Tag Archives: Memory

An Itch Better Left Unscratched

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Do you ever scratch an itch and later regret it?

Way back in 1969, when I was a senior at a suburban California high school, I missed the notice about reserving a copy of the yearbook. Maybe I was distracted. Maybe I was home with mononucleosis. So when the yearbooks were distributed later that year, I didn’t get one.

Being 17 and relatively unassertive, it didn’t even occur to me to ask if there were extra copies available.

This has bothered me ever since, not in a big way, but in an itchy way. That’s why I looked on eBay recently to see if anyone was selling a copy of La Mirada High School’s 1969 edition of La Capa (why anyone would use the Spanish words for “the layer” or “the coating” as the title of a high school yearbook is a good question, but probably says something about the quality of language instruction at La Mirada High in the 1960s).

Surprisingly, someone who specializes is selling such things was.

My used copy of La Capa arrived two days ago. It once belonged to a sophomore named Lenny. So far as I know, we never met, but I hope his yearbook didn’t end up on the open market because he’s no longer with us.

After a brief look and some excited sharing, I put my new possession aside until this morning.

Having paged through it now, I’m wondering: 

Who the hell were all those people? Only a very small percentage of them looked familiar at all.

What motivated the La Capa papparazzi to document the activities of a small social elite?

Why didn’t I participate in the amazing assortment of clubs and activities that La Mirada High offered? (Apparently, I was vice-president of one organization, but you couldn’t prove it by me.)

Why didn’t I talk to the completely charming Debbie Anderson as much as possible? Especially since I was considered intelligent back then (there are clearly different kinds of intelligence, some more valuable than others). 

And how could I ever have been that skinny?

I’m convinced it would have been better to have kept my $50 (including shipping) and avoided this excursion down memory lane. The past is past for a reason. 

Nostalgia Once Removed, or Stardust Memories

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Chinatown is a wonderful movie. One of the great things about it is how it portrays Los Angeles in 1937. The city looks so shiny and new. Watching Chinatown always makes me nostalgic for Los Angeles, even though I lived there decades after the 1930s. 

What’s odd is that I don’t have especially happy memories of Los Angeles. Living there, it often seemed as if the really good stuff was happening on the other side of town.

My nostalgia, my “bittersweet longing for things, persons, or situations of the past”, my “wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to some past period”, is mostly for the past that didn’t happen. It’s for the past that might have been, a longing for missed opportunities in a setting that promised something wonderful.

The Germans could have a word for it: “Sehnsuchtnacheinervergangenensie hattennie”.

Sehnsucht nach einer vergangenen sie hatten nie. Nostalgia for a past you never had.

We might also call the phenomenon “stardust memories”.

Would You Forget About It, If You Could? (Part 2)

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Last week, I wrote about some scientists who have erased memories by injecting a drug into the brains of rats (our memory appears to work the same way as rat memory, but nobody is currently injecting propranolol into human test subjects). 

Now some other scientists have reported the ability to create memories in rats by injecting a certain kind of virus into their brains. The virus affects the creation of a protein that underlies the storage of memories. In this case, the rats were made to remember a certain environment as being painful, even though they had never experienced pain in that environment. 

Erasing real memories. Creating false ones. We’re a long way from our memories being manipulated like a character in a Philip K. Dick story (“We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”). But what’s a nice rat to think about its memories these days? Did I have that excellent cheese yesterday or not?

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/07/26/3811591.htm

Would You Forget About It, If You Could?

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Everyone has some bad memories. Would you erase a bad memory if you could?

That’s the premise of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a wonderful movie from 2004 in which Jim Carrey (playing a serious role) and Kate Winslet use a new technology to erase their memories of each other. As you might expect, things don’t go as planned.

The idea that we might get rid of painful memories raises some interesting questions. Is it right to erase what is part of ourselves, something that contributes to making us who we are? Don’t bad memories help us avoid making the same old mistakes again? Does having painful memories help us appreciate our happy memories and the good things that happen to us?

We might have to consider such questions in the relatively near future. Scientists aren’t yet ready to erase our memories, but some of them are working on a way to make bad memories less painful. It isn’t clear from the article below whether the details of a memory can be changed, or whether it’s the emotion associated with a memory that can be changed. What is clear is that ingesting a certain drug (propranolol) within a window of time after a memory is formed or after it’s recalled can change the memory’s emotional impact. In theory, a traumatic memory can become relatively benign. 

The premise of the article is that this method will work because it takes a certain amount of time for a memory to be “consolidated” (added to our long-term memory), and each time we recall a memory, it is “reconstituted” (reconstructed from some underlying arrangement of the stuff in our brains). If the drug is administered at the right time, the process of consolidation or reconstitution can be modified.

Perhaps it’s a sign of having a “half-empty” personality, but I’d be more than willing to remove a few bad memories or make some of them less powerful. There doesn’t seem to be much difference between getting rid of a bad memory and avoiding a bad situation that you will later remember.

In fact, one of the benefits of being dead (there aren’t a lot, but there are at least a couple) is that you don’t have to remember how you screwed up that time or what that so and so did to you. Even if there’s an afterlife (don’t count on it), you won’t have to remember all the bad stuff unless you’re in hell — or heaven isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515981/repairing-bad-memories/