How memory fails us, wrecks us, and makes us human.
We’ve all forgotten names and had words stuck ‘on the tip of our tongue.’ It’s part of being human; that is, unless you are Solomon Shereshevsky.
Ironically, much of what we know of the man who couldn’t forget is a blur, mixed up with the ‘folklore’ of his legend. But, the gist remains clear. Attention was first cast on “S.” because of his unusual abilities discovered while he was a journalist for the Moscow Newspaper. He never took notes on stories he was reporting on because he simply didn’t have to write things down in order to remember them. Skepticism and disbelief led to astonishment, and led his boss to send him to the Communist Academy in Moscow so that someone could examine him. There he was met by Alexander Luria, a psychologist who worked with Shereshevsky for years and authored the well-known case study on “S.” Luria describes how S. could flawlessly remember long strings of random words and numbers, foreign poems, scientific formulae, and the outfit that Luria had worn on that very first day they met, even after years had passed.
Yet his ability to remember was too much of a good thing. Not only could he never rid himself of the burden of unnecessary memories, but he had trouble with abilities central to being human, like understanding abstract ideas, or recognizing faces in differing contexts. And more tragically, his affliction led him to become apathetic towards life.
Memory is far from perfect, but in far more ways than you would think. Memory evolves, invents itself completely, or, for people like Shereshevsky, memory never forgets.
Some have described memory as having sevens “sins” or flaws, but you’re likely only able to think of one: forgetting. Hermann Ebbinghaus, in 1880 and 1885, conducted some of the first studies on forgetting by testing his own memory. He would, for example, memorize a series of meaningless syllables, consisting of a vowel between two consonants (for instance, TUY, XEF, LOL). Throughout time he tested the accuracy of his recall of the 2300 total syllables, in random sequences of varying length
What he found was something he says that could have been foreseen: “that forgetting would be very rapid at the beginning of the process and very slow at the end”. While there has been continued debate as to what type of function this “forgetting curve” resembles, in general this notion that overtime the rate of information loss will lessen has been agreed upon.
What about that other flaw, oh you know the one, the one where you’re sure that you know a word or a memory but its somehow blocked just below the surface, that one where no matter how hard you try you can’t seem to recall it, that where it’s…its…yes, just on the tip of your tongue! It’s a phenomenon called lethologica; it’s universal across people speaking different languages, and worsens with age. So-called “ugly sisters” are often present during the struggle to recall a word, referring to Cinderella’s siblings in that they are related but not quite the right word that you are looking for. It is these related words which seem to block the successful retrieval of the actual, desired word; often it’s better to just look up the answer or distance yourself from the blocking words, as some studies show it can make remembering the right word harder in the future, too.
While memories can simply be forgotten or blocked, they can also, more destructively, be wrongly recalled, manipulated, and influenced from the future. Why would one call these the more dangerous of memories flaws? Take a scroll through the Innocence Project’s page of exonerees, many of whom were originally sentenced due to eyewitness evidence. You’ll see men and women who have spent years, even decades of their lives behind bars. You’ll see people whose lives were ruined; partners lost, reputations shattered, years of opportunities gone. With the justice system relying heavily on eyewitness reports (with around 20% of cases use an eyewitness as their main source of evidence), the susceptibility of witnesses to biased or flat out wrong memories is a real threat to a just society.
Still don’t believe it? You would if you were part of the 70% of false convictions due to inaccurate eyewitness accounts. And it only makes sense that it would be this way; every single one of these stages of memory — encoding, storage, and retrieval — are vulnerable to outside influences, leading us to be confident in otherwise flawed recollections.
And it is not only eyewitnesses and victims that can be swayed in terms of the memories and their confidence; so can the “criminals.” Take the famous case of Paul Ingram, county Republican Party Chairman of Thurston County, Washington and the Chief Civil Deputy of the Sheriff’s department, who was arrested in 1998 for child abuse. Although Ingram denied all accusations at first, after months of questioning and suggestions from a psychologist and detectives, he later supplied descriptive accounts of his ‘crimes.’ The list of confessions includes “rapes, assaults, child sexual abuse, and participation in a Satan-worshiping cult alleged to have murdered 25 babies.” Richard Ofshe, a now retired professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, was even able to get Ingram to write a 3-page confession of an event that Ofshe himself had invented. Indeed, the entire list of his crimes was fabricated, but through nothing more than his thoughts did they become real to him.
Memory is inherently linked to imagination in this way. Getting Ingram to imagine these crimes that never occurred made him believe that they did. It’s also part of what made Shereshevsky a legendary mnemonist; his tendency for synesthesia, the phenomenon through which one’s senses become tangled, led him to treat numbers as named, vivid characters, or interpret the word “restaurant” as an elaborate, moving scene with people, plates, and music. It’s also what has made some believe that the memory of S. wasn’t so perfect after all. Above average, yes, but only as a result of impressive imagination.
Like Ingram, or an overly confident eyewitness, we are all susceptible to these flaws of memory, of bias and malleability. We’re like the 70% of undergraduates at Williams College who admitted to purposefully crashing a computer program by hitting the ALT key, a move they were told would cause many problems. In reality, none actually hit the button. We are like the 35% who even came up with a description of what happened during the fake event. We are all biased in our recall, like the participants in the ‘false-fame’ study, who remembered on average 1.7 times as many black criminals as white, when in reality all of the names were made up. We are the optimists who tend to remember more positive events, and depressed participants who recalled more negative ones, as shown by a study of Stanford undergraduates.
At times, whether a memory is wrong or right, there are parts of our past that we simply wish we could erase, traumatic events or upsetting relationships. Memories stubbornly persist, a fact that can be as simple as the impossibility of the statement ‘don’t think about monkeys,’ to as debilitating to as “several psychiatric conditions, from anxiety to addiction.” The amygdala is important here, which for most intents and purposes is the fight or flight center in the brain — the area mainly responsible for the fear response. Individuals and animals alike who experience symptoms of PTSD show greater activation in this brain area. It’s also important to emotional memory in that, for example, the amount of activity within the amygdala corresponds directly with the subsequent ability to recall an emotional movie later, according to one study. This correlation does not exist with non-emotional movies, suggesting the relationship of this brain area to more intense memories.
While the technology of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, capable of erasing a person completely from one’s mind, may be far off in the future, science has shown us some ways in which to be rid of unwanted histories. Much of this field has focused on helping those with post-traumatic stress disorder. One finding is that beta blockers like propranolol (medications usually used to treat heart issues) shut down certain receptors within the amygdala. In this way, they affect protein synthesis in the fear center and further, the traumatic memory. The caveat is that it’s imperative that the undesirable memory be ‘reactivated’ or recalled during the drug administration, or else the memory trace will not be modified by propranolol. Interestingly, what is found is that the memory itself still remains — it’s simply that the overwhelming fear response is gone.
Who can argue with such a cure for a debilitating condition? I surely can’t. For those whose memories are a curse rather than a blessing, the potential of memory modification must seem like a saving grace; but the other end of the spectrum of memory, that of extreme forgetting, is equally as frightening a prospect. As mentioned, beta-blockers are generally viewed as safe in that they will only affect the emotional and not the episodic content of a memory. But this is not always the case, as was for famous patient H.M.
Henry Molaison suffered from epilepsy; having almost one seizure per day, his affliction was debilitating and warranted neurosurgery. The extent of surgery was dramatic, to say the least, with about 8cm from both sides of H.M.’s medial temporal lobe removed. Post-surgery, his seizures miraculously dropped to about once per year, and his IQ even increased (although this may be because he no longer needed medications). For such a risky surgery, surprisingly not much seemed different about his personality of “cheerful placidity.” Yet the instant you left the room for just a few moments, upon your return you would be viewed as a complete stranger by him.
H.M. suffered from anterograde amnesia; he could not form any new memories. He also could not remember the year or two prior to his surgery. But, he could complete a puzzle an indefinite number of times with no recollection of past attempts, no dulling of entertainment. He could greet his neuroscientist companion of 46 years, Suzanne Corkin, as if she were a new face every single day.
Interestingly, however, Molaison could form new procedural memories. This simply means that over time he could, for example, improve in the skill of drawing something while looking in a mirror, a task requiring reversed movements. Despite have no recollection of the task the next time that he tried, he did better each time. This should be no form of solace to you, however; procedural memory is not as integral to our humanity as those other capabilities lost from amnesia.
Take Kent Cochrane, another famous amnesiac patient who lost his memory in a motorcycle accident. His unique case of amnesia involved the loss of his personal, episodic memories, meaning that his life, to him, in some way never occurred beyond a surface level. He can tell you his name, and when he was born, and where he lives. Or, he can tell you that Mexico City is south of Chicago, or how to change a flat tire. But he can’t ever remember changing a flat himself. Watching his interviews, it becomes clear just how tragic his story is. When asked to describe his life, he can do nothing more than hesitate to say, “I don’t know, livable, I guess.” He seems to simply exist, with no meaningful attachment to the past, his mind “clear really all the time,” like a calm pond without a ripple on the surface. This tabula rasa of a mind is sadly less than complete without his deeply personal memories.
Memory can paralyze us or trick us into false beliefs, and it is certainly not without its drawback. But it also makes us who we are. Over time, the random syllables of life will may melt away, or become blurred amongst false realities. But these are necessary evils. Without memory, a large chunk of what makes up a human beings special life is simply gone: the adventures, the arguments, the hilarious-in-hindsight histories, the songs and stories and food and faces you love and the reasons why, and the places you’ve been and the good and bad times had there, the people you’ve known and the connections that made them more than just an extra in the story of your life, the everything that makes you different from anybody else. Memory can make us suffer, but it makes us us.
