Adventures in Memory. Hilde østby
She positions herself on the edge. She believes all will go well; she can’t possibly think anything else or she wouldn’t throw herself out of a plane thousands of feet above the ground. Normally, it does end well; that’s the thought you cling to.
Now we’ll leave her standing there, watching the forested, billowing landscape from above, while thick clouds cast everything below her in a grayish light. The temperature hovers around sixty degrees Fahrenheit, and the summer has not yet fully set in. We’ll let her stand there for a while longer, her slender body in her red skydiving suit, her dark brown eyes, her broad smile. Just a few minutes more.
What memories would you linger on if you had only a few moments left to live and were looking back on your life? What memories are like shiny pearls in an incredibly exclusive—exclusive, because you are the only one in the world with your memories—pearl necklace of important events? What flutters across the hippocampus as you say goodbye to life? How many monarch butterflies light on your hand?
Or what if you were allowed to pick only one, as in the Japanese film After Life, where the deceased have to choose a single memory to relive, over and over, in heaven—the happiest moment of their lives. What would yours be?
Perhaps this is why people keep diaries. They don’t want the magical moments to slip away.
When blogger Ida Jackson reads through what she has written, she remembers more of those days than before, she claims. She sees and smells and hears what happened. She discovers details she otherwise would not have remembered. She is, in a sense, a collector of memories, a memory hoarder.
“It feels as if, by doing this, I lose fewer memories. There is something existential about it. I think often about death, so I want to remember everything,” Ida says. From 2007 to 2010 she wrote the award-winning blog Revolusjonært roteloft under the pen name Virrvarr; it was Norway’s third-most-visited blog. She saw it as an extension of her diary. She has kept a diary every single day since Christmas of 1999.
“Today, I got this notebook in the mail, and since my life is upside down right now, I might as well leave behind something in writing,” is how twelve-year-old Ida Jackson began her first diary. Since then, she has written herself into the long tradition of diarists and autobiographers, philosophers, poets, and authors—from St. Augustine to Karl Ove Knausgård—who have transformed their lives into books, published or not. It seems as if written language is closely connected to our wish to remember. The first Babylonian writings from over four thousand years ago were memos, trade notes, and astronomical calculations etched into ceramic plates meant to be kept for posterity.
By the year 200 CE, emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius had written what is considered the earliest well-known diary, Meditations. But long before that, Japanese courtesans and other Asian travelers were in the habit of recording their experiences in writing.
So what do we remember of our lives when we write things down, or when we don’t?
Psychology professor Dorthe Berntsen heads the Center on Autobiographical Memory Research in Aarhus, Denmark, and exclusively researches personal memories. “We remember best the period from our early teenage years into our twenties,” she tells us.
It seems that not all memories are created equal. Some are given priority. Our memories peak during our formative years (teens and early twenties), a phenomenon called the reminiscence bump. During this period of our lives, many of our experiences are new and startling; there are so many firsts, and they stay with us for the rest of our lives. Middle-aged people who are asked to recall their fondest memories typically mention something from this period of their lives, Berntsen’s research reveals. This area of psychological research is amazingly free from controversy.
But does it help if you keep a diary the way Ida Jackson does?
“Yes, it does help, but it might mean that we replace our memories with written stories,” Berntsen says.
What else helps make memories last? It turns out that several factors determine whether an experience sticks with us as a memory.
One such thing is the emotional impact of an experience. Exciting events that provoke sharp emotional highs stay with us particularly well. Whizzing toward the earth from fifteen thousand feet in the air, for example. Or a first kiss, after anticipation has been building for weeks. Another important ingredient for a lasting memory is how much it deviates from what we expect—how distinct or remarkable it is.
Many memories are similar to a number of other experiences we have had. It’s hard to tell them apart—thinking of them doesn’t remind us of one specific incident. Like all the times we take the bus to work. We have a cumulative memory of these experiences under the heading “bus trip to work.” Or all the times at the beach that have merged into “sunbathing at the beach”: that feeling of a summer breeze grazing our face while we squint at the sun. This is not a single event; it has happened many times. Every time, we have soaked up the summer warmth and wished that the moment would last forever. Caterina Cattaneo added to her memories of diving when she dived for the seventy-third time: that feeling of sinking into the dark water, the bubbles rising toward the light surface, the maneuvers with the tank she had done seventy-two times before. All of this became part of the general memory of “diving,” “diving in the Oslo Fjord,” or “winter diving.” But more exciting events remain as independent, unique memories. Like the time Caterina saw a rare marine slug for the first time, or the time she saw a seahorse in Madeira.
“The brain works with memory on two conflicting principles,” psychologist Anders Fjell, from the University of Oslo, points out. “Part of the brain’s work is to try to categorize and assimilate as many of our experiences as possible in order to save space, while the hippocampus fights to retain unique memories.”
The hippocampus is finely tuned to notice and pick up events and experiences that stand out for being different. Their uniqueness is what creates a memory trace, a shiny pearl in the necklace.
As with all other information we encounter, the more we ruminate over and talk about a unique incident, the more ingrained it becomes in memory. All the little tales about our lives that we share around the lunch table, at parties, or on Facebook—small talk—make memories stick. The paradox is that those memories then become stories in our minds more than living experiences.
Dorthe Berntsen’s research center is situated in Aarhus, Denmark. There, on top of the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, you can enjoy a view unlike anything else in the world. On the roof, artist Olafur Eliasson has installed a circular tunnel of glass in every color of the rainbow. In every direction you look, you can see spires and low-lying stone domes that date back to the 1600s in various shades of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and purple, depending on where on the roof you stand. Just as the city of Aarhus is rendered here in multiple beautiful shades, our memories are also seen through a filter: our emotions.
The fate of a memory is mostly determined by how much it means to us. Personal memories are important to us. They are tied to our hopes, our values, and our identities. Memories that contribute meaningfully to our personal autobiography prevail in our minds.
Personality and identity can also be maintained without memories. Even Henry Molaison, the man without a memory, obviously had a sense of a self. He knew who he was, even though he didn’t remember the full story of how he had become that person. Who we are is partially determined by factors like temperament and habits, and how we face the world and all its challenges. But our core memories in our own personal autobiography define us. Even if we don’t write six volumes about ourselves, as Karl Ove Knausgård has done, all of us walk around with an autobiography stored in our memory. It isn’t just a random stream of events we have experienced; our memories are structured and organized in accordance with our own life story. We are all authors.
“A life script is what we call it in memory research,” Dorthe Berntsen says. “It’s a script for how life should unfold; it structures our experiences.”
If you ask children what they want to be when they grow up, they might answer police officer, firefighter, or doctor, or maybe author, psychologist, or skydiver. In other words,