Memory

“Is Memory in the Brain?”

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Most of us think of memory as something that goes on exclusively in our brains, but alongside of efforts to view cognition in general as an embodied and extended activity, some researchers have been arguing that memory also has a socially extended dimension.  David Manier is among those pushing our understanding of memory so as to encompass acts of social communication as remembering.

Manier’s 2004 article, “Is Memory in the Brain?  Remembering as Social Behavior,” published in Mind, Culture, and Activity seeks to establish social remembering as a legitimate and significant area of study for cognitive psychologists.  In order to this, Manier begins by challenging the dominant understanding of memory which construes memory as something located in the brain or as a faculty housed exclusively in the brain.

“Historians, anthropologists, and sociologists, often influenced by Halbwachs (1950/1980), have taken up the topic of collective memory, looking at ways that organizations preserve important aspects of the past, and ways that events of weighty historical importance (such as the Holocaust) become integrated into the collective identity of a group of people …. But among some psychologists, especially those whose emphasis is on neuroscientific approaches to memory, it is possible to detect a certain ambivalence toward this topic.” (251)

Manier intends to argue instead, “for the usefulness of conceptualizing remembering as social behavior, and for expanding the science of memory to include communicative acts.” (252)  Manier and his colleagues have conducted a number of studies into what he terms conversational remembering.  These studies take place in “naturalistic contexts,” that is everyday environments as opposed to the contrived laboratory environment in which most cognitive scientific research takes place.  Thus far, Manier’s studies suggest that the dynamics of social remembering shape the subsequent remembering of individual group members.

Manier briefly traces the history of the belief, most recently articulated by Tulving, that memory “has a home, even if still a hidden one, in the brain” back past recent neuroscientific discoveries to ancient Greece.  Plato operated with what Cropsey has termed an “obstetrical metaphor” according to which “the purpose of philosophy is to serve as a ‘midwife’ to the birth of ideas having germinal existence within the soul; in this sense, Plato saw knowing as involving an act of remembering.”  Thus memory was not conceived as mere storage of information, nor simply as a brain function, but “rather more like a journey, a quest in which conversations with a philosopher … can play a crucial role.”  (253)

According to Manier, this more conversational, dialogical, social conception of memory was displaced by Aristotle’s “emphasis on taxonomy” and his division of the soul into four faculties: the nutritive, the sensory, the locomotive, and the rational.  Memory, associated with imagination, was understood as a function of the sensory faculty through which one perceived images of things past.  While Aristotle did not maintain that what he had distinguished in theory was in fact distinguishable in reality, others who came after him where not so precise.  In Manier’s brief sketch, the notion of memory as a faculty located in the brain evolves through the Medieval heirs of Aristotle, to Locke, Thomas Reid, and then on to Gall and Spurzheim (founders of phrenology), Fechner, and Ebbinghaus.  (253-254)

Certain metaphors have also reinforced this “modular or topographical” view of memory:

“Often, the metaphors have been influenced by discussions of anatomy and physiology (… ‘the mental organ’ of language production – discussed by Chomsky …).  Moreover, the industrial revolution, with its production of heavy machinery, lent weight to an emphasis on metaphors about psychological ‘mechanisms.’  The development of computers spawned a host of new metaphors for cognitive psychology, including information processing, hardware and software, systems and subsystems, control processes, input and output, the computational architecture of mind, parallel distributed processing, …. (254)

Against the “mental topography” approach, Neisser has called for “ecological validity” which “asserts the imperative of understanding ‘everyday thinking’ rather than the study (preferred by many experimental psychologists) of how isolated individuals perform on contrived experiments conducted in carefully controlled laboratory settings.” (255)  Following Bruner, Manier goes on to characterize remembering as an “act of meaning” adding, “memory is something that we as humans do, that is, it is a meaningful action we perform in the sociocultural contexts that we take part in creating, and within which we live.”  Furthermore, “If it is correct to say that memory is something we do rather than something we have, it may be more appropriate to think of remembering as a kind of cognitive behavior ….” (256)

Now Manier articulates his chief claim, “remembering can be viewed as an act of communication.”  (257)  He aligns his claim with Gilbert Ryles’ earlier argument against the “tendency to view silent thoughts as somehow real thoughts, as opposed to the thoughts that we speak aloud.  By analogy, Manier suggests that not all remembering is silent remembering, and he offers the following definition:  “Remembering is a present communication of something past.”  He goes on to give various examples, all of which constitute acts of remembering:  solitary, private remembering; remembering in conversation with someone; and remembering through writing.  Each example was a remembrance of the same event, but each situation shifted what was remembered.  (258)

While some may argue that behind acts of remembrance there lays one’s “real memory” physically located in the brain, Manier suggests that the “neurophysiological configuration” is “only the material basis for real acts of remembering.”  Furthermore,

“This view of acts of remembering accords with the concept of distributed cognition, according to which we humans use the cultural tools that are available to us.  As Dennet, announced … we no more think with our brains than we hammer with our bare hands. And one of the important cultural tools we use in our thinking – and especially in our remembering – is group conversation.” (260)

Manier then provides a transcription of a family group conversation to illustrate how memories shift through the give and take of conversation, memories that presumably would not have been altered otherwise.  He concludes,

“Remembering is not only shaped by internal, cognitive processes.  When we reconstruct past events in the context of conversation, the conversational roles that are adopted by group members will affect what is remembered.  Moreover, conversational remembering can be shaped by other influences.  These influences on remembering – as well as a host of other sociocultural facts – tend to be missed by an approach that limits itself to what goes on in the brain.”

Manier, David.  “Is Memory in the Brain? Remembering as Social Behavior” in Mind, Culture, and Activity, 11(4), 251-266.  2004.

Vast Palaces of Memory and the Wonder of Being Human

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

I come to fields and vast palaces of memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images of all kinds of objects brought in by sense-perception.  Hidden there is whatever we think about …. When I am in this storehouse, I ask that it produce what I want to recall, and immediately certain things come out; some things require a longer search, and have to be drawn out as it were from more recondite receptacles.  Some memories pour out to crowd the  mind and, when one is searching and asking for something quite different, leap forward into the center as if saying ‘Surely we are what you want?’ With the hand of my heart I chase them away from the face of my memory until what I want is freed of mist and emerges from its hiding places.  Other memories come before me on demand with ease and without any confusion in their order.

This passage is from Augustine’s chapter on Memory in his Confessions, and to some degree it resonates with our own experience of memory.  I suspect, however, that at the same time it may seem as if Augustine’s memory is more expansive than our own and that he has achieved a greater organization and mastery over his memory than what we would claim over ours.  And this is probably about right.

In The Art of Memory,Francis Yates wonders,

It is as a Christian that Augustine seeks God in the memory, and as a Christian Platonist, believing that knowledge of the divine is innate in memory.  But is not this vast and echoing memory in which the search is conducted that of a trained orator?

The “vast palace of memory” that Augustine describes suggests to Yates a memory that has been trained in the artificial memory tradition associated with classical rhetoric.  It is a fascinating tradition that Yates elegantly chronicles in her classic work and which Joshua Foer has revisited in his recently published, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. You can get an article length taste of Foer’s book in his piece for NY Times Magazine, “Secrets of  a Mind Gamer.”

This may become a well-worn topic around here in coming days, weeks, months, so I’ll apologize in advance for that.  At this point, though, I’ll only throw out the observation that in his rather dense, Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur considers various abuses of memory including artificial memory.

Coming back to Augustine, he goes on to write of memory,

It is a vast and infinite profundity.  Who has plumbed its bottom?  This power is that of my mind and is a natural endowment, but I myself cannot grasp the totality of what I am.  Is the mind, then, too restricted to compass itself, so that we have to ask what is that element of itself which it fails to grasp?  Surely that cannot be external to itself; it must be within the mind.  How then can it fail to grasp it?  This question moves me to great astonishment.  Amazement grips me.

This is a remarkable observation of the inability of memory, and the mind more generally, to encompass itself.  His wonder at the complexity and opaqueness of the “inward man” is one of Augustine’s most significant and enduring contributions to the Western tradition. The recognition that there is an element of itself that the mind fails to grasp, that “the mind knows things it does not know it knows,” predates the Freudian unconscious by a good 1500 years.

Finally, this astonishment and amazement also lead Augustine to question why we are not all equally amazed by the mystery and wonder that is a human being:

People are moved to wonder by mountain peaks, by vast waves of the sea, by broad waterfall on rivers, by the all-embracing extent of the ocean, by the revolutions of the stars.  But in themselves they are uninterested.

A good reminder that the most amazing thing about the universe that contains such wonders may be the creature who is able to contemplate them, be moved by them, and hold them in memory.

‘Haunted Places Are the Only Ones People Can Live In’

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Places have a way of absorbing and bearing memories that they then relinquish, bidden or unbidden. In three artful paragraphs Michel de Certeau enchants us with a series of poignant reflections on place and memory built upon a string of evocative metaphors. The whole discussion appears near the conclusion of a chapter titled “Walking the City” in The Practice of Everyday Life.

The context of walking and moving about spaces leads de Certeau to describe memory as “a sort of anti-museum:  it is not localizable.”  Where museums gather pieces and artifacts in one location, our memories have dispersed themselves across the landscape, they colonize.  Here a memory by that tree, there a  memory in that house.  De Certeau is principally developing this notion of a veiled remembered reality that lies beneath the visible experience of space.

And not only spaces, for as he puts it, “objects and words also have hollow places in which a past sleeps,” suggesting then this metaphor:  “A memory is only a Prince Charming who stays just long enough to awaken the Sleeping Beauties of our wordless stories.”  But it is principally with places that de Certeau is concerned, places made up of “moving layers.”  We point here and there and say things like, “Here, there used to be a bakery” or “That’s where old lady Dupuis used to live.”  We point to a present place only to evoke an absent reality:  “the places people live in are like the presences of diverse absences.”  Only part of what we point to is there physically; but we’re pointing as well to the invisible, to what can’t be seen by anyone else, which begins to hint at a certain loneliness that attends to memory.  Reality is already augmented.  It is freighted with our memories, it comes alive with distant echoes and fleeting images.

The loneliness of memory is also captured in a comment incorporated by de Certeau:  “‘Memories tie us to that place …. It is personal, not interesting to anyone else …'”  It is like sharing a dream with another person: its vividness and pain or joy can never be recaptured and represented so as to affect another in the same way you were affected.  It is not interesting to anyone else, and so it is with our memories.  Others will listen, they will look were you point, but they cannot see what you see.

And perhaps it is this invisibility of memory stored away in places that inevitably suggests to de Certeau the haunting metaphor:  “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can ‘invoke’ or not.”  But, he goes on to say, “Haunted places are the only ones people can live in.”

At this juncture de Certeau notes that this unseen, absent reality laid over our perception of present places “inverts the schema of the Panopticon.  This is a curious aside given that de Certeau is in conversation with Foucault, for whom the Panopticon becomes a metaphor for disciplinary society in Western cultures.  Rather than being seen by an unseen presence, we see an unseen absence.  Is this also then a form of resistance, a way to disperse the power of disciplinary society?  Do we invoke our memories inhabiting our spaces in order to inoculate ourselves against the pressures of conformity?  Our memories, especially perhaps childhood memories, are so particular that they reinforce the uniqueness of our experience.

Finally, de Certeau points to the embodied status of these memories:  “Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read … symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body. ‘I feel good here’:  the well-being under-expressed in the language it appears in like a fleeting glimmer is a spatial practice.”  We not only see our memories, we feel them.  Of course, the proper vocalization of this feeling is not always, “I feel good here.”

‘The Connecting Is the Thinking’: Memory and Creativity

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 5 Comments

Last summer Nicholas Carr published The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, a book length extension of his 2008 Atlantic essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The book received a good bit of attention and was in the ensuing weeks reviewed seemingly everywhere.  We noted a few of those reviews here and here.  Coming in fashionably late to the show, Jim Holt has written a lenghty review in the London Review of Books titled, “Smarter, Happier, More Productive.” Perhaps a little bit of distance is helpful.

Holt’s review ends up being one of the better summaries of Carr’s book that I have read, if only because Holt details more of the argument than most reviews.  In the end, he tends to think that Carr is stretching the evidence and overstating his case on two fronts, intelligence and happiness. However, he is less sanguine on one last point, creativity, and that in relation to memory.

Holt cites two well known writers who are optimistic about off-loading their memories to the Internet:

This raises a prospect that has exhilarated many of the digerati. Perhaps the internet can serve not merely as a supplement to memory, but as a replacement for it. ‘I’ve almost given up making an effort to remember anything,’ says Clive Thompson, a writer for Wired, ‘because I can instantly retrieve the information online.’ David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, writes: ‘I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realised the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants – silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.’

But as Holt notes, “The idea that machine might supplant Mnemosyne is abhorrent to Carr, and he devotes the most interesting portions of his book to combatting it.”  Why not outsource our memory?

Carr responds with a bit of rhetorical bluster. ‘The web’s connections are not our connections,’ he writes. ‘When we outsource our memory to a machine, we also outsource a very important part of our intellect and even our identity.’ Then he quotes William James, who in 1892 in a lecture on memory declared: ‘The connecting is the thinking.’ And James was onto something: the role of memory in thinking, and in creativity.

Holt goes on to supplement Carr’s discussion with an anecdote about the polymathic French mathematician, Henri Poincare.  What makes Poincare’s case instructive is that “his breakthroughs tended to come in moments of sudden illumination.”

Poincaré had been struggling for some weeks with a deep issue in pure mathematics when he was obliged, in his capacity as mine inspector, to make a geological excursion. ‘The changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work,’ he recounted.

“Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. I did not verify the idea; I should not have had time, as, upon taking my seat in the omnibus, I went on with a conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty. On my return to Caen, for conscience’s sake, I verified the result at my leisure.”

How to account for the full-blown epiphany that struck Poincaré in the instant that his foot touched the step of the bus? His own conjecture was that it had arisen from unconscious activity in his memory.

This leads Holt to suggest, following Poincare, that bursts of creativity and insight arise from the unconscious work of memory, and that this is the difference between internalized and externalized memory.  We may be able to retrieve at will whatever random piece of information we are looking for with a quick Google search, but that seems not to approach the power of the human mind to creatively and imaginatively work with its stores of memory.  Holt concludes:

It is the connection between memory and creativity, perhaps, which should make us most wary of the web. ‘As our use of the web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory, we’re forced to rely more and more on the net’s capacious and easily searchable artificial memory,’ Carr observes. But conscious manipulation of externally stored information is not enough to yield the deepest of creative breakthroughs: this is what the example of Poincaré suggests. Human memory, unlike machine memory, is dynamic. Through some process we only crudely understand – Poincaré himself saw it as the collision and locking together of ideas into stable combinations – novel patterns are unconsciously detected, novel analogies discovered. And this is the process that Google, by seducing us into using it as a memory prosthesis, threatens to subvert.

And this leads me to make one additional observation.  As I’ve mentioned before, it is customary in these discussions to refer back to Plato’s Phaedrus in which Socrates warns that writing, as an externalization of memory, will actually lead to the diminishing of human memory.  Holt mentions the passage in his review and Carr mentions it as well.  When the dialog is trotted out it is usually as a “straw man”  to prove that concerns about new technologies are silly and misguided.  But it seems to me that there is a silent equivocation that slips into these discussions: the notion of memory we tend to assume is our current understanding of memory that is increasingly defined by the comparison to computer memory which is essentially storage.

It seems to me that having first identified a computer’s storage  capacity as “memory,” a metaphor dependent upon the human capacity we call “memory,” we have now come to reverse the direction of the metaphor by understanding human “memory” in light of a computer’s storage capacity.  In other words we’ve reduced our understanding of memory to mere storage of information.  And now we read all discussions of memory in light of this reductive understanding.

Given this reductive view of memory, it seems silly for Socrates (and by extension, Plato) to worry about the externalization of memory, whether it is stored inside or outside, what difference does it make as long as we can access it?  And, in fact, access becomes the problem that attends all externalized memories from the book to the Internet.  But what if memory is not mere storage?  Few seem to extend their analysis to account for the metaphysical role memory of the world of forms played within Plato’s account of the human person and true knowledge.  We may not take Plato’s metaphysics at face value, but we can’t really understand his concerns about memory without understanding their lager intellectual context.

Holt helps us to see the impoverishment of our understanding of memory from another, less metaphysically freighted, perspective.  The Poincare anecdote in its own way also challenges the reduction of memory to mere storage, linking it with the complex workings of creativity and insight.  Others have similarly linked memory to identity, wisdom, and even, in St. Augustine’s account, our understanding of the divine.  Whether one veers into the theological or not, the reduction of memory to mere storage of data should strike us as an inadequate account of memory and its significance and cause us to rethink our readiness to offload it.

Update:  Post from Carr on the issue of memory including a relevant excerpt from The Shallows, “Killing Mnemosyne.”

Memory, Writing, Alienation

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

Some more reflections in interaction with Walter Ong’s work, this time an essay originally published in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition (Oxford, 1986) titled “Writing Is a Technology that Restructures Thought.”

Literacy does its work of transformation by restructuring the cultural and personal economy of memory and installing a self-alienation at the heart of literate identity.

The world of orality is fundamentally evanescent.  Spoken words themselves have begun to pass out of existence before they are fully formed by the speaker’s mouth.  The spoken word is in this way a telling image of oral society; each generation is always already fading into the unremembered past as it inhabits the present.  The accumulated knowledge and wisdom of an oral society exists only as it is remembered by individuals so that each member of the group shares in the cognitive burden of sustaining and transmitting the group’s cultural inheritance.  This work of memory preoccupies the cultural life of oral societies and configures the individual as a node within a network of cultural remembering.  Oral society is thus fundamentally conservative and collective.

Writing disrupts and rearranges this situation by offloading, to a significant degree, the cognitive burden of remembering from the living memory of each individual to the written word.  This work of cognitive offloading generates recurring debates, as we first encounter in Plato, about the proper modes of memory.  These debates reflect the (often unrecognized) force with which new mnenotechnologies impact a society.  As Ong notes, the frozen, lifeless written word is in another, paradoxical sense alive.  It achieves permanence and is “resurrected into limitless living contexts by a limitless number of living readers.”  Furthermore, the “lifeless” written word, by both resourcing and reconfiguring the economy of memory, also injects a new dynamism into literate cultures. It does so by relieving the conservative pressure of cultural remembrance thus encouraging what we might call intellectual entrepreneurship.

This new dynamism is, however, accompanied by various forms of alienation.  Crucially, writing dislodges a portion of one’s memory, a critical aspect of identity, from oneself.  To the extent that identity is constituted by memory, identity must be, to some extent, divided in literate societies.  Ong details the alienating work of writing when he lists fourteen instances of separation effected by writing:

1. Writing separates the known from the knower

2. Writing separates interpretation from data

3. Writing distances the word from sound

4. Writing distances the source of communication from the recipient

5. Writing distances the word from the context of lived experience

6. Due to 5., writing enforces verbal precision unavailable in oral cultures.  (In other words, without the context provided by face-to-face communication, words have to work harder in writing to make meaning clear.  This is why we sometimes feel compelled to use smiley faces in electronic communication — to communicate tone.)

7. Writing separates past from present.

8. Writing separates administration — civil, religious, commercial — from other types of social activities.

9. Writing makes it possible to separate logic from rhetoric.

10. Writing separates academic learning from wisdom.

11. Writing can divide society by splitting verbal communication between a “high” spoken language controlled by writing and a “low” controlled by speech.  (For example, “proper” English is really “written” English, while devalued vulgar and colloquial speech patterns are “spoken” English.)

12. Writing differentiates grapholects, dialect taken over by writing and made into a national language, from other local dialects

13. Writing divides more evidently and effectively as its form becomes more abstract, that is more removed from the world of sound to the world of sight.

14. Writing separates being from time.

By making thought (and so also the self) present to itself, literacy introduces an irreparable fissure into identity and consciousness, but one that is, in Ong’s account, ultimately “humanizing.”  Last word from Ong:

To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it . . . By distancing thought, alienating it from its original habitat in sounded words, writing raises consciousness.  Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for fuller human life.  To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance.  This writing provides for, thereby accelerating the evolution of consciousness as nothing else before it does.