Memories are Made of This

Taking a look at the wonderful world of memory and exploring why it is that we can remember some things with ease, whilst others just seem to be a blank.

Memory is the glue that binds our past with our present and makes us what we are. Descartes said, 'I think, therefore I am', and yet in a truer sense he should have said 'I remember, therefore I am', because without memories what are we?

Thinking about memory is hardly a new thing though. The whole edifices upon which current ideas of memory development are built were first established with the Greeks, and other oral cultures that relied upon word of mouth to spread their ideas. In such a setting it is perhaps not surprising that methods of remembering developed that were more advanced then simply repeating back fifty times and hoping for the best.

To go beyond where we currently are we need a new way of reflecting on the world around us. It seems strange that if I were to ask you to describe your couch to me that you can do it in remarkable detail, and yet if I ask you for a scientific fact that you learned at school your mind is a miracle of blankness. What's the difference? The same engine (your brain) is driving both mechanisms, and yet for one you are blessed with photographic type powers and for the other your resistance is so great that you are convinced that you probably never learned the fact after all. That it was instead some other 'younger you' that used to possess mastery of 'the force' that has since deserted you.

Nothing could be further from the truth of course. The 'Good' you; the Jedi Knight who can lift the weight of a spaceship with the sheer force of his mind; and the 'Bad' you; the Darth Vader character who is constrained by the black mask of blankness are one and the same. The problem is not with your brain. It is with how you choose to use it.

Lets take the two and have a think… When I ask you to describe your couch what do you do? I'll tell you what I do. For me, I go in my mind to my living room. Stand next to my couch and take a good look at it up and down, and then just describe what I see. In fact I don't do any 'active' memorising at all. It is all remarkably painless. It's green, slightly faded, has low arms etc. In fact, apart from being in my head it almost looks good enough to sit on!