Dreaming Up Daily Quote

 

“Everything in the mind is in rat’s country.  It doesn’t die.  They are merely carried, these disparate memories, back and forth in the desert of a billion neurons, set down, picked up and dropped again…You will only find the bits and cry out because they were yourself.”

Loren Eiseley

Considering Why Time Speeds Up As You Get Older

 Douwe Draaisma, professor of psychology in the Netherlands, is my go-to guy on the subject of memory.  I tend to trust him because as a European he can access centuries of thought and experiment, beyond the limitations of the kind of dependence on dubious statistical experiments, let alone neuroscience, that form the dogmatic procedures of many American psychologists and brain scientists.  He also writes clearly. 

Neuroscience for example can tell us very little about memory, because memory is subjective; memory is an experience.  So what brain neurons fire where is of highly limited value, except of course for the treatment of conditions involving the brain's role in memory loss or distortion.  Properly conducted and interpreted behavioral experiments can be suggestive, and can support or contradict subjective insights. But these don't often require much computational power, so some of the best and most elegant of these experiments were designed and performed generations before computers.

In one of his books of essays, Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older, he applies to that particular question the insights of psychologists (including William James), a philosopher or two, and novelists including Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann.   This question is a gateway to the paradoxes of memory and time.  Memory is important because that's one way we measure the experience of time.  The answer to this question, at least to my mind, is not settled.  We experience time according to a lot of individual factors.  Some elements may ring true (a week's vacation flies by, but when you return home and to work, it seems you've been gone much longer, or that periods of anxiety, anticipation, illness and even boredom seem endless while they happen, though they seem shorter in retrospect) but others, I find, don't match my experience.

But one application of that question seems pretty universal among the people around my age that I know: that certainly after age 70, the weeks, the months and the years seem to fly by.  They seem so short.  The other feature of this feeling is that the past 20 or 30 years or more seem to have been much shorter in memory than the years that preceded them, when we were young.  Those more recent years don't seem to have even happened.

Perhaps another approach to the question is to ask, why does time slow down when you're younger?  One answer to this is the same as the answer to why people tend to remember events and people from their younger lives, and remember the experience more fully, but in later years don't remember much from more recent decades.  It's because we are built to remember the new.

Remembering a new observation or experience--and the surrounding circumstances--is a survival skill, when those circumstances are encountered again.  So of course we remember the first times, especially if it was an impressive, inately important event or experience.  There's still a lot of mystery and individual difference in some of our early memories, but surely this is a big factor in many. 

Then as life begins to repeat itself, there is less need to remember the details.  We may remember our first car.  But we probably aren't going to remember where we parked at the supermarket on an uneventful day three years ago.

But some memories do adhere because we continue to be new people, well into adulthood, not only because we experience new things, but because we are new people.  Obviously we aren't the same at 10 as we were at 2, but we also aren't the same at 15 as we were at ten, or at 20 vs. 15, etc. for decades to come.  Maybe the gaps are longer, and the differences may be more subtle, but we aren't the same at 40 as we were at 30.

And we really aren't the same at 70 or certainly 78 as we were at 50.  We are brand new, in some ways. Our bodies are different, our physically processes including the glandular--all contributing to how we see the world, experience it, experience ourselves, and experience time.

After reviewing the theories and experiments, Draaisma admits that there is no convincing single answer to the question.  Some speculate that our memory of time is related somehow to how long we've experienced time--that is, been alive.  Which would help to explain how a month is endless at ten years old, when 12 of them add up to a tenth of your life (and you've only had any idea of what a month is for a few years.) The experience of time may similarly be related to the speed of biological processes, which tend to be faster the younger you are.

But I'd add another possibility.  We've probably all noticed that we lost track of time while totally engrossed in some activity that required or evoked near total concentration, or perhaps engaged many of our senses and emotions.  It isn't a rule of being old, but I am not alone in experiencing the moment more fully--that is, I'm not worried about where else I should be, or what I need to do next.  I'm here, now--even if that means I'm totally present with a book, a movie, a song I'm singing or listening to, or a memory. It is present, and then it isn't, and something else is.  I think part of this is a tendency towards entropy--I tend to keep doing something I've started, though it is harder to get started--that has noticeably increased in recent years.

It may even be that what we do remember, especially from youth, seems more full of time because we experienced it more fully, while later, the anticipation, the worry, the multitasking, obliterated a sense of being present in the time.  So in a sense there is actually less to remember.

In many ways I remember my early past--the 20s are the statistical peak in some areas, like the popular music we recall--better than more recent decades.  But, adding to the newness or firstness factor is that I've thought about those times more, I've told myself more stories about them.  How much I really remember about more recent decades, once I put my mind to remembering and given myself the same kind of supporting cues, I have yet to discover.

Consciously or unconsciously, many older people compensate for the sense of time speeding up by increasing the newness in an outward way: by travel and new skills and adventures.  Perhaps it is my introversion, but I find little appeal in that (though not having the means to do much of it does color my judgment.)  I find my adventures in following curiosity about patterns of the past, as well as patterns in the world. And not just patterns, and not just intellectual understanding--maybe more the many fruits of perspective.  So the past becomes new.

  The process of revisiting artifacts of my own past in this protracted "History of My Reading" series for example, has been very involving on many levels, very absorbing. (It's certainly taking long enough.)  Just living in the daily present while experiencing the evoked and fragmentary memories, finding myself in dialogue with them, takes up a lot of time.  Though not much is accomplished compared to the past, the day is full.  And it's over so fast.  

Turning 72: I Dwell in Possibility

It was a pretty good 72nd year.  No one close to me died, or came down with a serious illness or injury, though I certainly know people my age with significant health challenges.  The exception is our beloved cat Pema--we're currently nursing her through a terminal illness, making this a sad and anxious time. But as for my health, I'm looking forward to my annual trek up Trinidad Head later today. Yesterday I set my home court record with 7 straight midrange baskets (I can't in good conscience call them "jumpers") and 9 out of 10, before I missed two in a row.

I'm pleased with writing I did this past year, including what amounts to drafts of two short books which I have cleverly hidden within my blogs on the Internet.  My recollections--first of books, but especially of my senior year of college fifty years ago-- went very well, by my own lights anyway.  The process was fascinating. Reclaiming context through factual research seemed to evoke and free memories, some of which came to me in the act of writing.

Lately I've had episodes of visual memories, which have been rare before now. I'm not good at visualization.  "Imagine yourself on a beautiful beach" etc. has never worked for me as a meditation or relaxation technique, for example, if it depends on seeing it.  But lately, visual memories have come almost unbidden, and once I've had them (usually on the edge of sleep but not always), they more or less remain accessible.

The past, both culturally and personally, remains my focus, my fireplace (which is what "focus" means.)  I'm interested in depth, reiteration, a more thorough exploration, rather than new places and experiences.  Fortunately I don't have to defend that choice.  "Don't Want To, Don't Need To, Can't Make Me, I'm Retired."

At the same time, I am exploring new ideas, though they tend to be more like going farther along a path I darted down for awhile before.  Some of these bear upon that other area of concern, the future.

The future has looked dark many times in my life, probably most times.  But there was always an idea or two that suggested the possibility of light coming into being. That is less so now.

The newest ideas I'm still learning about are actually 20 or 30 years old.  It was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for example, that the scientific ideas informing the Gaia hypothesis were percolating.  Its basis was formulated even earlier, in the late 1960s when I was in college (but it was so unorthodox that it never would have been mentioned in a science class.)  In studying the atmosphere of the planet Mars, James Lovelock discovered that the physics and chemistry of that planet predicted what it was like.  But the physics and chemistry of Earth does not describe its actual atmosphere.  There is another element determining and regulating Earth's atmosphere, and keep its temperature fairly constant despite changes in the heat coming from the sun.   That element is life.

The Earth is self-organizing and self-regulating through its specific lifeforms. Living systems, from the smallest bacteria to the entire surface and atmosphere, self-maintain.  That makes the Earth a single system, and by some definitions,  a kind of organism.

The implications were vast, and go beyond ecology--the study of the Earth as our home--to the study of the Earth as our body.  The idea of Gaia was an immediate magnet for various New Age enthusiasts but in the late 1980s, William Irwin Thompson and the Lindisfarne Association published a couple of collections of essays derived from conferences the Association had held since the early eighties. (Gaia: A Way of Knowing, and Gaia 2: Emergence).

The authors were serious people, including James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, the scientist who helped him develop the hypothesis, as well visionary cybernetic pioneer Gregory Bateson, visionary neurobiologist Franciso Varela, physicist Arthur Zajonc, botanist and popular writer Wes Jackson, economist and futurist Hazel Henderson and W.I Thompson himself, who promoted the idea that Gaia could be the guiding idea of cultural transformation in the 1990s.

As far as I can tell, there didn't turn out to be a guiding idea of cultural transformation in the 1990s, nor do I know of any guiding idea since.  At best, some segments of society sort of caught up to ecological ideas of the 1960s and 70s.  Others got sidetracked by computer technology to contemplate bogus ideas like "the singularity" or just got sucked into the social media vacuum.

But lately I have been reading Slanted Truths, a book of the mid-90s, a somewhat shaped collection of essays by Lynn Margulis and her son Dorion Sagan. (He is also the son of Carl Sagan, and has taken on his father's job of popularizing science, though he's much more his mother's son in the science he attempts to popularize.)

Their essays were mostly published separately in periodicals and are often repetitive (which is actually good, since the ideas are still new and the science unfamiliar) so it is an immersive experience.  (These writings are however more coherent than either of the authors speaking: Dorion does not have his father's skills and both are pretty unorganized in the events YouTube has preserved, though Margulis is nevertheless magnetic and occasionally mesmerizing.)

Margulis herself transformed life sciences by concentrating on microorganisms, and showing the crucial role they played in evolution.  She also showed that these are the organisms upon which Gaia's ability to self-regulate depend, more than any other.  Bacteria is the essential lifeform to maintain the life of planet Earth, including its atmosphere.

I am reading this in the context of a year in which it seems that the collapse of civilization within the next century, and perhaps the fall of the American Republic much sooner, seems more and more likely.  On a somewhat longer timeline, the fate of the human species is in question.  If the climate crisis and mass extinction are as bad as they seem they will be, homo sapiens may be facing enough reduction that extinction is possible.  In a previous climate crisis, homo sapiens were down to perhaps 2500 beings in one small location.  Coming back depends on how extensive the changes are, and for how long.  Nuclear weapons complicate this further.

Mass extinctions may wipe out all large mammals and perhaps too many keystone species we don't even know about.  But the ultimate threat to life seems to depend on what happens to the oceans, and whether we end up killing them.

Margulis and Sagan leave me with at least this hope for the future of life: that bacteria are likely to endure and adapt, and since from them in time came all of the species we know, they can just start again.  Raccoons or rats or even ants may be faster to develop but then, does the planet want to go through all this again?  I sometimes wonder whether a species that invented helicopter gunships even deserves to survive.  Maybe evolution will settle next time on a scenario like that in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Galapagos, in which descendants of humans are more like porpoises, who frolic in pools with fins, incapable of building anything.

For the near future, Gaia offers some possibility of offsetting the worst effects of global heating, in that we don't understand exactly how life regulates the atmosphere.  Perhaps that self-regulation can overcome excessive global heating, although it seems there is unlikely to be enough time to adapt.  But maybe.

Which suggest another source of hope: our ignorance.  We think we know a lot, but all we've learned are a few limited mechanisms and how to do some stuff, mostly through trial and error.  We've just done too much of it, on too large a scale. Because in part there are too many of us.

In fact we know almost nothing about our world and our universe.  Steven Wright used to joke: "I bought a packet of powdered water but I don't know what to add to it."  We don't really even know what water is.  We certainly can't make the stuff.

We've made up all these categories and theories that soon reach their limits, though we insist they are universal, they are "laws."  Science has at least acknowledged that Newtonian physics doesn't apply in all realms. (And that's because we know how to do some stuff using the math of quantum mechanics, but we have no idea why they work.)  It took recent scientists like Lynn Margulis to begin showing that Darwinian evolution in its traditional definition doesn't apply to everything alive, or even to the origin of species.

Margulis and other microbiologists also showed that many of the assumptions made about how life works in general was based only on larger lifeforms: animals and plants.  But many of those "rules" don't apply to microorganisms such as bacteria.  Either these rules operated in a limited field or they are generally mistaken.

We use definitions as tools and then get captured by our definitions.  The most interesting philosophical essay I read this year, by Galen Strawson, suggests that the conundrum of consciousness as a non-physical phenomenon may lie in a restricted definition of "physical."   The universes of the very small and the very large have shot down a lot of our middle-range assumptions and definitions.  With dark matter, dark energy and all the other more or less theoretical aspects of the universe, exactly what "physical" means is (or should be) in doubt.

So maybe there's something we'll learn that we can't now foresee, something that will make enough of a difference to avoid catastrophe.

For those younger than me who will live in the future, hope is a daily commitment to make things better.  Hope isn't what you feel, it's what you do.  For me, looking at a future that extends beyond imagination, I am buoyed by possibilities we can begin to imagine but can't quite imagine, way beyond anything fantasized in Silicon Valley.

So I greet the beginning of my 73rd year with a poem by Emily Dickinson.  She was a favorite of Lynn Margulis (though admittedly not of mine)--I saw a line of this one that was sort of quoted by Dorion Sagan.  The whole poem however is what I want to say:

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

P.S. I've added a "birthdays" label to such posts in prior years.  But two of the more extensive are on another blog: Turning 60 and Turning 65.

Present Past: Crosscurrents of Memory

Memories can be brought into consciousness by an almost simultaneous complex of sense impressions.  And those memories can be affected by the crosscurrents of time.

This time there's no expert saying this.  Just my own observation.  For example:

At some moment in the recent past, I was scanning the supermarket shelves for the brand of teas I prefer (Stash) when I happened to notice for the first time in a long time a familiar-looking black and red box, with an almost forgotten name, written in fake cursive handwriting: "Constant Comment."

It took me back, though not to childhood.  Growing up in Greensburg (western PA), the adults of my parents' generation drank coffee.  When I got to be of the age that coffee was no longer believed to "stunt your growth," I drank coffee, as well.

People drank tea mostly in the summer, when it was iced tea.  My mother probably made herself a cup of hot tea once in awhile.  So there was always a box of Lipton or Salada tea bags in the kitchen cupboard.

Then tea became a Thing in the 1960s.  Beginning in the mid-60s, the Beatles and the groups that followed in the English Invasion made everything English fashionable and gear, and that included tea.  Especially when the boom in British movies made it over to our TV sets and theaters.

But we were still basically stuck with Lipton and Salada tea bags. I remembered that at some point I became aware of Constant Comment, a tea of unique flavor. It was the tea that the hippest girls served.  It came in a tin in those days, and if you were truly hip, it was loose tea, not bags.  Those tins were in the kitchens of off-campus apartments, and particularly after our campus arts center got a ceramics studio, served in a ceramic tea pot and ceramic mugs.  In my memory I always see a young woman with long hair pouring the Constant Comment.

It wouldn't be long before its hipness was overrun as more exotic brands became available, with green tea the accompaniment to various forms of the cannabis. But Constant Comment was the first of the tea variations.

With those vague memories and images in mind, and a pretty good price on the shelf, I bought a box.  Then the distinctive smell of the tea when I made a cup evoked a more specific memory.

I remembered the afternoon I was first served Constant Comment.  I was probably still in high school, or maybe an early year home from college, and made one of our adventurous forays into Pittsburgh with my friend Mike.   We visited his older sister Mary Ann, who lived in a basement apartment in Squirrel Hill.  She worked as a buyer for a major department store.  I had no idea what a buyer did (and even now I'm not completely clear on the matter.)  But she was a single young woman with an important job and her own apartment in the big city of Pittsburgh, so she was the acme of sophistication.

We sat in her living room, looking at the feet and legs of passers-by through the window we faced, and she served us Constant Comment, which is basically a blend of black tea and sweet spices, dominated by an orange flavor from orange rinds.  I can't say I was immediately crazy about this unfamiliar taste, but it felt like a rite of passage.  My world was expanding.

The memory of the orange smell and taste might have been reinforced by something I think I remember being on her coffee table: a small ceramic bowl of those tiny orange balls that I was to see on other coffee tables in those years.  But when I heard the Leonard Cohen song Suzanne, with the line "and she serves you tea and oranges that come all the way from China," I thought about this moment.

That line, by the way, was very effective in supporting the sense of special mystery about "Suzanne" that went with the mesmerizing melody and (in his version) Cohen's hypnotic voice.  Today it's sort of a funny line. Oranges that come all the way from China was a fantastic and exotic idea then, whereas now of course virtually everything comes from China, except maybe oranges.

My association of the line with Constant Comment may seem either a poetic leap or insultingly reductive, but it turns out to be neither: just accurate.  Cohen himself explained that the song is based on a young woman who lived in a riverside apartment in Old Montreal, and served him...Constant Comment tea.  The rest is poetic license.

The problem with this coincidence however is that I probably didn't hear the song "Suzanne" until several years after that afternoon tea.  I first heard Judy Collins' hit version when it was popular in 1966.  It was on Cohen's first album, which I remember either I had or a housemate did, released in 1968.  (And then there's that song "So Long, Marianne" that may have reinforced that memory as well.)

So while the association of the tea and that afternoon formed at the time, the association of the song--which likely strengthened the memory--did not occur until afterwards.  One of those crosscurrents of memory.

Present Past: Aroma of A Memory

It's often difficult to know just what provokes a memory.  A smell can, but it's complicated, and even involves something that looks like a paradox.

In his chapter on the subject in Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older, Dowe Draaisma notices a complication, which he elegantly frames with an observation about the famous petite madeleines scene in Proust.  Every psychological treatise on smell and memory inevitably refers to it, and like good English majors, they repeat what they've heard about it (probably from other treatises on smell and memory) and they generally get it wrong.

"The depiction is often at umpteenth hand, three lines long at most and whittled away until almost unrecognizable: the narrator drinks a cup of tea, dunks a piece of cake in it, and suddenly the smell takes him back to his youth in Combray."

The problem is the actual scene as Proust writes it covers four pages and goes through a long process between the smell and the memory.  The smell affects him but he doesn't know why.  Only with effort does he then associate it with the general memory of his childhood.  It's a key to many memories of that time and place.

A smell can ignite a memory pretty much right away, and it can be powerful.  That's happened to me.  But it also--and probably more often--just causes a slight change in mood, the research suggests.  That may lead to a memory, but only with some work at concentrating, sorting, rooting around--as Proust did.

Smell has several unique features compared to other human senses.  Of course, it's pretty weak in humans, compared to other animals and to other senses.  Taste is even more specific, and much of what we think of as taste is actually (or mostly) smell.

And smell has a unique pathway to the brain, a direct route to centers of emotion and memory.  But shouldn't that make remembering smells more likely?  Not necessarily, for autobiographical memory is strongly linked to speech, and since smells bypass speech centers, we may have no access to those memories.

But when an aroma does evokes a memory it can be very powerful.  Accounts by writers suggest these would more likely be smells that were a fairly regular part of life in the past but are not frequent in the present, like the smell of hay that immediately takes a city dweller back to childhood on the farm.

Memories--not usually of specific events but of a period or place--sparked by smells are usually positive, Dr. D. writes, occasionally negative but almost never neutral.  It's that direct line to the limbic system, where emotions reside.  And the sight of hay or sawdust or wool tweed is not enough to trigger the sensation.  It has to be the smell.

Lab experiments trying to verify smells evoking memories have generally failed, because you can't get enough smells into the laboratory, and because it may take time before the smell and memory are connected.  Another reason they fail apparently is because experimenters use the same undergraduate age test subjects as many if not most of these studies do, and then they announce findings as if they necessarily apply to all ages, cultures, etc. in all conditions.

But one lab study that tested subjects of various ages found that people over 70 were much more likely to have memories elicited by actual smells than the names of smells.  The apparent paradox is that the sense of smell declines much more with age than other senses.  70 year olds typically have a small fraction of the ability to smell as they did as children.

But that doesn't undercut the power of particular smells; it may enhance it.  For older subjects, smells were associated mostly with memories formed when they were age 6 or younger.  It's that direct connection again.  And this effect is enhanced by another unique property of the smell sense.

Our active memory can hold only so much--so many thoughts, associations, sights, sounds, etc.  So newer sights tend to block the memory of older ones, which is true of the other senses--except smell.  New smells don't block old smells.  So another reason that, if a smell does provoke a memory, it's a powerful connection.

Dr. D. doesn't deal with a phenomenon I've noticed: certain smells can evoke a powerful sense of "being there" in the memory, and it can happen each time for that smell.  But if the smell isn't repeated, I forget the association.  I can remember only a few recent smells that have taken me back, but I know there have been others.  I just don't remember them.

Obviously an aroma you haven't smelled in awhile is more likely to bring back an emotion-laded memory.  But I've noticed that it's more than a simple correspondence, especially for smells more regularly encountered.  For example, concrete blocks and bricks.  Only sometimes in the presence of concrete and bricks do I catch the aroma that takes me back to houses under construction in my neighborhood when I was a kid (positive.) Or sites where I later worked as a summer job, mostly picking up and stacking in the hot sun (negative.)

Dr. D. also doesn't deal with self-reported associations.  For that I go back to something I clipped out of Harper's Magazine (I believe) several decades ago.  I can't find the actual clipping, but I wrote down the findings.  It was a survey done in a Chicago shopping mall.  A social scientist asked people "What odors cause you to be nostalgic?"  What was most interesting about the findings--and from a certain point of view, sad-- was how they broke down in terms of when people who had them were born.

Among the smells people born in the 1960s and 1970s cited were: Play-Doh, Chlorine, crayons, Downy fabric softener, tuna casseole, tacos, SweeTarts, Coca Puffs, Scented Magic Markers, Windex, hairspray, disinfectant, motor oil, airplane fuel, plastic and smoke.

Among the smells those born in the 1920s, 30s and 40s cited were: lilies, manure, violets, ocean air, pine, hot chocolate, Cracker Jack, baking bread, blueberries, honeysuckle, burning leaves, clover, hay, meadows, tweed, meat balls, cut grass, soap, fresh air.

  

Past: First Memories

My first memories come from that hazy time when I was two or three years old.  I can date those memories that much only because they happened in an apartment where I lived for the first three or so years of my life, before moving into the "foundation" that became the basement of the house I grew up in after that.

But why do I have these particular memories?  Why don't I have more?  And are they actually my memories?

Douwe Draaisma addresses these questions in his book Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older.  He does so (here and throughout this book) by recounting and synthesizing various studies done over the years, as well as comparing observations and conclusions with literary and historical sources.  All of this is fascinating reading, but here I'm mostly sticking to the answers.

What do we remember from these early years? It may depend on how old you are when asked what you remember: retention seems to decline over the years.  But the average age of the first memory is about three years old.

Why that memory?  It tends to be associated with strong emotions.  One study found is it usually fear, while another found that feelings of elation or surprise were more frequent.  My first memory combines elation and surprise, which must include a little fear: it is of arriving on the landing outside our third (and top) floor apartment, on my father's shoulders.

Like mine, it is usually a visual memory.  But that's a little deceptive.  For it seems that the reason we don't have more memories from these early years--where our minds are very active, and we're experiencing lots of things for the first time--has to do with language.

Researchers believe all memories still exist somewhere in the brain.  The problem is accessing them.  In order to make access possible, we sort memories into categories.  Though we don't necessarily do this consciously, it requires a level of language, and an ability to deal with abstractions (like categories) that we don't have in our earliest years.  In fact, memories may not form without the ability to describe them in language (even if that's the daily babble of toddlers in their beds or cribs, talking to themselves in their own terms about what they've recently experienced.)

But depositing memories into categories also works against remembering specific events if they are repeated.  The first trip to the zoo becomes conflated with the second and third trips until all specific memories of the zoo recede and seemingly disappear.

Another reason that we seldom have memories from the first year may be that we lack the consciousness of self--the "I"--to form autobiographical memories.  Forming the "I" implies the "you," and so first memories may also include recognition of a parent as someone not "I."  (Dr. D. notes first memories by writers Nabokov and Edith Wharton that supports this idea.)

But how real are those first memories?  Some first memories can be checked with others who were there, and it sometimes turns out they remember it differently.  And sometimes there is even objective evidence that shows it isn't quite true to what happened--it happened here when you remember it as there.

Or it didn't happen at all.  Maybe my father didn't ride me on his shoulders that time (it wasn't something he did a lot.) But it's still a memory.

This is where the relationship of memories and the language to describe them becomes more complicated and perhaps troublesome.  One person remembered an attempt to kidnap him out of his stroller, when it turned out that it had never happened--it was a story he was told, a lie by his nanny that she later admitted.  Yet he had pictured it happening.

A lot of memories--including first memories, and maybe especially those--turn out to be stories we've heard, perhaps combined with some incoherent impressions we seem to remember.  That may be what happened with another of my early "memories" that might even be the first: I remember playing quietly under the bed.

I focused on this memory--re-remembered it--when I heard the story, told by both my mother and her sister, though each told it to me separately, many years apart--of the afternoon when I was a baby that I disappeared from that same apartment.

They had been talking when one of them noticed they could no longer hear me and I wasn't in sight.  They called me and searched the apartment without finding me. My aunt noticed that a window was slightly open.  My mother told me she thought about Lindbergh baby kidnapping (though that had happened more than a decade earlier, it evidently made an impression.)  They were both frightened.

One of them soon found me asleep under the bed.  I had crawled under there, played awhile and fallen asleep.  Was my memory from that day? Or was it a perspective I dimly recall from several adventures under the bed?  I think the second alternative is more likely.

We may feel pieces of memories that get located by repetition (I seem to remember how my mother sang to me when I was a baby, but I also saw her sing to my younger sisters) or by familiar objects etc., as well as by stories.

For example, I don't remember the actual moment this photo was taken of me at 2 yrs. old, on the phone at my grandparents' house. But I remember the phone and the phone table and where they were because they were there for years.  And I seem to remember that sweater with the ducks, but do I?  I don't recall the colors (I want to guess blue-gray with yellow ducks.)  Maybe I just remember photographs like this one.

I wonder if these vague impressions plus stories we hear later account for both the richness and mystery of our childhood memories.  I see my curly blond locks that I don't recall, but I remember my mother's story of crying when they were cut off at the barber shop.

Of course once we tell the story of the first memory (or formulate it in our heads), what we basically remember is our story, as the actual memory recedes. That may account for the odd fact that we often see ourselves in the memory (as one researcher found), rather than seeing the scene from our point of view at the time. The story of the memory is what gets fixed in our heads.  It's called autobiographical memory, and autobiographies are stories, after all.

The Two Memories

Um, on this memory series I forgot something, that comes before "first memories."  It's the two memories in psychology.

As Draaisma tells the tale, in 1879 or so a 57 year old man of science called Francis Galton took a walk through the Pall Mall in London, an area of fashionable shops and men's clubs.  He noticed that whatever he observed there seemed to inspire specific memories from his past.  He began to note what these associations were.

Eventually he designed and carried out an experiment: Galton wrote down a number of common words ("carriage," "abbey," "afternoon") and then read them one by one, noting what memories came from them.  He did this systematically, a number of times.  In the end he had a list of associated memories--many of them repeated--and noted from which parts of his life they came, and where.  (A disproportionate number were from childhood, and most from his native England, although Galton was well traveled.)

At about the same time in Germany, Hermann Ebbinghaus was an unemployed philosopher looking for a thesis topic.  He designed an experiment: he prepared a set of randomly assembled syllables by inserting a vowel between two consonants (bif, nol) and wrote each down on a card.  He then read the cards quickly until he had memorized the contents.  Then he waited--for 20 minutes, a day, a month--and repeated the process, noting how much time it took for him to re-learn the cards.

His major conclusion was that: the longer the interval between the learning and re-learning sessions, the longer it took to relearn the material.  In other words, he discovered cramming.

Both experiments were breakthroughs in the study of memory, but after awhile, only one of them was remembered.  And for the next century, the Ebbinghaus experiment was the basis for the approach to memory taken by psychology.  Galton's was forgotten.

The reasons have to do with what happened to psychology.  Psychologists, a philosophy teacher once told me, have a bad case of physics envy.  In order to be a science like physics, psychology became obsessed with measurement and laboratory experiment.

The Ebbinghaus experiment didn't depend on somebody's memory of their past.  It could be replicated by anyone, and it was, for many years.  Special instruments were invented for it, and eventually it involved two technicians working the apparatus and a test subject.

It probably also helped that Ebbinghaus had a catchy and, well, memorable name for the result of his memory statistics.  When plotted on a graph they became "the forgetting curve."  Who could forget that?

The fate of these two experiments was the fate of psychology, which became the study of stuff that can be measured under laboratory conditions.  Besides making the study of the human mind mind-bogglingly boring, it was deceptively limited.  It fell in love with its toys, but as Dr. D. points out, "any craftsman will tell you that your tools largely determine the use to which you can put them." (p.9.)  It also created the temptation of making claims larger than your evidence warranted, and psychology still loses out to that temptation a lot of the time.

But the major distinction between the experiments is that Ebbinghaus' was essentially about the mechanics of memory, useful for research into learning.  But Galton's was about actual memories--aspects of the past that may be many years old, and weren't deliberately "memorized," but re-surface in some form.

These are now called "autobiographical memories," and it took until the 1970s before this subject--much more fascinating and potentially revealing for people not in the position of laboratory mice--got some attention in more or less mainstream psychology.

The content of memories themselves was of interest to psychoanalysis and the psychology of Freud and Jung, all of which contemporary psychology would like to forget.  But the study of autobiographical memory itself is about what we remember, why we remember it (and what we forget) and when and how we remember it.

In discussing neuroscience and Buddhist meditation here recently, I noted this tension between the objective and the subjective: westerners have studied the mind objectively (most recently, with brain scans) while Buddhists have centuries of carefully observing the workings of their minds and creating systems to explain their findings.  So the West considered the Buddhists quaint, primitive and unscientific.  That's changed among some--but not for everyone.

Something of the same conflict has blocked the study of autobiographical memory. There is a necessary subjective element (one's memories are unique), and yet that's a source of their fascination.  Do you remember what I remember?  Why do I remember this and forget that?  And so on.

Autobiographical memory is the subject of Draaisma's books.  And so next time (really) we begin with first memories in childhood.

But before that, two related notes not in the Draaisma book.  The first recorded experiment in autobiographical memory was hardly Sir Francis Galton's only claim to fame.  He was basically a statistician but applied his skills to many areas.  He was the model of the Victorian polymath--an inventor and tropical explorer, a geographer as well as contributing to statistics (he developed 'regression to the mean'), psychology, sociology and anthropology. Among his claims to fame were the first weather map and other contributions to what became the science of meteorology.

He was also Charles Darwin's half-cousin who came up with the phrase "nature versus nurture."  And unfortunately he was an early advocate of eugenics, another word he coined.

As for the Pall Mall, it also involves the coining of words.  In Galton's time it had been a urban space for more than a century, but in the 17th century it was an open green where a popular game was played.  The game was also called pall mall, described as a combination of golf (the fairways) and croquet, as it was played with a mall-et.

The mallet was also called a 'maul,' which remains the name of a kind of hammer, a meaning that predates the verb sense of tearing up as well as pounding.

The word 'mall' as in shopping mall comes from the Pall Mall and other green open spaces, often shaded by trees.  So the actual mall in a shopping mall is not the shops but the open area they surround, where people walk.

The title of my book The Malling of America (still available from your online bookseller, like this one) suggests a pun: the mauling of America.  Both meanings of mall and maul come from the same place and the same game of pall mall.  I claim bonus points.

Memory Series, an Introduction

Douwe Draaisma is a professor of the history of psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He has written a number of books on memory, four of which have been translated into English. The two I've read have been fascinating, and I'm looking forward to reading a third.

I'm going to write about these books here, probably chapter by chapter. But first I want to say a little about why I surmise I like these books, and more importantly, trust what he says.

They are well-written, and that is usually the first impression that builds confidence. I mistrust quite a lot of contemporary psychology and psychological writing, though not only because most of it is badly written. It tends to over-promise and overreach its evidence. I don't think Draaisma does, but then he is not exactly a psychologist. He has a degree in psychology and philosophy. So there is more depth, more distance from clinical experiments, more perspective and evaluation.

Further, he specializes in the history of psychology, which counters the present-centeredness of so much psychology, in which each new study is announced as if it is the first ever, or because it is the latest, it's the definitive last word. Indeed, his books refer back to earlier psychologists and studies, even to the 19th century. He is able to evaluate methodologies that are no longer fashionable but valuable nevertheless.

He also applies relevant insights from literature and the other arts. So much contemporary psychology (like so much economics) either breathlessly announces findings that have been dealt with in literature for centuries, or findings that literature has long ago disproven.  They act as if literature didn't exist, or maybe just shouldn't.

He isn't just making cute literary references. As we'll see, he notes that every treatise on the psychology of smell refers to Proust and the famous pastries dipped in tea that set off a flood of memories in his narrator. He also notes that they usually get it wrong, because they haven't actually read it. He does read it, and finds it much richer and revelatory.

All of this is probably because he is European, and specifically not American. A broader cultural education seems more natural there. So much in American academia and associated professions is narrowly specialized, and arrogant about it as well.

Memory is a subject of general interest, but of course, of more specific and greater interest as we get older. Memory changes--often childhood memories become more vivid, while other memories seem to slip away. Access to certain kinds of memories is harder (like names) and of course there are the fears of losing the function of memory.

James Hillman (a psychologist I respect, perhaps above all others since Jung) used to suggest that perhaps we have our experiences in order to have things to remember. (That's psyche as soul right there.)

 It does seem to me that the active process of remembering adds richness and maybe even meaning (or meanings) to the experiences. There's such an emphasis on seniors having new experiences, traveling the world to fulfill their bucket lists, as well taking up new interest and hobbies to keep their brains working. Maybe. Active remembering uses the brain, too, as well as the heart and soul. Finding depth in past experiences seems at least as worthy as trying to have often superficial new ones, and it's a lot less expensive and exhausting.

Anyway, notes begin here soon on Draaisma's Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older:How Memory Shapes Our Past. First up: first memories.

History and Memory

There are historical firsts every day, some more generally significant than others.  For example on Wednesday, for the first time, a player born in Africa played in a US Major League baseball game.  He's an infielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and in his first at bat he hit a single.  He has a great baseball name, too: Gift Ngoepe.

It's of special interest to baseball fans, and somewhat curious in general, in that many African Americans have played the game.  In fact, the first all-black starting lineup also belonged to the Pittsburgh Pirates back in the 1970s.

But the lack of African players has not been due to racial discrimination, at least not since Jackie Robinson. Baseball is apparently not a major sport in any African country, and to be born and raised in South Africa presents fewer opportunities to learn and play the game.

A flood of African players doesn't seem on the immediate MLB horizon, but there was another somewhat stunning historical first that may forecast the future. Reports Quartz:

The seismic shift in global energy production was powerfully in evidence today (April 21), when all electricity in the UK was produced for a 24-hour period without burning a single shovelful of coal—for the first time since the industrial revolution [began.]

Consider that the industrial revolution essentially began in England in the late 18th century, and that its growth is largely responsible for global heating and the Climate Crisis.  The massive burning of coal is historically the chief cause (though oil is catching up.)  This event hopefully forecasts a near future when a day without burning coal is a normal day in the UK and the US, and rapidly thereafter, everywhere.

Another historical first has more to do with our relation with the past.  The New York Times ran a feature on Emma Morano, who at her death recently was the oldest known person in the world.  She was 117.

She lived in a modest room in an Italian town, and the article ran large pictures of her possessions, as if they were already remarkable relics of a faraway time. Although to me they were quite familiar from my own grandparents and their friends and contemporaries.  Her odd habits weren't odd to me.  Some have been passed down.

But a kind of throwaway line in the story stopped me.  Here it is:" Ms. Morano, the last person documented as being born in the 1800s.."

So that's a big change.  If this is true, we have all lost forever direct contact with the nineteenth century.

I think of my Italian grandparents, both born in the 1890s.  I think of a grandparent of John F. Kennedy, who reputedly lived during both the assassinations of JFK and of Abraham Lincoln.  Or Kennedy himself, noting in his 1961 Inaugural that "the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century..."  He was the first President of the 20th century not to have been born in the 19th.

When time escapes memory it becomes history.  Photographs and sound recordings provide some connection, but especially writing--both diaries and memoirs as well as fictions based on times remembered rather than only researched.

We still have those from the 19th century.  But none of us will ever again touch the hand of someone who lived in it. Nor will we hear a new memory, perhaps one that had not emerged before.