Re-membering

This was something I learned in Psychology and I thought of it when we talked in class about the process of re-membering. It was a chapter on episodic memory and we talked about how memory is not actually an entity but a process. Pieces of information from past events get stored in different parts of the brain and when we try to recall an event, they essentially act as building blocks that we assimilate to construct a memory. Details from different events merge in these ‘storage units’ in our brain and often times, when we try to create the memory of one incident, it is interrupted by details from others. There is evidence that people sometimes have very vivid memories of what they were doing on significant dates, 9/11 for example, down to details such as the color of their shirt they were wearing. Many times these details turn out to be inaccurate. However, the people who report these details are usually very convinced of their memories.

It is the way we are wired- for some reason, we are not meant to remember everything. And it’s probably always the details that we get wrong. Details cannot be trusted. We talked in class about how the minute details in the chapter “The Man I Killed” in The Things They Carried and those in An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge makes us suspicious about the accuracy of the stories we are being told. Yet, I feel like details are essential because ironic as it is, they are supposed to reinforce a story. It’s like the author is trying to recreate the exact moment for us or make us see the picture is in his head, so that we feel what he is feeling. After all, in real life or in writing fiction, that is the whole point of storytelling- eliciting from your audience the emotion that you felt, or at least making them understand why you felt so. And details make your readers feel emotionally invested, even if it something completely irrelevant, like the color of the shirt you were wearing. Details are important to us- they make a story real. So even when we are trying to recollect a memory, we need those details. And if we cannot remember it, maybe our brain just pulls a piece of detail from another incident and snaps it into the puzzle to make our memory complete. It doesn’t matter if it’s not true; that completion makes it feel right. Seems like once again, it’s that trade-off between accuracy and getting it right.

The idea of constructing a memory makes me think that every time we try to remember something, we are actually creating a mini-fiction for ourselves. Isn’t that what fiction is? Fragments of experiences of an author molded into a meaningful story. Metaphors are just embellishments; at the very core, every fiction is just a summary and conclusion of an author’s real life experiences. By the same reasoning, every memory is like a fictional tale printed in our brain. Every memory is as illusive as a piece of fiction, and every piece of fiction is as valid as a real memory.