Jogging the memory
In his book, Moonwalking with Einstein (2011) Joshua Foer explores “the art and science of remembering everything.” He traces human memory’s evolutionary decline to the growing availability of external memory storages. Rather than carrying data and words that we need for survival in our heads, we now just rely on external sources for information as and when we need to remember it. There are reference books, and now the Internet and Wikipedia, to check the exact wording of quotations rattling around in our heads or names of movies we liked and their cast, as well as places we visited but forgotten.
Foer relates the memory training he underwent for the memory Olympics that tested prodigious feats of total recall including the sequence of four decks of cards to be memorized in 30 minutes. One technique he describes is the “Palace of memory” which is based on an ancient and storied feat of remembering all the guests at a banquet were when the reception area burned down by reimagining them around the banquet table. The palace of memory imagines a familiar house or building and then placing items to be memorized by placing mental images on the steps, doorway, rooms, kitchen, and other spaces. The items can then be recalled as needed. They can be as pedestrian as a grocery list, say with a lamb having a shave and ringing the doorbell (for lamb chops and razors). The more absurd the image it seems, the better its mnemonic traction.
The memory games can aid anyone trying to remember people he meets in a cocktail party, even if many there are forgettable.
If we don’t need to keep everything in our heads, pretty soon we don’t need to remember anything outside of what instinct requires of us. A simple test in our experience will illustrate this point. We used to remember many telephone numbers, including our own. With the mobile phones’ storage of hundreds of contact numbers, there is no need to memorize any of them. Anybody we need to call is in the mobile phone directory. The name needs only to be pressed to dial the number no longer required to be remembered. Of course, this also makes more likely the catastrophe of pressing the wrong name for a missent message — Taking a shower already, Wonder Woman.
When external storages for information were unavailable, before the printing of books, the oral tradition was strong as epics and tribal struggles and rules were memorized and passed on from one generation to the next. These were recorded only when the printing press arrived as the first external storage.
Ray Bradbury posits a dystopian future in his 1956 sci-fi novel Fahrenheit 451 precisely speculating a bookless society. The burning of books by a totalitarian government starts a revolutionary movement with specific individuals tasked with memorizing particular books, turning them into walking memory sticks.
Bradbury in an interview before his death in 2012 emphasized that what he was decrying was not the censorship of ideas at all but the loss of interest in reading. In Fahrenheit, a character proclaims — “you don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
Psychologists have identified a part of the brain, mentioned in Gray’s Anatomy (not the TV serial), that stores memory and emotions. The amygdala is almond shaped and tiny. A pair of them sends messages to the hypothalamus to act on the emotional inputs transmitted to the body through the nervous system. This is where the primordial fight-or-flight instinct resides. This brain tissue also wears down with age.
If the ability to remember fades to the point of forgetting where one has put his senior citizen card for discounts, does the emotional part of the brain get to occupy more space and kick into higher gear? One can speculate that indeed forgetful individuals tend to be irascible and short-tempered — but, I gave it to you earlier.
Total recall is indeed possible. Feats of photographic memory (also mentioned in Foer’s book) include one Akira Haraguchi who was able to recite from memory in October 2006 the value of “pi” to the 100,000th decimal point in 16 hours.
Partial recall is all we can manage anyway. Still, this retrieval system consists only of trivial details like the menu on one’s 50th birthday party or some lines from “City of Stars.” For most other things like groceries and chores, we need to make lists... and making sure we remember where we put them.
Total recall is possible but partial recall is all we can manage anyway.