Memories

What role does memory play in shaping who we are as people? Isn’t it odd that the certain aspects of an experience shape our entire perspective and sometimes beliefs for the future to come? I find it fascinating that two people sharing the same experience can perceive it so differently; and then within that different perception, each of us chooses to selectively keep some part of it in the RAM of our brain.

So, it goes something like this:

Figure 1

Now this is an oversimplified version, but let’s start with this:

Your perception of event 1 shapes how you perceive Event 2 wherever you spot the mildest of a similarity in patterns.

But is this permanent in nature- can you rely on your perception? Have there been instances where someone else’s memory of the same event shaped your perception?

Well, I can illustrate with an example. The way my memory works is in flashes. I rarely remember what someone said or did at any instance. I only remember a brief flashback of an event and my understanding of it at the time. There have been times where I don’t remember big fights that changed my friendships permanently or specific words spoken, but I do remember how I felt at the time and why I did something I did. Now realizing this makes me believe I have a very internalized, slightly disconnected presence in any situation. I don’t register an external event as strongly as my subjective perception of it i.e. stage 2 in our FIGURE #1. I don’t remember every event I spent in college organizing fests or performing or going on trips- to me, when I look back, it’s usually just a feeling of fun and a sense of lightness I felt during my college era which encapsulates how I perceive my experience to be. The negative to this kind of memory is that I can rarely look back and perceive a situation differently than I originally did because I have no memory of the event as a whole. 

But there are times when I connect with someone who shared those experiences with me, and I have a new understanding of not only how someone else perceived that situation, but also how less I remember from my own perception. My memory of my college experience was mostly lazing around all day, mostly chilled out yet uneventful. But recently when I connected with a friend, he reminded me how many cafes we visited, the activities we did during our fests and the time we spent as part of extra- curricular research projects when we actually worked hard. 

Then as I started recalling all those parties, I remembered how I had a WhatsApp group with my girlfriends, where we discussed before any party what we would wear, and then a separate group formed before each person’s birthday in the group where we discussed the gift we were to give them. And I was reminded just how much time we spent in constantly talking and chatting and planning- not indicators of a particularly uneventful life. 

Even while remembering all this, it just didn’t register itself as a permanent memory, just part of the broader story I was telling myself, and my brain decided to discard the aspects which did not fit its overall narrative. Considering how much time had passed between now and then, perhaps the recency bias also comes into play. Now that I spent more time with my friend discussing our good old days, my perception shifted based on his experiences too which served to add another dimension to my very limited view of my life.

So let’s add those factors to the funnel we created. 

Figure 2

Now expand this scope to bigger events- whole periods of your life. Isn’t our whole identity built on just a culmination of our memories and the takeaways we had from them? Does the mere fact that we live in a world where external environments change our current perceptions constantly apply to our past as well? Does that make these memories more mutable than immovable? What impact does that produce on our self-identity and placement in the world?

Do current events and situations change the way you perceive your past? It can happen so often that something you perceived as normal during your childhood- say the inherent sexism of society or objectification of women on screen, or streets, the jokes you laughed at because everyone seemed to be enjoying them- were not really normal, or better said- not aligned to your principles. But then one day you grow up and realize that the good old memories were not that good. That immediately brings about a change not only in the way you perceive those seemingly happy memories, but also those people who propagated those activities. Things like these- which contradict your beliefs directly, shine a different light not only on the same event but also change the overall narrative you view your life and the people in it.

Figure 3

Our figure by now looks very different from what we had started with. The overall narrative now doesn’t shape the memory but is a result of the past and present colliding together. And that changes not only the opinions you have, but your whole identity. The way you perceive the same incident the second time around, presumably years apart is greatly dependent on the person you are now. Experiencing the same event puts on display not just the takeaways from your first experience, but also puts into glaring contrast the difference between you in the past v/s present, giving you an opportunity to re-evaluate your beliefs.

Now the question you would ask me is- what about the events I don’t remember? What about those events which I put conveniently at the back of my mind, consciously or subconsciously- due to lack of observation or simply indifference or unimportance? 

I am no psychologist so I cannot comment on traumatic experiences, but sometimes the way you perceive things also goes to show how much importance you place on memories themselves. Do you live from moment to moment, or do you have a more continuous view of life? Do you relate to who you were when you were at age 12 v/s 20 v/s 30? Read this article by the New Yorker to read more on this. 

Perhaps if you are a moment-to-moment person, my guess is that you are living largely in the present, are largely non- nostalgic and might not find this topic particularly interesting. These small moments do not take away from your experience of life, because you are not looking back at the narrative your past events have led to, because you are too busy forming the narrative your current experiences are building, which is kind of a pretty great way to live life too, and just one of the wonderful ways we humans learnt to adapt and cope. 

As I write this, a plane flies over my head, pretty close to the ground. As a child, I remember being excited as we were on the school ground during recess, and for a split moment, all eyes were transfixed on the plane. Never mind the game everyone was playing, the loud thunderous noise pulled us all away and we shared that common sense of wonder and awe for such a bird-like miracle created by man, flying away on its path and reaching a totally different destination in a matter of a couple of hours. Now as I sit in a café writing this article, an elderly man sitting on the table reacts the same way a group of ladies having a kitty party do on seeing this object in the sky. The past and present become one to harmoniously share the same experience.

How much of it is habitual – a conditioning of looking up as something flies over you, OR a genuine sense of some lost excitement residing in our memory, is unclear. But for a brief moment, we created a shared memory. And perhaps that is where our memory best serves us - finding, evaluating and creating our own and oftentimes shared experiences and identity.