One day, walking on a trail in the mountains, I exchanged greetings with a passing hiker. Suddenly, the image of someone I had known 40 years before came to mind, and with that image, a series of memories. The strange thing is that the person who came to mind from all those years before had not been a close friend, and the memories that flooded in did not seem very important. (Alas, this is not the story of a long-lost friendship renewed. The hiker on the trail was not the person from my past.)
The fascinating part of this story is that, while reflecting on what had just happened, I couldn’t remember thinking about that particular person for many years. Even more, some of the memories that flooded back had not been conscious to me for 40 years. So, does this mean that every experience of my life is stored somewhere, waiting for the proper trigger to bring it to consciousness? If they are all there, how is access to all my memories determined? And if all memories are not stored, which ones have I kept and which ones not? Whatever the answers, “I” don’t seem to be in control of the functioning of my memory. Sometimes recent facts elude me, yet I will spontaneously remember an event from long ago. Sometimes a song title will pop into my head that I hadn’t thought of for years, and other times I have will have difficulty remembering the name of someone I talked to yesterday.
Another dramatic point: I do not remember creating most of my memories. I occasionally make a conscious decision to try to remember something, but the great majority of what I have access to just seems to be there, often appearing without any intention on my part (a song will spontaneously trigger a memory, or a taste, or a face, or a smell). How, then, are countless decisions about what will be stored in my memory being made? What I remember is crucial to who I am, thus how these decisions are made is pretty important.
Equally perplexing is the realization that many things that seemed important to me when I was five—or twenty-five—often do not seem very important today. Yet a memory that was filed away when I was five has the perspective of that five-year-old attached to it—so how much significance should I give to memories from an earlier period of time if those memories come with old feelings and judgments attached? Especially if my perspective has changed a lot since that time?
Can I even count on my memory of facts being accurate? Are they stored exactly as things happened? Since I did not make a conscious decision about what was to be stored, was there any judgment being made to insure the accuracy of the facts? If so, by whom? Further, if my conscious mind was not in charge, how could reason have been involved in the process? Or is reason irrelevant to memory?
One further puzzle: I have come to see that my memories often differ substantially from those of others who experienced the same event. Are their memories wrong? Are mine? Or perhaps my memories, as well as theirs, are being rewritten continuously as time passes to fit the constantly updated stories we each are telling ourselves about who we are and what the world is like. But if so, who is doing this rewriting, and how much can I count on the accuracy of the rewrites? To make sure they are accurate, perhaps I should take charge of my memory process. But how on earth would I do that?
The Mystery of Memory
All these questions about memory tie into and are a part of the many questions about consciousness. Memory, just like consciousness, is central to the experience of being human, yet we do not know how we create memories or how they are brought back into consciousness. Are they filed away as discreet units? That used to be a prominent theory, but has fallen out of favor. Recent research strongly suggests that, wherever memories are, they aren’t stored like files in a file drawer. Rather, they are diffuse; distributed. That is, there is a field of memory, and the entire field carries memories. Where this field might be, and how it is created, however, no one knows.
At the same time, who we are is completely dependent on memory. Without memory we would have no past, no way to learn, and no relationships. Further, there would be no science, no civilization, and no culture. There would be no identity, no “you” and no “I.” Yet memory is a complete mystery. No one has ever found a memory in the brain. (Pause for a second and ask yourself: “Can I envision where a memory is, what it is, how it is stored?”)
Skeptico: How can that something this important is so little understood?
Wisdom Seeker: A very good question. I have tried to come to some understanding by studying what others have written as well examining my own internal process, but I cannot discover how I create memories. Further, I have no idea what is stored in my memory banks. If, in a flash, I can remember something in great detail that happened forty years ago, something I had not thought of in the intervening years, I have to wonder how much else is stored I am unaware of?
I have looked carefully to discover if researchers today understand how memory works, but real understanding in incredibly sparse. On the other hand, a handful of people with abilities far greater than normal hint at amazing possibilities. The most dramatic example—twenty-five people in the world have been confirmed as having hyperthymesa, the ability to recall on command an endless number of the details of their lives. One of these individuals is Brad Williams, a newsman from Wisconsin who has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to quickly recall what he was doing on any specific day in his past. In a few seconds, Brad can tell you where he was, what he was doing, and even the major news events of any date that is named. And he can do this for each of the twenty thousand days he has lived since he was eight years old.
Brad’s ability is especially pertinent because there is no evidence that his brain is different from yours or mine; rather, he simply seems to have the capacity to access what is stored more readily than most of us. Perhaps, then, this information is somehow available to each of us if we just knew how to access it. Is it possible that a memory of everything that has ever happened to you is all there, but inaccessible most of the time. If this is the case, we are back to the issue of how we access our memories, and why we choose some and not others. Who or what determines which memories we will recall? Can recall? How does this happen? Once again, this seems pretty important.
But no one know how Brad does what he does. Brad doesn’t know. Yet his ability suggests that the brain is more like an accessing mechanism than a filing cabinet. Perhaps the brain is like a radio that tunes into channels or fields of information. A fascinating example of a person who tuned in to a whole field of information in an instant comes from Marcel Proust. In his famous novel he writes:
I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure invaded my senses.[1]
The inspiration of this one moment brought back memories that resulted in a seven-volume novel (4,300 pages in the Modern Library’s English translation), filled with memories that, by Proust’s report, were triggered by that instant. The broader implication of his experience is that, with the right trigger, an amazing amount of information is available to each of us. Interestingly, his novel includes an exploration of memory itself, how it interacts with and affects our lives. And before you dismiss this example and its suggestion of the existence of prodigious amounts of memory in us, keep in mind that the novel itself is the evidence—and it is considered one of the greatest novels of all time.
Reinforcing the idea that much lies dormant in our memory is the way we can remember a great deal more in any area upon which we chose to focus. Wherever we turn our attention, an increasing number of memories are available in that area. When I first start thinking about a topic, there are often a few memories, but not many. If I stay focused, however, more and more facts, ideas, and images appear. At any given moment, each of us is focused on a few areas of interest, and we recall a good bit of information in those areas. But if we change our focus, memories grow in number and detail in the areas to which we have shifted our attention, and diminish in the old areas. You can get a sense of the vast field of memory available to you if you simply practice tuning into different topic areas in your life.
Yet another hint that a vast memory field is available to us (of which we are usually unaware) is the oft-reported phenomenon of one’s whole life flashing before a person on the verge of death. Although these reports are anecdotal, they are significant because that are so widespread—this phenomenon has been reported by many different people in many cultures over thousands of years. Where these elaborate life memories have been stored up to the “dramatic” moment of recall, however, is completely unknown. Increasing the mystery is the fact that a number of such reports have come from people with significant loss of brain function, some whose brains had deteriorated for years before the recall event. On additional thought to ponder: Since only a few people survive who are about to die, I often wonder how many have this experience right before they die but did not live to tell us it happened.
Thought Experiment – How are memories created and stored
Do you have any idea how you create memories or how you store them? We clearly have the ability to select a few specific things to remember, but do you have any idea how you have stored those memories? Even more, since what you consciously choose to remember constitutes only a very small part of everything in your memory system, do you have any idea how the rest of the information was selected and then stored? (Some of it for decades.)
Examining my own memory process, focusing as intently as I can, I cannot discover how I create most of my memories. I intentionally memorized the multiplication tables many years ago, and those memories have been available to me ever since. A few other things are like that, things I chose to memorize. But most of my memories just seem to be there—millions of pieces of information organized into patterns and sequences in various categories. Yet I did not choose these things to be memories, I did not choose the categories or the patterns; somehow it all just happened. There are many theories about how it happens, but I have been unable to find anyone who really understands how this process works. The mystery of memory remains as elusive in the modern era as ever. We have some idea about why particular events are more likely to become significant memories than others (emotional impact, figural life moments, connection to ambitions and fears, etc.), but we do not know how they are created, where they are stored, or how we access them.
The “Cloud” of Memory
A new development in the computing world provides one useful way to think about memory, the cloud. Perhaps memory is like the much-discussed “cloud,” where data is distributed and stored in various off-site locations. This is an analogy, of course, but a corrective to past analogies that compare the brain to a stand-alone computer where all our memories stored inside the box.
The cloud analogy fits with the ideas of a number of scientists who have suggested that memories are not located in specific parts of the brain, but instead are distributed throughout. One such expert, neurosurgeon Karl Pribram, postulated that memory is like a hologram.[2] When a small photographic impression is cut from a holographic film, and an appropriate light is shone through that small piece of film, the whole image appears. The image from the small piece is less distinct than the image created when all the film is used, but the whole image is in each piece, no matter how small. Pribram thinks that memory functions in this way—rather than discreet bits of data being located in specific areas of the brain, memories are distributed as fields of memory.
One piece of evidence for this theory arose from Pribram’s work with people who had brain damage. He discovered that subjects did not forget all the information in one category and remember all the information from another; instead, the memories of those with brain damage was fuzzier overall, but all areas of memory were available. Pribram’s holographic model, when introduced, was at odds with the mainstream view that memories reside in particular locations, so many attempts were made to prove him wrong. Experimenters destroyed parts of many rats’ brains that they believed were the location of specific memories (we will not deal here with the moral questions involved in such experiments), but the end result of all these experiments were supportive of Pribram’s view.
Somehow, then, each of our memories does not exist in one place, but seems to be distributed in some way. But if this is the case, how are they distributed? Where is this memory “cloud” and how does it work? No one knows. We do not even know whether it is located in the physical brain. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake has assembled a vast amount of evidence suggesting that memories reside in a morphogenetic field external to the physical brain. He sums up his years of research by saying that, “Memory seems to be both everywhere and nowhere in particular.”[3]
Pribram’s holographic theory and Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field theory are not the only alternatives available. Carl Jung suggested that some information is stored outside the individual in a shared “collective unconscious,” and physicist David Bohm developed the idea that the universe has an “implicate order,” parallel to and simultaneous with the “explicate order” of the universe of our everyday experience. Bohm’s research suggested that memory exists in the implicate domain as well as the everyday world, and at times we can access the information contained in the implicate realm. Going back much further, for thousands of years shamans have talked about having access to a field of memory, and the Hindu philosophy of Samkhya speaks of an Akashic record that contains information from the distant past.[4] (These theories do not necessarily conflict with each other; there is much overlap between them.)
Returning to the ideas of David Bohm, it is crucial to understand that the implicate order he suggests is not separate from the material world; rather, one is enfolded in the other. Although we cannot directly see the implicate dimension, it is there, and within it everything is in contact with everything else. Ultimately, at the implicate level nothing is separate from anything else; each and every thing is connected and in communication at the implicate level. There, our sense of being separate is but an illusion, an illusion that arises because we are usually perceiving the world through the narrow window of our position within the explicate order, and from that position we can see only a very small part of the whole.
As Bohm developed his ideas, he came to believe that, besides matter and energy, there is a third element, parallel and equally important to them, which he called “active information.” His idea is that everything in nature, including consciousness, is constantly interacting with this field of information. In this field, everything is connected instantaneously, which gives us a way to understand many of the abilities people have demonstrated through the ages that have previously been hard to explain (such as how people sometimes seem to know things they have no way of knowing through the normal five senses). Could this Bohn’s field of information be the brain’s “cloud?” I don’t know, but I do know we need to explore Bohm’s views and those of others who are taking a broader perspective if we are ever to understand what memory really is and how it works. (For more on these ideas, a good book is The Holographic Universe: The Revolutionary Theory of Reality by Michael Talbot, in which he extensively discusses the ideas of Pribram and Bohm.)
Skeptico: Given all this, why do some people still insist that memories must be located in specific areas of the brain?
Wisdom Seeker: Those who have made materialism their act of faith want to downplay how mysterious memory is because, if memories cannot be explained by their theory, many questions arise about the theory itself. Within the worldview of materialism there is no inherent point to life, no values with any deep basis, and there is no room for anything beyond the mindless, meaningless interaction of matter and energy. This is, of course, just one of many different metaphysical belief systems, ways of thinking about how the universe came to be and how it functions. This one is fairly unique in holding that everything can be explained on the basis of the interaction of tiny bits of matter. (In recent decades, the terms physicalism and naturalism have been used in place of materialism, but all three insist that the universe is only material “stuff” and mindless energy.) But for this faith system to be true, memory and consciousness must be able to be explained by mechanical or chemical processes.
Thus, when broader possibilities for how memory might work are suggested, materialists fear that if they open that door even slightly, all kinds of other ideas and possibilities could rush through. This fear has led to a parade of reductionistic attempts to show how memory is only a mechanical process, but none of these attempts are convincing, and none have garnered broad agreement. The “mechanistic brain will eventually explain memory” advocates have tried to use Charles Darwin to bolster their position, but this effort has mostly shown the limitations of their approach. Darwin’s ideas, and those of his followers, are very important, and have helped us understand many things. Evolutionary theory has revolutionized modern thought. But Darwin’s ideas have been unsuccessful in explaining memory.
Darwin himself recognized this, which is the reason he did not mention human memory once in either of his most important books, On the Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man. He makes one passing reference to animal memory: “Animals have excellent memories for persons and places.”[5] But there is no attempt by Darwin to explain how memory came to exist, how it developed, or where memories are stored. This suggests he understood the limits of his theory and recognized there were many things they could not explain. Because Darwin’s ideas have been widely accepted, however, there is power in invoking his name, so materialists haven’t resisted the urge to claim that his theories can explain many things they cannot, such as memory.
Skeptico: But Darwin is ancient history. What about modern theorists; haven’t they dealt with this?
Wisdom Seeker: Well, no. Consider Stephen Jay Gould, one of the greatest evolutionary scholars of the modern era. Gould wrote 1,433 pages about evolution in his monumental work, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory,.[6] yet memory is not mentioned once in all those pages!
Skeptico: Not once?
Wisdom Seeker: Not once. And this complete absence of a topic as essential as memory highlights the fact that evolution simply cannot explain everything. Darwin himself understood this. He was quite open-minded, demonstrated by his deep interest in the role of morality in human life, even though he made no effort to explain it through his theory of evolution. In fact, he spent more time in The Descent of Man discussing the importance of morality than “the survival of the fittest.” In The Origin of the Species Darwin focused primarily on the forces that affect the development of the animal kingdom, but the Descent is dealing more with human beings, and in that book he continually stressed the importance of love and the mysteriousness of how love arises. (Darwin only mentions “survival of the fittest” twice in Descent, but speaks of love ninety-five times.) As for memory, Darwin clearly did not think he could explain it, for he didn’t even try.
Modern Research to the Rescue?
Skeptico: What about recent brain research? What does it have to say about memory?
Wisdom Seeker: The history of the once popular but now questionable view that memories are stored as files in specific locations in the brain is instructive. The great neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield held this view early in his career; even identified certain parts of the temporal cortex as the center of memory. As he continued his research, however, this assumption did not hold, and Penfield had the courage to admit that this theory was mistaken.[7]
Even though an expert as influential as Penfield changed his position, however, this did not end the debate; researchers keep trying to find specific locations where memories are stored. One group set out with that intention, trying to make it very simple by creating a specific memory in day-old chicks. At first the researchers were excited when brain scans revealed that nerve cells in a particular area of the brain had undergone a burst of growth when the chicks were trained to avoid pecking at colored lights. They thought they had found the place this memory was stored—until this area of the chicks’ brains was surgically removed and the chicks still retained the memory.[8] This experiment demonstrates the problem with much modern brain research—too many researchers start with the “assumption” that memory resides in the brain, and their starting assumption leads them to the “conclusion” that were hoping to find.
This is, of course, circular thinking, and it is amazing how many scientific projects fall victim to such a basic error of reasoning (training in rigorous philosophical thought is not a strong point in most educational programs today). An example is an article in Nature[9] a few years ago, in which the researchers reported creating a conditioned reflex in a mouse, and then used that reflex as stand-in for memory. The problem is, although a conditioned reflex has some things in common with memory, the two are not the same thing. Or more specifically, a learned reflex cannot serve as an analogy for all aspects of memory. If you reflexively pull back your hand from a spider you see beside your hand, the motivation for that action does not encompass the full range of memory.
Even less does a conditioned reflex in a mouse represent the full range of memory in human beings, which the article seems to suggest. Humans sometimes act in a reflexive way, just as mice do, but memory is much more than reflexive action. To create reflexive actions in a mouse and then make the gigantic leap to the conclusion that this explains how human memory works is, to put it generously, a fantastic leap of faith. It is like assuming that when a camel falls to its knees, it is praying.
This article in Nature is a striking example of the tendency of some researchers to define memory simplistically rather than dealing with its true complexity; to define it in a reductionistic way so it can be studied more easily. But studying human memory, and human consciousness in general is different from any other scientific pursuit, because memory and consciousness are the tools with which scientific research has to be conducted. In essence, to study these things requires turning around and examining the instrument being used to do the study. This is why it is such a hard problem, and why memory and consciousness remain a mystery to us even after centuries of research.
When the researchers in this study designed their experiment, they were using human memory and consciousness to create the experiment. If they had truly wished to study human memory, they would have had to explore how they, themselves, remembered all the things they had learned during their lives, and how they had been able to put those memories together into a coherent plan to be able to create the experiment. This is the essence of the difficulty of studying human memory and consciousness as compared to other things—the researchers themselves must use as tools for the study the things being studied. And this is in addition to the difficulty that memory and consciousness are not material objects that can be observed directly, cannot be weighed or measured directly, which is how science usually operates.
To get around this difficulty, the approach of the researchers in the study in Nature was simply to start with the reductionistic view that a mouse’s reflexive action is the same as all memory. But as Arthur Schopenhauer said many years ago, “materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.” Experimenting with a mouse’s reflexes has some value, but it is a far cry from dealing with human memory or consciousness, and the value of such a limited study can only be gained if the researchers understand the limits of their approach.
Skeptico: You are moving pretty fast here. Let me step into my skeptical frame of mind for a moment. How would a materialist explain these things?
Wisdom Seeker: In recent years the primary path has been the theory that memory is somehow stored in the synaptic connections between neurons. Ever since Donald Hebb published his research 70 years ago showing there were synaptic adaptations in the brain while learning was taking place, this possibility has been an enormous amount of attention. A great deal of research has been focused on synaptic plasticity, with accompanying speculation that changes in the synapses can account for all of memory. There is no question that the synapses do change, and there is evidence that they change while we are learning. That these changes are memories, in the way we think of our memories, is a total speculation with no evidence. The fact that we can measure the heart speeding up when we see someone we love does not mean that our love is contained in the faster pulse, or explained by it.
In the same way, no one has even begun to demonstrate how changes in brain synapses become memories. To say that synaptic changes become and hold extended, detailed memories of childhood adventures, vacations, and special moments with someone you love is magical thinking: somehow billions of slight synaptic shifts magically transform into complex memories that last through a lifetime, although no one has any idea how they do that, nor even if these synaptic changes are memories. The only thing that is known is that there is synaptic plasticity, changes occur there, sometimes when learning seems to be happening. But whether those changes become memories is not known, or how. To assert they are is to confuse correlation with causation. If someone walks into your bedroom unannounced when you are naked, you might blush, but the blush does not explain your reaction, but is simply correlated with it. Today, evidence that synaptic plasticity can explain all of memory is totally lacking. As Austrian researcher Patrick C. Trettenbrein put it:
To sum up, it can be said that when it comes to answering the question of how information is carried forward in time in the brain we remain largely clueless… the case against synaptic plasticity is convincing.[10]
Or as stated in an article in 2019 about the view that synapses are the principal site of information storage in the brain, it was noted that this view has received much attention and research, and that most studies show that there is probably some role for synapse memory-storage ideas to play in discovering what memory is, “Yet, despite the neuroscience community’s best efforts, we are still without conclusive proof that memories reside at synapses.”[11]
To continue to explore the role of neuronal synapses in memory is worthwhile, and might provide valuable information in future understandings. But given what is now known, the only reason anyone would hold the view that all of memory is contained in or will be explained by synaptic changes comes down to an act of faith that memories must be in the physical brain, and that this speculative theory is the best hope to support that materialistic belief.
There is one further challenge to modern attempts to explain memory as residing in the physical brain: There is no physical brain. Quantum theory has demonstrated pretty conclusively that atoms are not physical objects, molecules are not physical objects—thus neurons are not physical objects. And neither are synapses. Ultimately, all are indeterminate clouds of possibility that take on the forms we see because we observe them. Behind that physical façade are fields of energy, or the quantum vacuum, or the zero-point field, or David Bohm’s implicate order, or morphic fields, or … . Basically, we do not know what is behind matter, we only know that more and more quantum theory is suggesting that physical matter is created by consciousness in some way, rather than the other way around (more later). And a great deal of evidence is accumulating that this field, or cloud, or whatever you wish to call it, is interacting with everything around it, and perhaps entangled with everything everywhere.
Skeptico: So, you are saying that materialists have no good explanation for memory.
Wisdom Seeker: That is absolutely right! They just leave the problems dangling out there, like a pink elephant in the room that everyone ignores. Or else they claim all will be explained at some point in the future, which amounts to a “promissory note” without any collateral, to use the delightful image of Sir John C. Eccles, a neurophysiologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine. Eccles used the phrase “promissory materialism” to highlight the fact that brain research has not begun to solve the riddle of the human mind, and that claiming it will do so in the future “must be classed as a superstition.”[12] For Eccles, this is a “superstition without a rational foundation.” He continues:
The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena [his way of referring to a broader mind]. … Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists … who often confuse their religion with their science.[13]
Possibilities
Some important things about memory are known, or are being discovered, however. One is that memories are powerfully affected by the emotional content of the things that happen to us. We tend to remember intense emotional moments, both good and bad, much more readily than those with little emotional content: Intense moments come back to us more often and more powerfully. This is, of course, another nail in the coffin of materialistic theories, for emotions are not material things.
One brilliant researcher who has studied memory extensively is Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who has focused on the differences between what we experience and what we remember. One example he gives is that you might thoroughly enjoy several days of a vacation, but if a disagreeable event happens at the end, your memory of the whole vacation will be negatively impacted. The tendency will be to create a story about the vacation that gives little attention to the many days of pleasurable experiences, but a lot of attention to the final negative moment. Of course, this process can happen the other way: A wonderful moment at the end of a vacation, perhaps an intense romantic experience, can crowd out the negative things that happened earlier.[14]
Overlapping this area of research is the growing understanding being developed about the strong tendency we humans have to remember things that support our present opinions, desires, and judgments—and not to remember things that go against what we want or already believe. Jonathan Haidt documented this extensively in his book, The Righteous Mind, and, crucially, his work shows that this processing occurs to a great extent at the unconscious level. Similarly, psychology professor Drew West has done a great deal of work demonstrating how we tend to select what we will remember, and that we so mostly at the unconscious level of our minds.[15] This means that, for those who wish to truly understand memory, they must do the hard work of overcoming their personal preconceptions and preferences. They must come to “know themselves” at a very deep level, as sages and saints have been telling us for thousands of years. This wisdom most definitely applies to modern scientists who wish to understand memory and consciousness. Without deep self-understanding, they will simply find evidence in support of whatever they already believe.
Daniel Kahneman and others have also shown that, as our lives move forward, we constantly rewrite the stories we tell ourselves about the past. Our memories change all the time; the stories are rewritten, often at the unconscious level. Again, it is becoming increasingly clear that memories are not stored facts, but much more complex things. To appreciate the difficulty of explaining this observation requires fully acknowledging that all we have been able to discover about how the brain functions has to do with electrical and chemical impulses that last for less than a millisecond—and then are gone. As far as we know, these impulses cannot be stored, so how can they be the location of memories? No other storage location has been found, however (which is another reason the human brain is not like a computer, which has a very specific location for its memory).
The understanding that our memories change with time is a large problem for all theories suggesting that memories are stored in a mechanistic or electronic way. If memories change, they cannot be facts located somewhere that we retrieve. If they change, they are not fixed, but fluid. At this point, no one has come up with a good idea about how to explain this in a mechanical or electronic way. And this doesn’t even get to the deeper question of who/what is managing the process of reorganizing and changing our memories.
That our memories change, however, does fit with the growing understanding that memories are not a bunch of facts, but are put together into stories. I organize fragments of my past into stories that have a meaning for me. I say ”I” do this but, once again, most of this happens of its own accord, at the unconscious level. Or to say this a bit differently, our memories are organized into stories by the unconscious part of ourselves. Somehow, our unconscious minds create stories, and these stories are the framework within which we think about and understand the past. The things we remember are the events and facts that have been put into our meaning stories, and we tend to forget all those things that have not been made a part of the stories (the rest might still be in there, but is harder to access).
That we do not remember everything that has happened to us is good in many ways. I have no desire to remember all the peripheral facts of each day of my life. But the crucial questions, since this mostly happens at an unconscious level, are: Who puts the stories together? How is what is “important” decided? On what basis are these decisions made? Who changes the stories? And where are they located? All we can say at this point is that we tend to remember those things that have strong emotional content, that our memories are organized primarily as stories, and all this happens in a mostly unconscious process. This leaves an awful lot that is unknown.
Most of the understandings that are emerging out of this large realm of the unknown tend to support the direction of thinking put forward by physicist David Bohm, neurosurgeon Karl Pribram, psychologist Carl Jung, and biologist Rupert Sheldrake, all of whom suggest that memory is best thought of as contained in a field. Where this field is, no one knows. It might not be in the physical brain only. In fact, there is little to support the theory that memories are contained within the physical brain alone. This might turn out to be the case, but at this point it is a speculative, metaphysical theory based on an act of faith about the nature of the world. For instance, one leading researcher in this area (Rudolf Tanzi, who holds the Joseph Kennedy Chair in Neurology at Harvard), said in a recent speech that memory doesn’t seem to “live in the brain.” Where is it, then? He doesn’t know. I don’t know. That is why I am not making an argument here for where memory is located. The only thing I am strongly asserting is that no one knows how memory works or where it is located, and all good research leading forward from where we are now will begin with an open mind. (For a good discussion of these issues, see Chapters 4, 5, and 6 in Chris Carter’s Science and the Near-Death Experience.)[16]
One assertion I can make is that each of us has the capacity to gain understanding about what memory is and how it works by observing ourselves, by exploring within our own minds how memory works within us. When I do this, I thing I have discovered is that I have the ability to affect what I will remember. I can focus on names, and that aids in remembering. There are mnemonic tricks that can help me consciously remember. Focus and attention are important tools to increase memory. I have intentionally made an effort for many years to focus on and understand the major currents of history, philosophy, science, psychology, and spirituality, and having chosen these areas of focus has had an effect on what I remember. In this way I have participated in, but not controlled, my memory creation process.
Another thing I have discovered is that I can bring conscious intention to rewriting my stories. I can look carefully at the stories I am telling myself about the world, about who I am, and about other people, and I can begin to see how my fears, anxieties, ambitions, and expectations had a lot to do with the stories that were created. The more clearly I see this, the more I am able to make a more conscious decision about the stories I will reinforce in myself, and the ones I will challenge as no longer being helpful or healthy. And these revelations make clear that my stories are not “the truth.” That are not right or wrong. They are simply the way my unconscious processes put together my understanding, and I can work with them to come to a healthier place. This, however, is not an easy process, for it requires working with my unconscious, and to do that, I must truly “know myself.” Any effort to paste a better story on the surface, without working it through at the deepest levels of my psyche will inevitably backfire.
In the end, I realize my personal investigations and study of memory have only carried me a short distance into understanding its mysteries. The only way forward for me, for you, for all researchers interested in this topic, and their own health and well-being, is to continue to explore, as much as possible, with an uncluttered mind, using reason as a tool, as well as intuition and self-examination. To always stay open to new insights rather than trying to prove to oneself and others your old ideas were right.
There is much, much more to be understood. The quest to understand memory has only just begun.
[1] Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume 1- Swann’s Way and Within a Budding Grove (New York: Vintage Books, 1982).
[2] Karl Pribram, Biology of Memory (Waltham, Massachusetts: Academic Press, 1970).
[3] Rupert Sheldrake – Science Set Free: 191.
[4] Cheryl Trine, The New Akashic Records: Knowing, Healing and Spiritual Practice (Portland, Oregon: Essential Knowing Press, 2010), 143.
[5] Charles Darwin, Descent of Man (London: John Murray Publishers, 1871).
[6] Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Boston, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002).
[7] Wilder Penfield, Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978), 30.
[8] Rupert Sheldrake, – Science Set Free: 191-192).
[9] Christof Koch and R. Clay Reid, “Neuroscience: Observatories of the Mind,” Nature, 483, March 22, 2012, 397–398.
[10] Patrick C. Trettenbrein, article in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience entitled “The Demise of the Synapse As the Locus of Memory” 17 November 2016 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2016.00088/full
[11] Wickliffe C. Abraham, Owen D. Jones & David L. Glanzman, Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-019-0048-y
[12] Sir John C. Eccles, Evolution of the Brain, Creation of the Self (London, United Kingdom: Routledge Publishing, 1989), 241.
[13] Sir John C. Eccles and Daniel N. Robinson, The Wonder of Being Human: Our Brain and Our Mind (New York: Free Press/Collier Macmillan, 1984), 36.
[14] Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Originally published: October 25, 2011 Farrar, Straus and Giroux
[15] Drew Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation
[16] Chris Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience: How Consciousness Survives Death (Rochester, Vermont, Inner Traditions International, 2010), Chapters 4, 5, 6.