Memory and imagination

A Second Wind, by Mary Petersen My friend recommended a book to me a few weeks ago — “Adventures in Memory.” This, ironically, after I boasted in my last column that seniors have broader interests than just learning memory tips and techniques. But the subtitle intrigued me — “The Science and Secrets of Remembering and Forgetting . ” Who doesn’t like a good secret? To be clear, the book is not a self-help manual written by a 20-something YouTube celebrity. One of the writers is a neuropsychologist and researcher, the other a celebrated novelist and editor. Together they present science-based research in a very readable style. I discovered that I don’t know much about how memory works. I always thought of memory as a sort of repository of experiences in our lives. I knew about long-term and short-term memory and that memory is unreliable. (Ask five witnesses about an incident they observed and get five different responses.) But I learned about why memory is unreliable. It’s because a memory is not like a read-only PDF, fixed and unalterable. The authors explain that memory is more like live theater. We create new productions of a memory each time we remember it. We maintain the central story or outline of the experience, but it’s reconstructed each time we recall it and subconsciously fill in the details with probable facts from a sort of memory prop room where persons, things, and actions are stored in a memory network. I’m not making this up. This is the brain’s way of freeing up space since we don’t need to store the exact details of every experience. So remembering is actually reimagining what happened. Because memory is elastic and not fixed, memories can become confused or murky. Desires or fantasies can sneak into memory and […]

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