SUNDAY, 12 OCTOBER 2025

In last week’s blog I mentioned a film noir titled Somewhere in the Night about a soldier returning from the war who is suffering from amnesia and doesn’t remember anything about his past. The movie depicts his desperate attempt to find out who he is and what happened to him before the war in order to regain his sense of self because without his memories he is just blood and muscles and bones. He can function without his memory in the sense that an oyster functions without a central nervous system and brain, but he doesn’t really exist as a person. When there is no memory, there is no permanent and stable I.

For the last year of her life, my mother didn’t recognise me except for brief moments when the son she loved reappeared before swiftly vanishing again. For the rest of the time, she saw me either as a nurse or sometimes an imposter who was pretending to be Alan. I found this very disturbing, not only because I sensed that she was suffering although I had no way of being sure that this was the case, but also because in one way I had ceased to exist myself when my own mother didn’t know me. I had entered the world of the 50s sci-fi movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which close family and friends start to believe that their loved ones are not their real loved ones, a psychological condition called Capras syndrome which apparently is more common than generally realised.

Perhaps the long-term memories were still there somewhere inside my mother because the short-term memory is always first to go when our mind starts to lose its moorings, while memories from the deep past continue to shine as brightly as if they had happened yesterday. I imagine most people have had the experience of listening to an elderly person tell them a story from the past in minute detail and then repeat the story a few minutes later, having forgotten that they have just told it. Although most memories fade over time (psychologists term this ‘transience’), moments of great emotion are often implanted more deeply (‘flashbulb memories’) and are more likely to rise to the surface and be consciously remembered. I can see all these phenomena in myself because I often can’t remember what I had yesterday for lunch or whether I locked my balcony door before I went to bed, but embarrassing episodes at school or moments when I was in danger such as when I was briefly queer-bashed are easy to recall (luckily a taxi appeared on the street, so my assailants ran away).

However, this doesn’t mean that these memories are perfectly accurate. Scientists in the field all seem to agree that memory is not like a photograph or a video; it doesn’t sit there like a DVD and wait for us to plug it into the machine and click play. To some extent, we recreate a memory each time we remember it, so slowly over the years it gradually drifts away from the original reality. We have a tendency to add details, for instance, or to alter the memory to make it more exciting or to fit our desired self-image. This has all kinds of repercussions in a range of fields, as I will explore later in this blog.

I apologise if there isn’t much recourse to recent science in this essay. The results of my research into the subject tended to fall into one of two camps: it was either rather general, close to folk knowledge, and could be stated just as easily in everyday language without any need for detailed reference to science, or extremely specific and technical and hard for the layperson to understand if they knew nothing of neurology (for example, the various areas of the brain and which activate a memory when they are stimulated). Briefly, science splits memory into declarative and non-declarative (sometimes called explicit and implicit). The former is memory that we consciously attempt to lay down, as for instance when we try to remember things for an exam. This can be split further into semantic (facts and meaning, such as the capital of Cambodia) and episodic (an event in our lives, such as what happened at Jane’s party last week). In contrast, non-declarative or implicit memory happens gradually, usually through repetition, without any conscious attempt on our part to learn, such as the way we pick up a language by immersion in a foreign setting or remember the words of a song from singing along.

I will repeat here what I have learned from my (rather perfunctory) research although I don’t claim to fully comprehend it: in general, long-term memories reside throughout the cerebral cortex, while the pre-frontal cortex is the site of short-term working memory and the hippocampus is essential for turning short-term memories into long-term ones (apologies to any experts if this is a misunderstanding on my part or ridiculously over-simplified). It can all sound impressively scientific, as if memory is as predictable as putting a penny into a slot machine, yet other research by Loftus and Palmer proves that context can play an enormous role in the exact form that a memory takes. They showed a video of a car crash and asked respondents to estimate how fast the cars were travelling, but they used a different verb (smash/hit/collide/bump/contact) in the question each time, and answers varied according to the verb used (i.e., the estimated speed was higher when the question included ‘smash’ or ‘collide’ rather than ‘hit’). Respondents were also more likely to see broken glass (which didn’t exist) in the video if the stronger verbs were used.

So not only are memories not like videos stored on DVDs, but the memory that forms in the first place is not like the snapshot of a camera. Memory is more tricky than this. We now realise that false memories are relatively common and can be induced during things like hypnosis or psychotherapy. During the 1990s, for instance, there were several trials in the US where people were found guilty of sexual abuse and the verdict was later overturned due to false memory syndrome, while psychiatrists were successfully sued for implanting false memories in their patients of sexual abuse and satanic rituals that never took place. As a result, recovered memory therapy became discredited (although there are still people who argue for its efficacy). In addition, police procedure and the judicial system have become much more wary of evidence from witnesses due to greater awareness of the problems surrounding memory, with identity parades being the focus of particular criticism. On a more everyday level, consider how many of our memories of childhood are actually stories that we were told by our parents, constantly repeated until they become fixed in our minds and transform into personal memories even though in truth we can’t actually recall them. In general, the popular view of memory needs to become much more nuanced and sophisticated than seeing memory as a simple photo or video recollection of what ‘really’ took place.

We do not have equal access to all memories. For example, retrieving words that begin with a specific letter is much easier than retrieving those which have that letter in third position. This might suggest that the brain works like a filing cabinet, an idea strengthened by those occasions when for some reason we know the first letter of the word we are searching for but the rest of the word remains elusive. However, this filing cabinet metaphor seems far too simplistic for in other ways words appear to be stored in what is more like a web, connected semantically rather than through their sound or orthography (and the filing cabinet concept cannot explain what happens in languages like Chinese which are written in ideograms rather than phonetically). Then there is the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon which we all know and which I personally experience all the time, where the more frustrated I become, the more the word I am looking for withdraws from consciousness. Add to this the problem with remembering names, which gets worse as we get older, since they seem to be stored somewhere different, away from the bulk of the vocabulary, and the complexity of the process of recalling becomes plain. What seems likely is that we have a variety of ways of searching for a word and the brain has recourse to them all, using a mix of sound, spelling and meaning.

So far I have been talking almost exclusively about cognition and the brain, but it is not only the brain that remembers: the whole body is capable of remembering, as for example when we learn to type or ride a bike or juggle. This is clearly an example of non-declarative memory which happens at an unconscious level, and it is essential because it allows us to do things without thinking and at a speed much faster than conscious thought. As sport has become so important and so competitive in the modern world, the concept of muscle memory has entered the public arena and public consciousness, and made us all aware that learning is not only about the mind. This may be why memories are often evoked by the senses that we tend to use less than sight and sound: the taste of Proust’s madeleine or the smell of a perfume can conjure what is termed an ‘involuntary memory’. At a more basic level yet, it could even be argued that our bodies ‘remember’ how to breathe or to regulate their temperature. Memory is essential to life.

This kind of memory we share with other animal species. Throughout history we have tried to separate ourselves from non-human animals, emphasising all sorts of criteria to do so, normally centred in some way on the superiority of our intellect. And yet no animal could survive without memory; this may not lead to a sense of a conscious I (although this might be debatable in some ‘higher’ species) but all animals are dependent on memory to continue to exist and use it all the time, both in search of food and to avoid being eaten. (As an aside, the short memory of a goldfish is largely a myth, as proved by research that was conducted in which they had to negotiate a maze to reach food, and which suggested that they have a memory that can last for at least six months.)

Memory does not only exist at the level of the human individual, of course, but also at the level of whole societies. How collective memory takes shape is complex and almost impossible to chart because efforts are always made to control this process by the powers that be, but it still remains outside of anyone’s total control. An extreme modern example is the wiping out of the 1989 protests at Tiananmen Square from official Chinese history, but this is far from unique: all societies do the same, as is clear from the partial suppression of the reality of slavery and colonialism from western education when I was young. As the saying goes, ‘History is written by the victors’. So just as we all individually have memories that do not exactly reflect what actually happened, societies have a similar phenomenon, although there is generally a greater attempt to deliberately manage the past than in the case of individuals. The line between official history and propaganda is thin and hard to delineate.

Is declarative memory deteriorating in modern life? This would seem to be a logical assumption in a world where we rely on machines to keep things like telephone numbers and we can google anything we need to know rather than store it in our long-term memory. What we remember is also interesting. Obviously the earlier we learn something, the more likely it is to survive through to old age. And some things are simply easier to remember; for example, we can often recall the lyrics of songs we learned at infant or junior school, or even those of our teens, perhaps because the rhythm of the tune acts as a mnemonic (all those hymns from school assemblies are indelibly lodged in my brain). In cases of amnesia, meanwhile, the sufferer usually remains able to use language and doesn’t lose abilities and skills that originally had to be remembered and learned, such as how to tie shoelaces or to read the time on a clock face, although all of these things can be lost in the case of a stroke.

I began this blog by referring to a film noir which depended on amnesia for its plot. Memory, and the fact that a memory can be false or lost altogether, makes it an ideal theme for novelists and film directors. At its best, this can make for extremely intriguing plotting, and there are several other noirs which draw on it, including The Blue Dahlia, The Chase and Black Angel. At its worst, it can be a lazy way to construct a rather lame plot, as in many telenovelas. Repressed memories can serve a similar function: for example, in Hitchcock’s psychological thriller, Marnie. Amnesia or buried memories can offer lots of twists and turns in the storyline and the shock of sudden revelations, and in the hands of the highly talented, they can touch on more complex issues about the nature of personal identity and how we become who we are.

Painters and writers have also used and explored the theme of memory, especially the Surrealists with their general love of anything that was mysterious. They were obsessed with the unconscious mind, the fragility of what we call reality, and what they saw as the deeper reality beneath the surface of everyday life, so it is hardly surprising that memory is often central to their works. Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, with its melting clocks, is the most famous of these, but for me Magritte is the Surrealist who best captures its mystery, as in his painting simply titled Memory, and the sense of a lost past that can almost be recaptured, but never is, permeates a lot of his work. A similar feeling is evoked by the paintings of De Chirico, whom many of the Surrealists cited as an inspiration. This theme of memory links closely to the theme of Time, and therefore attracts many painters and writers of a philosophical bent. For example, it is clearly at the heart of Proust but is equally central to the poems of a very different writer, Eliot, in the Four Quartets.

I personally have my doubts whether science will ever be able to fully explain the enigma that is memory because of its intimate connection to the so-called problem of consciousness. It may work out where storage takes place, and seems to have already done so in a general way, and perhaps it may even at some point be able to locate specific memories. But questions will almost certainly remain. Can a memory be lost forever, for example, or does it lurk in some dark corner of the mind even when we can no longer bring it back to consciousness? One metaphor that has appeared over the last fifty years is that of the brain as computer, and, just as a computer’s memory is limited and sometimes files must be deleted before new ones can be uploaded, it’s possible that the same is true of the human mind. There are also rare cases of people who find it impossible to forget and their lives sound like a living hell. So although memories make us who we are and we cannot survive or exist as conscious beings without them, the ability to forget is a blessing too.