Memory is the enemy of wonder, which
abides nowhere but in the present.
Michael Pollan
I read an article in Wired Magazine the other day called “The New Science of Forgetting,” about how scientists are working on a technique that will basically enable us to Eternal Sunshine bad memories from our brains. This has all sorts of applications for PTSD and people who have been subjected to horrible traumas and abuse, but of course I read it from a personal and self-absorbed standpoint. I certainly have some memories I’d like to vanquish, and I’ve been waiting for someone to invent that machine ever since I first saw the movie.
Alas, the memory erasing technique they are hard at work on doesn’t actually erase your memories as much as it does render them powerless by zapping them of their emotional charge. Something about proteins compounds and neuron networks. I don’t know.
What I did find interesting about the article was the description of how our brains actually form memories in the first place. They’ve done all sorts of research to prove that most of our memories are not static, and they are actually not necessarily wholly or even mostly accurate and true. Our memories are informed by our feelings about our memories (Marshall Rosenberg would have a field day with this) and we constantly reinvent our memories every single time we remember them. Different parts of our brain collaborate to keep a memory intact, aided by the use of savvy proteins, and each time you recall something, it takes on a new shape based on the random circumstances of your remembering moment.
So for instance, if you are reminiscing about your first kiss, and as you are taking a mental stroll down memory lane, you get crashed into by a truck, guess what? Next time you think about your first kiss, you’re not gonna have such fond feelings about it. No; there will be an ominous sense in the back of your mind that there is something not-quite-right associated with your first kiss. And before long, your memory factory has segued that good dream into a bad dream. This is an extreme and extremely novice translation (probably you should just read the actual article and not take my word for it), but I had long suspected that a lot of my memories were not, in fact, memories, but stories my mind had constructed based on memory seeds. And in fact, that’s exactly how “memories” are formed. They aren’t really about what actually happened, but how your mind translated it and which elements it decided were important to store.
Once again, science proves to me that creativity is really what makes the world go round.
