THE TRUTHINESS OF MEMORY

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The life and times of the Greek Goddess of memory, Mnemosyne (Nem-o-sign-a) is perhaps fittingly not well record by history. What little we are told is that the goddess memory is the daughter of Uranus and Gaia, The God of Sky and Goddess Mother Earth herself, so she is literally the result of the coupling of earth and sky. She ends up having nine children with Zeus, who become the nine muses: poetry, history, mime, flute, dance, song, tragedy, comedy and astronomy.

These nine muses, the daughters of Memory, are meant to represent the efforts by early humans to preserve history; to save the stories of the past from being forgotten, because memories are really just the stories we remember to keep telling. The muses were the mnemonics of our ancient ancestors. If a story was to be remembered, it had to be turned into an epic poem or story, set to music and regaled in song, or turned into a play or act so that it would be imprinted on those who were not there and thus not be forgotten.

This metaphor - that memory is like physically imprinting stories on the brain - dominated our understanding of how we remembered things for much of human history. Plato, for example, posited that memories were imprinted on wax blocks stored in our heads. Although this idea is in many ways still with us as a symbol for how we think memory works, we now know pretty definitively that this is not at all the case. As researcher Rosalind Cartwright relates in her book The Science of Dreams, "Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original... it is a continuing act of creation."

If imprinting on the brain is the old metaphor, it is this well-articulated thought from Dr. Cartwright - that memory is a continuing act of creation - that I ask you to hold onto as we explore the topic this morning.

I am sure that everyone has experienced that moment when you have gathered with old friends or family and begun to tell favorite stories from the past and quickly come to realize that many of you have very different memories of significant plot points. Some people may even seem to remember themselves right into stories they were never really in in the first place. These people would perhaps even swear on a their life that they were there; they remember that and how could their memory be wrong? Well, as author Jonah Lehrer remarked: "The biggest lie of human memory is that it feels true." It feels true, but so often is not. In fact, perhaps the world expert on how memory really works, a professor of Psychology and Law at UC Ervine named Elizabeth Loftus says, "Just because someone thinks they remember something in detail, with confidence and with emotion, does not mean that it actually happened, ... False memories have these characteristics too."

So what is going on here? To better understand how our memory really works, let's dive into Professor Loftus' work for a moment. After getting her Ph.D. from Stanford in 1970 she received a grant from the U.S. Government's Department of Transportation to study the way people remember and report their memories of auto accidents. You can imagine the implications for insurance companies who are trying to sort out what happened at an accident scene: who is at fault, who pays and gets paid.

What Loftus quickly discovered was that the reports of witnesses were very easy to manipulate based on how she phrased questions. For instance is she asked how fast a car was going when it 'hit' another car, she got on average an answer that was 7 miles per hour less than if she asked how fast the car was going when it 'smashed' another car. Clearly the memories of the witnesses reacted differently to the words 'hit' and 'smash', increasing the speed of the car in their minds when a more active word was used.

Further, she could not just manipulate the memory in the sense of expanding or contracting something that already existed; she could quite easily insert entirely new details. For example, after viewing a film of an accident, if asked if the witness saw 'a' broken headlight, the answer was no, but if they were asked if they saw 'the' broken headlight they were very likely to answer yes, when in fact there was no broken headlight. The feeling of the questions switching from "did you see a broken headlight" to "did you see the broken headlight" was all it took to add an entirely new feature into the memory that was held as confidently as any other piece.

She began to wonder how far she could take this, and decided to turn her attention and research towards criminal trials, where more than just insurance payouts were on the line, but rather people's lives and freedom. Here is one example of what she found: First she would show someone a set of six faces while she told them about a crime, and then identify one of the faces as the perpetrator and five as innocent. Three days later, she would show four faces to that same person, one of an innocent person from the previous group and then three new faces. In this situation just short of two-thirds of the participants in the study fingered the innocent person that they recognized from days earlier as the perpetrator, stating with certainty that they remembered it to be them. That is to say, almost two thirds recognized the one familiar face and leapt to insert it back into the story as the criminal.

You can imagine that criminal defense attorneys love her, and she has indeed testified in many celebrity trials including Michael Jackson's and the famous O. J. Simpson trial. Her studies go on and on, but you get the idea by now. Memory is not an imprinting in the sense of videotape that captures a fixed set of events and plays them back over and over just the same, but is rather a continuing act of creation, involving only a loose relationship with the original event, and owing at least as much to the context of the moment of recall. The reason you are trying to remember, the way you are asked about it, the mood you are in at the time you are diving back into your mind - all will have as great an impact as the facts of the original event.

That is how trustworthy and solid our memory really is. In some ways this can be unsettling. Our memories are so essential to how we think of who we are. So what does it mean that they are so much less reliable then we assume?

I think one possible answer is that it can actually be very freeing. Because as much as memories help us know who we are, they also can trap us in who we are and make it very difficult to become who we wish to be. But if the truth is that memory is not a permanent imprint but is rather a continuing act of creation, then there is no reason it should ever stop us from becoming. Just because we remember our childhood a certain way, or what happened the last time we tried to better ourselves, or think we know how good we are at something because of a stuck memory from our past, doesn't mean that has to be the end of it. Because a memory is really just a story you tell yourself, and every story can be changed. Not only can it be changed, but it is being changed, constantly, for better or for worse. Our only choice is whether to get involved or not. So what do I mean by getting involved? What would it really look like for us to free ourselves from stuck memories?

Luckily for us, Northwestern Professor Dan Adams believes he knows the answer. Professor Adams has spent thirty years studying life stories, because he believes that of all of our memories, the ones related to our life story are our most tenderly curated collections, the most essential to who we are, or as he puts it: "The stories we tell ourselves about our lives don't just shape our personalities - they are our personalities." Of course, your life story is not a telling of everything that has happened to you since birth; rather, it is kind of like the cliff notes version of your life that you tell yourself, which he calls a cognitive script; it helps us answer those big questions as best we can: how we got to be the person we are, and what direction we are trying to take our lives. "These aren't just separate things that have an influence on who we are," says McAdams. "They are, to a certain extent, who we are and they're integrated into our personality as a kind of narrative feature of individuality." Further, he claims that by gaining a deeper understanding of how we create our narrative script, we can actually intentionally alter it and, as I hinted at previously, thereby free ourselves from parts of our past that are hindering us from moving forward.

I am going to share two of the main concepts at the center of this growing field called Narrative Psychology. The first is the idea that not only is your story constantly evolving, but that as you age there is a clearly discernible trend towards the positive. We begin creating our cognitive scripts right around the time we enter kindergarten. As will most likely not surprise anyone, they continue to grow in depth and drama as they approach the teen years and we start to engage with those big anxious questions about meaning and purpose. In our twenties and thirties all kinds of new ideas and characters are added to our script, but this usually peaks sometime in our 40s and the story begins to move in the opposite direction, towards simplicity and integration. "There is some research to suggest that the complexity of narratives peaks out in someone's 40s, maybe early 50s," says McAdams. "Then you get a tendency to simplify a little bit. If you look at people in midlife and later, their stories tend to be a little bit softer and gentler and happier... There's an improvement over time. When people get older, they seem to have less tolerance for that. They'll kind of reconstruct the past and forget or downplay the bad stuff a little bit."

So that is tip number one: You are going to give yourself permission eventually to downplay the bad stuff, so why not get a head start now. And if you are already there, why not do a little more?

The second learning from Narrative Psychology was found when McAdams studied people in their 30s and 40s who fell into a category he called "generative" people, which he defined as being caring, productive and committed to being a positive force in the world, the kind of people most of us aspire to be. With all the life stories of these people that he studied, he found the same thing: they all included a strong redemptive arc. All of these people had met with epic failures, disappointments, heartbreaks, and disasters. They had started failed businesses; they had been divorced or fired from their dream job. But when they told these stories as essential components of their script, it was to show how they had used these moments as a catalyst to what they were now, not to dwell on things that prevented them from getting to their goals. It is such a classic genre of life script that we all know the arc well. It is the basis for every Lifetime movie and VH1 "Behind the Music" special: failure leads to success if we decide to keep trying. "We all know how to do that and many of us do it, but the highly generative people do it a lot," says McAdams. "They have about twice as many of those themes in their life stories or more as do the rest of us." Twice as many. So that means that each of us needs to work a little more on those failure stories we carry, as they are some of the most important to how we see ourselves. We need to see them as part of our learning, as the beginning of our arc, and not the end. I think most of us sense intuitively that this is true, but this is empirical evidence that backs it up. Failure will come to us all, but what story will we tell ourselves about that failure? That is up to you.

That is what I hope you leave here today thinking about: that your memories are not set in stone and they do not own you or control your future. Your memories are, just like you, a work in progress, a continuing act of creation. Your memories will always be a shifting tide of then and now, so why not engage with those memories, take an active role in the curation of your inner life, and assign meaning as fits your life needs. This has already paid dividends for me. One memory, which I have shared with you before, that has held me back for decades happened at my third grade recorder concert, when, the night of the final rehearsal, I was instructed by the music teacher to not actually blow through my instrument at the final performance lest I throw off the other children. For so long the story I have told myself with this memory is that I had no musical talent, and it has kept me from ever exploring if that was true or not. But now, as an adult with a job, I can more easily understand that this moment was more about the instructor's need for perfection than anything about my musical potential. Seen through her eyes, I can transform the story I tell myself: that maybe a great musician does lie dormant within me, yet waiting to be discovered.

What memory can you start to work with, what story can you begin to tell differently?

May it be so.

Sources I was influenced by in the creation of this message

The Independent article: Your memory rewrites the past and edits it with new experiences, study finds

Brainpickings newsletter: Neurologist Oliver Sacks on Memory, Plagiarism, and the Necessary Forgettings of Creativity

Slate magazine article: Making Memories, One Lie at a Time

Huffington Post article: What Your Life Story Really Says About You

Who was Mnemosyne in Greek Mythology?

Wikipedia article on Elizabeth Loftus

Time magazine article: Remember That? No You Don't. Study Shows False Memories Afflict Us All