Past: First Memories

My first memories come from that hazy time when I was two or three years old.  I can date those memories that much only because they happened in an apartment where I lived for the first three or so years of my life, before moving into the "foundation" that became the basement of the house I grew up in after that.

But why do I have these particular memories?  Why don't I have more?  And are they actually my memories?

Douwe Draaisma addresses these questions in his book Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older.  He does so (here and throughout this book) by recounting and synthesizing various studies done over the years, as well as comparing observations and conclusions with literary and historical sources.  All of this is fascinating reading, but here I'm mostly sticking to the answers.

What do we remember from these early years? It may depend on how old you are when asked what you remember: retention seems to decline over the years.  But the average age of the first memory is about three years old.

Why that memory?  It tends to be associated with strong emotions.  One study found is it usually fear, while another found that feelings of elation or surprise were more frequent.  My first memory combines elation and surprise, which must include a little fear: it is of arriving on the landing outside our third (and top) floor apartment, on my father's shoulders.

Like mine, it is usually a visual memory.  But that's a little deceptive.  For it seems that the reason we don't have more memories from these early years--where our minds are very active, and we're experiencing lots of things for the first time--has to do with language.

Researchers believe all memories still exist somewhere in the brain.  The problem is accessing them.  In order to make access possible, we sort memories into categories.  Though we don't necessarily do this consciously, it requires a level of language, and an ability to deal with abstractions (like categories) that we don't have in our earliest years.  In fact, memories may not form without the ability to describe them in language (even if that's the daily babble of toddlers in their beds or cribs, talking to themselves in their own terms about what they've recently experienced.)

But depositing memories into categories also works against remembering specific events if they are repeated.  The first trip to the zoo becomes conflated with the second and third trips until all specific memories of the zoo recede and seemingly disappear.

Another reason that we seldom have memories from the first year may be that we lack the consciousness of self--the "I"--to form autobiographical memories.  Forming the "I" implies the "you," and so first memories may also include recognition of a parent as someone not "I."  (Dr. D. notes first memories by writers Nabokov and Edith Wharton that supports this idea.)

But how real are those first memories?  Some first memories can be checked with others who were there, and it sometimes turns out they remember it differently.  And sometimes there is even objective evidence that shows it isn't quite true to what happened--it happened here when you remember it as there.

Or it didn't happen at all.  Maybe my father didn't ride me on his shoulders that time (it wasn't something he did a lot.) But it's still a memory.

This is where the relationship of memories and the language to describe them becomes more complicated and perhaps troublesome.  One person remembered an attempt to kidnap him out of his stroller, when it turned out that it had never happened--it was a story he was told, a lie by his nanny that she later admitted.  Yet he had pictured it happening.

A lot of memories--including first memories, and maybe especially those--turn out to be stories we've heard, perhaps combined with some incoherent impressions we seem to remember.  That may be what happened with another of my early "memories" that might even be the first: I remember playing quietly under the bed.

I focused on this memory--re-remembered it--when I heard the story, told by both my mother and her sister, though each told it to me separately, many years apart--of the afternoon when I was a baby that I disappeared from that same apartment.

They had been talking when one of them noticed they could no longer hear me and I wasn't in sight.  They called me and searched the apartment without finding me. My aunt noticed that a window was slightly open.  My mother told me she thought about Lindbergh baby kidnapping (though that had happened more than a decade earlier, it evidently made an impression.)  They were both frightened.

One of them soon found me asleep under the bed.  I had crawled under there, played awhile and fallen asleep.  Was my memory from that day? Or was it a perspective I dimly recall from several adventures under the bed?  I think the second alternative is more likely.

We may feel pieces of memories that get located by repetition (I seem to remember how my mother sang to me when I was a baby, but I also saw her sing to my younger sisters) or by familiar objects etc., as well as by stories.

For example, I don't remember the actual moment this photo was taken of me at 2 yrs. old, on the phone at my grandparents' house. But I remember the phone and the phone table and where they were because they were there for years.  And I seem to remember that sweater with the ducks, but do I?  I don't recall the colors (I want to guess blue-gray with yellow ducks.)  Maybe I just remember photographs like this one.

I wonder if these vague impressions plus stories we hear later account for both the richness and mystery of our childhood memories.  I see my curly blond locks that I don't recall, but I remember my mother's story of crying when they were cut off at the barber shop.

Of course once we tell the story of the first memory (or formulate it in our heads), what we basically remember is our story, as the actual memory recedes. That may account for the odd fact that we often see ourselves in the memory (as one researcher found), rather than seeing the scene from our point of view at the time. The story of the memory is what gets fixed in our heads.  It's called autobiographical memory, and autobiographies are stories, after all.

The Two Memories

Um, on this memory series I forgot something, that comes before "first memories."  It's the two memories in psychology.

As Draaisma tells the tale, in 1879 or so a 57 year old man of science called Francis Galton took a walk through the Pall Mall in London, an area of fashionable shops and men's clubs.  He noticed that whatever he observed there seemed to inspire specific memories from his past.  He began to note what these associations were.

Eventually he designed and carried out an experiment: Galton wrote down a number of common words ("carriage," "abbey," "afternoon") and then read them one by one, noting what memories came from them.  He did this systematically, a number of times.  In the end he had a list of associated memories--many of them repeated--and noted from which parts of his life they came, and where.  (A disproportionate number were from childhood, and most from his native England, although Galton was well traveled.)

At about the same time in Germany, Hermann Ebbinghaus was an unemployed philosopher looking for a thesis topic.  He designed an experiment: he prepared a set of randomly assembled syllables by inserting a vowel between two consonants (bif, nol) and wrote each down on a card.  He then read the cards quickly until he had memorized the contents.  Then he waited--for 20 minutes, a day, a month--and repeated the process, noting how much time it took for him to re-learn the cards.

His major conclusion was that: the longer the interval between the learning and re-learning sessions, the longer it took to relearn the material.  In other words, he discovered cramming.

Both experiments were breakthroughs in the study of memory, but after awhile, only one of them was remembered.  And for the next century, the Ebbinghaus experiment was the basis for the approach to memory taken by psychology.  Galton's was forgotten.

The reasons have to do with what happened to psychology.  Psychologists, a philosophy teacher once told me, have a bad case of physics envy.  In order to be a science like physics, psychology became obsessed with measurement and laboratory experiment.

The Ebbinghaus experiment didn't depend on somebody's memory of their past.  It could be replicated by anyone, and it was, for many years.  Special instruments were invented for it, and eventually it involved two technicians working the apparatus and a test subject.

It probably also helped that Ebbinghaus had a catchy and, well, memorable name for the result of his memory statistics.  When plotted on a graph they became "the forgetting curve."  Who could forget that?

The fate of these two experiments was the fate of psychology, which became the study of stuff that can be measured under laboratory conditions.  Besides making the study of the human mind mind-bogglingly boring, it was deceptively limited.  It fell in love with its toys, but as Dr. D. points out, "any craftsman will tell you that your tools largely determine the use to which you can put them." (p.9.)  It also created the temptation of making claims larger than your evidence warranted, and psychology still loses out to that temptation a lot of the time.

But the major distinction between the experiments is that Ebbinghaus' was essentially about the mechanics of memory, useful for research into learning.  But Galton's was about actual memories--aspects of the past that may be many years old, and weren't deliberately "memorized," but re-surface in some form.

These are now called "autobiographical memories," and it took until the 1970s before this subject--much more fascinating and potentially revealing for people not in the position of laboratory mice--got some attention in more or less mainstream psychology.

The content of memories themselves was of interest to psychoanalysis and the psychology of Freud and Jung, all of which contemporary psychology would like to forget.  But the study of autobiographical memory itself is about what we remember, why we remember it (and what we forget) and when and how we remember it.

In discussing neuroscience and Buddhist meditation here recently, I noted this tension between the objective and the subjective: westerners have studied the mind objectively (most recently, with brain scans) while Buddhists have centuries of carefully observing the workings of their minds and creating systems to explain their findings.  So the West considered the Buddhists quaint, primitive and unscientific.  That's changed among some--but not for everyone.

Something of the same conflict has blocked the study of autobiographical memory. There is a necessary subjective element (one's memories are unique), and yet that's a source of their fascination.  Do you remember what I remember?  Why do I remember this and forget that?  And so on.

Autobiographical memory is the subject of Draaisma's books.  And so next time (really) we begin with first memories in childhood.

But before that, two related notes not in the Draaisma book.  The first recorded experiment in autobiographical memory was hardly Sir Francis Galton's only claim to fame.  He was basically a statistician but applied his skills to many areas.  He was the model of the Victorian polymath--an inventor and tropical explorer, a geographer as well as contributing to statistics (he developed 'regression to the mean'), psychology, sociology and anthropology. Among his claims to fame were the first weather map and other contributions to what became the science of meteorology.

He was also Charles Darwin's half-cousin who came up with the phrase "nature versus nurture."  And unfortunately he was an early advocate of eugenics, another word he coined.

As for the Pall Mall, it also involves the coining of words.  In Galton's time it had been a urban space for more than a century, but in the 17th century it was an open green where a popular game was played.  The game was also called pall mall, described as a combination of golf (the fairways) and croquet, as it was played with a mall-et.

The mallet was also called a 'maul,' which remains the name of a kind of hammer, a meaning that predates the verb sense of tearing up as well as pounding.

The word 'mall' as in shopping mall comes from the Pall Mall and other green open spaces, often shaded by trees.  So the actual mall in a shopping mall is not the shops but the open area they surround, where people walk.

The title of my book The Malling of America (still available from your online bookseller, like this one) suggests a pun: the mauling of America.  Both meanings of mall and maul come from the same place and the same game of pall mall.  I claim bonus points.

Memory Series, an Introduction

Douwe Draaisma is a professor of the history of psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He has written a number of books on memory, four of which have been translated into English. The two I've read have been fascinating, and I'm looking forward to reading a third.

I'm going to write about these books here, probably chapter by chapter. But first I want to say a little about why I surmise I like these books, and more importantly, trust what he says.

They are well-written, and that is usually the first impression that builds confidence. I mistrust quite a lot of contemporary psychology and psychological writing, though not only because most of it is badly written. It tends to over-promise and overreach its evidence. I don't think Draaisma does, but then he is not exactly a psychologist. He has a degree in psychology and philosophy. So there is more depth, more distance from clinical experiments, more perspective and evaluation.

Further, he specializes in the history of psychology, which counters the present-centeredness of so much psychology, in which each new study is announced as if it is the first ever, or because it is the latest, it's the definitive last word. Indeed, his books refer back to earlier psychologists and studies, even to the 19th century. He is able to evaluate methodologies that are no longer fashionable but valuable nevertheless.

He also applies relevant insights from literature and the other arts. So much contemporary psychology (like so much economics) either breathlessly announces findings that have been dealt with in literature for centuries, or findings that literature has long ago disproven.  They act as if literature didn't exist, or maybe just shouldn't.

He isn't just making cute literary references. As we'll see, he notes that every treatise on the psychology of smell refers to Proust and the famous pastries dipped in tea that set off a flood of memories in his narrator. He also notes that they usually get it wrong, because they haven't actually read it. He does read it, and finds it much richer and revelatory.

All of this is probably because he is European, and specifically not American. A broader cultural education seems more natural there. So much in American academia and associated professions is narrowly specialized, and arrogant about it as well.

Memory is a subject of general interest, but of course, of more specific and greater interest as we get older. Memory changes--often childhood memories become more vivid, while other memories seem to slip away. Access to certain kinds of memories is harder (like names) and of course there are the fears of losing the function of memory.

James Hillman (a psychologist I respect, perhaps above all others since Jung) used to suggest that perhaps we have our experiences in order to have things to remember. (That's psyche as soul right there.)

 It does seem to me that the active process of remembering adds richness and maybe even meaning (or meanings) to the experiences. There's such an emphasis on seniors having new experiences, traveling the world to fulfill their bucket lists, as well taking up new interest and hobbies to keep their brains working. Maybe. Active remembering uses the brain, too, as well as the heart and soul. Finding depth in past experiences seems at least as worthy as trying to have often superficial new ones, and it's a lot less expensive and exhausting.

Anyway, notes begin here soon on Draaisma's Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older:How Memory Shapes Our Past. First up: first memories.