great interest of mine.

Could you expand on the importance and impact of collective memories? And how they come to be created.

Collective memories are fought over — there are social, cultural and political battles over what counts as a memory and what does not. The cultural rhetoric of ‘firsts’ or ‘worst’ is interesting here. A recent shooting in the US was categorised as the ‘worst mass shooting in US history’, which led to activists on social media posting photographs of the 19th Century massacre at Wounded Knee. The statement ‘worst…shooting’ contained assumptions, or ‘silent terms’ — it was the worst mass shooting by a civilian. And the worst in terms of numbers of deaths, outside the context of the genocide of Native Americans, who are not part of the US collective memory except in the form of appropriated images on football helmets and cigarette packets. Equally, the ‘first woman astronaut’ was a US citizen — Sally Ride — she was indeed the first woman astronaut as this is an American term. The first woman in space was Valentina Tereshkova from the USSR. So language and linguistic concepts are often tied up with how collective memory is framed, and who does (and does not) get to have those memories.

None of this necessarily determines what individuals remember, but it sheds light on the processes by which societies decide which memories should serve as collective exemplars, and which should be passed over in silence. So ‘who decides’ what a collective memory is, is largely a matter of power. In more properly psychological terms, some collective memories are repressed. This is because they contradict the image, or schema, which those with the power to define wish to project. This is also because those who do wish to remember are marginalised or oppressed. But as the repressed always return, so these ‘other‘ memories have a tendency to resurface — the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, holding up pictures of those ‘disappeared’ (kidnapped or murdered) during the military dictatorship in Argentina is a case in point. In other cases, the collective memory has not as such been repressed, but its meaning is fought over — a dominant reading of the event is challenged, often after a long struggle. The recent admission from the South Yorkshire Police that there was no ‘riot’ at Hillsbrough, and that the football fans died as a result of incompetence — or callous disregard for life — by those supposed to protect them, is one example of such struggles over memory.