On the Meaning of Memory

Wrote this a long time ago, but felt relevant to what’s been on my mind lately…

I’ve been pondering the growing obsession with capturing memory artificially. Photo and video taking inundate the lives of many people, a trend made even more salient of course through the buzz of social media. Aside from the public aspect though, many people take pictures for the sole purpose of ‘remembering.’ I’ve definitely paused at times to take my phone out for a quick shot (my favorites tend to be friends, instances of contrast between light and dark, and the ocean). I can’t even count how many photos I have in my phone of sunsetting skies that struck me in the moment inexplicably, ones with the kind of gradient in which you can’t tell where one layer starts and the other stops. 

We hold onto these small extensions of that first original moment, trying to increase the chances that we will be able to retrieve such memories in the future. But now I question myself more deeply, for what purpose? 

“A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original.” -Ken Liu

I could not have phrased the paradox of memory better than writer Ken Liu when he posits that memory is “both more and less than the original.” 

Much of who we are and our consciousness is memory. Our ability to form long term memories of our experiences is crucial to our survival and growth as people. From procedural memories that allow us to remember every day habits to episodic memories which encompass the impactful events in our lives, the ability to remember informs us and largely makes us who we are in the present moment. 

At the same time, memory is flawed. Often inaccurate and subject to decay, our episodic recollections are biased at best and completely false at worst. The memory reels running through our heads are colored in with personal emotional valence and blurred out or replaced at certain points altogether. As with film making, most of the raw footage never even makes it to the screen of our long term memory, forgotten.

While it’s intuitive to see how the memory of an event might be considered ‘less’ than the original event due to its reconstructive tendencies and layer of removal from the original, I am pressed to think about how it might be ‘more.’ I personally spend a decent amount of time reminiscing and recounting memories. Despite inaccuracies and gaps in memory, going through memories is a way of tracking and reflecting on my growth, checking in at different junctures in my life armed with new, different knowledge. Memory is often what brings me to conscious perspective shift. It is how we learn. 

Beyond the realm of self-reflection, retrieving a memory can also feel like you’re reliving it—the brain literally ‘replays’ the same pattern of neural activity that was generated during the original event. In fact, there is no neural distinction between the act of remembering and the act of thinking. 

Thus the only main brain difference between living the event and recalling it is the awareness that your recall is not the actual event. So perhaps the ability to replay such neural patterns over and over to functionally relive the event, as well as the flexibility we have in reconstructing memory with our own biases, might make an argument for memory being ‘more,’ and explain why we treasure our dearest memories while feeling disconcerted at how much we forget. 

I wouldn’t say that our reconstructing and reliving of memories is strictly positive or negative. Personal bias and reconstruction are inevitable, and reliving memories can bring out any range and mixture of emotions, depending on the event’s nature and your present mental state. But our ability to access our memories at any point in time and re-experience certain events is powerful, giving meaning to the original event in the first place. 

Ken Liu’s fictional short story, ‘Simulacrum,’ takes this idea to an extreme. Through interview dialogue from two characters, we learn of the invention of the simulacra camera, a device that can produce hyperrealistic human simulations, imitating physical appearance as well as quirks and personality.

I won’t go into too much detail (because I hate spoilers and also you should read it), but the whole point of this invention is to recreate a person, a snapshot of someone from a specific time in their lives. In other words, it’s a memory with physicality breathed into it. It’s also a little uncomfortable to think about being able to replay someone over and over again. 

And yet, startlingly, we do that already. Just without the special camera. Simulations of people are always living in our memories on some level. While retaining memories about people helps us learn and build relationships, one potential danger of this capability is how our mental simulacra affect our actual real time perceptions of people. Overemphasizing and recreating an inherently biased memory of someone for example can ground a very narrow or specific perception of them in your mind, creating a “flat” or “2-D” character. 

Liu writes, “In your mind, you traced that captured image again and again, until the person was erased by the stencil.” And so, the memory can overpower and erase the person themself, weaving together a new narrative entrenched in old past. Suddenly, it’s difficult to tell what is ‘real’ and what is re-created.  

Still, there is beauty in the fact that memory connects us not only to ourselves, but to others. Our impact on others, others’ impact on us—it doesn’t exist without memory, distorted as memory may become. Memory acts as a form of validation, assuring us that our lives mean something. Reminding us that we’ve grown, that we’ve been happy and sad and filled with so many moments in our lives, regardless of where we’re at in the present...simultaneously more and less. 

While the time old adage wisely tells us not to live in memories of the past, it’s important to remember that the value of memory can exist alongside this precaution. Because memory reminds us of what is meaningful to us. 

P.S. If you’re reading this right now, this may be just another piece of writing that you consume and promptly forget about amongst a world overflowing with constant stimuli and interaction. But maybe you will remember some small part of this deep within your memory—a phrase, an idea, a feeling. That’s all I hope for, and that is enough for me. I hope it’s enough for you too.