Memory and Forgetting, Memory Movement Memory Objects.

While I’m perpetually mid-research for my show exploring the neuroscience of memory (in relation to grief), I listened to this podcast - ‘Memory and Forgetting’ - on Radio Lab. It was a bit of a revelatory bombshell. Here’s a little reflection, and some pondering on its relation to theatre...

A common perception of the way we ‘store’ memories in the brain is that it works something like a filing cabinet, or a series of events we upload to ‘The Cloud’. It’s a lovely image, but an inaccurate one. Instead, what actually happens is that when we remember something, it is not as if we pull down a ladder, climb into the attic of a brains, blow the dust off the cardboard boxes and reminisce our childhoods. No - to remember a moment is to reimagine it. Your 8th birthday at McDonalds? The Happy Meal toy and the cold fries that fell out of the little paper bag, and tasted of the cardboard box? That is not a direct, accurate memory, as such. That is your imagination, conjuring up an image of the event, in relation to the present moment. 

It may well be that, in fact, the fries were still hot, and that you actually had your birthday at Burger King. It might also be that you never had a birthday party there at all, and it’s just something that your parents told you had happened. The question of the reliability of memory is not an issue with remembering something correctly, it is an inevitability of re-imagining the event entirely.

But get this: each time you remember a moment - for instance, to take the example used in the podcast, your first kiss with the love of your life - you imagine it a little differently. This means that each time you remember it, it pulls further and further away from that true moment, until all you’re left with is the essence - or the desired essence - of the moment. The moment has gone, and the ‘memory’ died the moment that kiss ended.

This is where I began to think about the nature of theatre. When we talk about “why theatre?” and the response is “Because it is live”, I think it is to this that we are referring. While a couple share their first kiss, or while a parent celebrates the birth of a child - while we cannot ever return to these big moments of our lives - we relive these moments by proxy. We do not enter the theatre intending to remember, so we relinquish these memories anew, and revel in this surprise catharsis and sympathy. And as in life, we cannot rewind to that moment in the theatre to experience it again. Just once more, we get the taste of something that will never, ever, ever happen again. 

But it’s not all doom and gloom. It is because of this that we can look back on times of our life with rose tinted glasses, or can only recognise a time of despair and confusion in hindsight. And if that’s not consolation enough, consider this - if you treat your favourite memories like your best jewellery, or a very old whisky, only to be brought out on special occasions, you will preserve them with closer resemblance to their true form. Like a photo gradually faded by the sun. 

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I went to the ‘Memory Movement Memory Objects’ exhibition by Alice Anderson at the Wellcome Collection last year. It was comprised of a series of objects ranging from kitchenware to a canoe that had been coiled and mummified in copper wire. Wandering between these objects that were uniform in aesthetic, I felt that there was something oddly sad and sinister about them, and couldn’t figure out why. I interpreted that the intention was to preserve them, and hold on to everything that they represented. But in doing so, the copper wire was slowly warping the objects out of shape, and the familiarity of the object was replaced by the uncanny. They morphed into a different kind of beauty, rendered unusable in an attempt to preserve them, perhaps like Miss Haversham destined forever to be waiting in her wedding dress. Maybe this is the fate of a memory that is not reimagined, recycled, and remembered anew, and neuroscience has finally come to explain the plight of this much explored phenomenon - that of trying to relive the past - in actual, scientific terms.