Thoughts on Memory

If I were to name one thing that I am good at, I would say that I have very good memory of experiences and surroundings. I'm not particularly good at remembering numeral data, logical arguments, or names, but I have impeccable memory of senses; things that I've seen, smelled, tasted, touched, or heard. Like Proust, I could recollect the memory of a place or time through one of the senses, such as the time when I stepped into the house of my friend's in Germany for the first time that reconnected me to the memory of my aunt's house in northern Japan that I haven't visited for over 20 years. At that time, it was the smell of the house that brought me back the memory, as both houses smelled (every house has distinct smell) oddly similar. My memory tends to be visual, like flashbacks or short movies, and even if I am unable to recall names or places, I could visualize the faces, colors and surroundings. My memory goes as far back as 1 and 1/2 years old, and I still surprise my parents for odd things that I remember that have long disappeared from their memories.

Recently, I had two occasions to re-consider the meaning of memory; what makes one person to have better memory than the others, and how memory could be elusive, fickle, and even selective.

The first occasion was a visit of my friend from NY and conversations I had with him on things that we remembered from our shared past. We were very close in our twenties, spent almost every weekend hanging out and shared every secret, hope and fear. He is a highly intelligent and incredibly smart person with the IQ far surpassing mine, but he claims that he is forgetful, and does not remember many things as I do. I used to agree, having had many small arguments with him on silly things such as the places that we've been that he insisted that he had never been (and of course we had, sometimes in multiple occasions), and not taking pills on time when he should have when sick. However, when we discussed our shared past experiences, I realized that he actually remembered tidbits of things that I have forgotten, and the types of memory he kept was quite different from mine. If my memory was connected with senses and feelings, his is wired with conversation and names. I was still better at recalling memories, but I did not find the memory capacity vastly different between us.

This made me think that there are no real difference in memory capacity from one person to another, but how we remember things could be dependent on our character. As a logical person with strong aptitude for words, my friend's memory seems to be wired with words and logical arguments constructed through words (and no wonder his is a lawyer), whereas my strength lies in senses and visualization.

The other thing that I realized is that those with good memory tend to have more"trigger points" that search, recall, or reconnect the labyrinth of our memory. Our mind is like internet, vast and expanding, and like "search", our mind could be indexed and recalled. However, unlike search engines that are programmed with logic and algorithm, our minds are not indexed with programs and our trigger points depend on individual strengths. Perhaps those with good memory have an ability to index their memory with better "tagging" or trigger points, like myself who tag them with 5 senses whereas my friend who tag with one.

Another occasion that makes me think of memory came few weeks ago, when I received a message from my old friend through social networking site inquiring the last names of few friends we both knew in college. I realized then that not only had I forgotten their last names, but there is not a single trace of their existence in my mind, or more surprisingly, the period.

There exists a period of two years that I consider "lost years" or to be more accurate "the discarded years", that I only wished to forget that I existed in certain place and surroundings. It seems I have succeeded in erasing my memory from the period and moved on, knowing that the memory would only makes me miserable for being a failure (in my eyes).

I realized then that I have blank indexes that are blackened and erased by myself, and the memory that could not be pulled out unless forced (such as hypnotize). It is strange that I have many bad memories that I rather forget or erase but couldn't, but have succeeded in doing so for this particular period. How did I succeed in erasing the period, and are we capable of selecting memory that we rather forget and discard from our mind? Or was my mind so full that I discarded the memories of the years that I considered unworthy of remembering and put them away, just as Dumbledore has done so in Harry Potter? Only, he had Pensieve to retrieve the memory, while I have nothing but my unreliable mind.