Selective Memory Goes in Both Directions

 

"Memory" is a fraught thing. Cherished memories, traumatic ones, memories that help you do well in school and work, and those that put others behind bars. So there's a lot at stake when you try to recall something that went through your brain before, whether a minute or a lifetime ago.

I've been brain-dumping memories of mine from different times of my life, using this time between jobs to record moments and anecdotes and observations, to see if patterns emerge that help my self-awareness and ultimately guide and support whatever I do next in my career. At times, I find myself laughing out loud, or on the verge of tears, or sitting in stunned silence. Memories literally take you back, and some do so quite viscerally.

Of course, rare is the human with total recall, to have access to every single interaction in their lives dating back to childhood. Instead, our brains shed content all the time, and we're left with some strong memories and other trace ones. 

It occurs to me that this culling, in a weird sort of way, goes in both directions. We are wired in our Western world to view time as an arrow, and so we go from past into future, and stranded as we are in the present at any given moment when we look back we hold certain memories from our past. So it seems strange to say that selectivity of memory runs both from past to present and from present to past.

But this is what I mean. In our past, our future at that time contained a multitude of possible paths. As we moved into the future, of course we were only able to take one. Many memories were impactful enough to our lives at the time that they were part of what helped us to determine what that path might be. A positive experience in sports forms in us a framework for how we will handle teamwork and discipline and success and failure, and as a result we shed certain ways we might think and behave and lock in on a specific way to think and behave. Conversely, a bad experience in school gives us a vivid lesson in what direction not to go in, and we shut that door off along with all the paths that could've been built from that. Memories, in short, are experience along our path which help us figure out where to go next, which is to say they guide us as to which paths not to take going forward.

But the culling does its own time-travel, too. What do I mean by that? The present version of ourselves is built on the experiences we had in our past. But it in turn represents a frame of reference by which we look back into the past. Memories are moments that help us select one direction over another. But memories are also selective, in that what we remember when we look back is not perfect recall but rather what we want to remember based on who we are now. 

Extreme versions of this are certain memories that we have, for good or bad, walled off from thinking about in the present. In an act of self-preservation, we are avoiding that which is traumatic or shameful or otherwise too hard to hold in the present. But there are less dramatic versions of this, in which we choose to remember what the hard lessons taught us and neglect the more mundane ways in which we were shaped for the present, or where we choose to think ourselves a slightly more noble version of ourselves while conveniently neglecting ways we were jerky to others along the way.

Whether from past to present or present to past, remembering memories, writing them down, and trying to draw some themes from them has been an interesting exercise. You should try it sometime! You may be similarly informed about what you do and don't remember, how memories teach you what foundations your current identity is built on and in turn how your current identity informs what you remember and how you remember it.