Adventures in Memory. Hilde østby

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Adventures in Memory - Hilde østby

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divers, however, are satisfied with their dive. They proudly hand us their notes.

      When we examine the results, it occurs to us that we have managed to re-create the experiment from the 1970s almost down to the smallest detail. The divers who were supposed to learn and remember underwater have remembered on average 8.4 words in the deep, almost matching their achievement on land earlier that day. They pulled this off despite factors like increased pressure underwater, gas mixtures and masks and wet suits and the sound of breathing, clouds of bubbles swirling toward the surface, flashes from flashlights sweeping the bottom of the sea, blurry vision, uncomfortable wet gloves, and difficulties holding pens and waterproof notepads. In the famous experiment from the 1970s, it was clear that the context had an obvious effect—the divers had remembered the list of words much better in the water when they had also memorized it in the water. Actually, they remembered it equally as well as the list they memorized and recalled on land.

      When the divers were in the water, they recognized where they had been before, and this memory triggered the memories of what they had learned, so that the words popped up almost by themselves, like images on a screen.

      Caterina Cattaneo led the divers in our experiment. She has almost thirty years of underwater experience and has dived at a depth of two hundred feet. This was a simple dive for her. The water temperature was comfortable, she claims, as she swings herself up on the pier and wrestles herself out of her diving mask. The February rain sprinkles the fjord behind her.

      “I’ve never seen seahorses here,” she tells us. “I’ve seen two on Madeira. They were tiny and very cute. They bobbed up and down, their tails wound around a sea plant. But the current was strong, and suddenly I was far away from them. I only caught a glimpse of them.”

      — 3 —

       THE SKYDIVER’S FINAL THOUGHTS

       Or: What are personal memories?

      All the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

       MARCEL PROUST, In Search of Lost Time

      FOR MANY YEARS, our sister was an active skydiver. Every weekend she would set out for the skydiving field at Jarlsberg or travel to the United States or Poland to jump in large formations with hundreds of other skydivers.

      Watching Tonje skydive was often a terrible experience for us. During the minutes we observed her falling from the sky we imagined her funeral, complete with flowers and the music we’d choose to play as the coffin was carried out. Even though there are few accidents in skydiving, the few that happen are gruesome. You don’t plummet toward the ground from fifteen thousand feet without it being dangerous. Every time she was about to land, we drew the deep sigh of relief that comes after holding your breath for too long. The cheeriness of the large, brightly colored parachute belies the grim reality of the accident it can cause if it doesn’t unfold or if a sudden gust of wind grabs hold of the lightweight material. Tonje’s parachute was reddish orange, like a sunset.

      The plane drones so loudly on its way to jumping height that you have to shout to be heard. This Saturday, a day in July 2006, Tonje walks toward the open door of the little silver plane, a Soviet turbine machine, Antonov An-28. She positions herself on the edge. She believes all will go well; she can’t possibly think anything else or she wouldn’t throw herself out of a plane thousands of feet above the ground. Normally, it does end well; that’s the thought you cling to.

      Now we’ll leave her standing there, watching the forested, billowing landscape from above, while thick clouds cast everything below her in a grayish light. The temperature hovers around sixty degrees Fahrenheit, and the summer has not yet fully set in. We’ll let her stand there for a while longer, her slender body in her red skydiving suit, her dark brown eyes, her broad smile. Just a few minutes more.

      What memories would you linger on if you had only a few moments left to live and were looking back on your life? What memories are like shiny pearls in an incredibly exclusive—exclusive, because you are the only one in the world with your memories—pearl necklace of important events? What flutters across the hippocampus as you say goodbye to life? How many monarch butterflies light on your hand?

      Or what if you were allowed to pick only one, as in the Japanese film After Life, where the deceased have to choose a single memory to relive, over and over, in heaven—the happiest moment of their lives. What would yours be?

      Perhaps this is why people keep diaries. They don’t want the magical moments to slip away.

      When blogger Ida Jackson reads through what she has written, she remembers more of those days than before, she claims. She sees and smells and hears what happened. She discovers details she otherwise would not have remembered. She is, in a sense, a collector of memories, a memory hoarder.

      “It feels as if, by doing this, I lose fewer memories. There is something existential about it. I think often about death, so I want to remember everything,” Ida says. From 2007 to 2010 she wrote the award-winning blog Revolusjonært roteloft under the pen name Virrvarr; it was Norway’s third-most-visited blog. She saw it as an extension of her diary. She has kept a diary every single day since Christmas of 1999.

      “Today, I got this notebook in the mail, and since my life is upside down right now, I might as well leave behind something in writing,” is how twelve-year-old Ida Jackson began her first diary. Since then, she has written herself into the long tradition of diarists and autobiographers, philosophers, poets, and authors—from St. Augustine to Karl Ove Knausgård—who have transformed their lives into books, published or not. It seems as if written language is closely connected to our wish to remember. The first Babylonian writings from over four thousand years ago were memos, trade notes, and astronomical calculations etched into ceramic plates meant to be kept for posterity.

      By the year 200 CE, emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius had written what is considered the earliest well-known diary, Meditations. But long before that, Japanese courtesans and other Asian travelers were in the habit of recording their experiences in writing.

      So what do we remember of our lives when we write things down, or when we don’t?

      Psychology professor Dorthe Berntsen heads the Center on Autobiographical Memory Research in Aarhus, Denmark, and exclusively researches personal memories. “We remember best the period from our early teenage years into our twenties,” she tells us.

      It seems that not all memories are created equal. Some are given priority. Our memories peak during our formative years (teens and early twenties), a phenomenon called the reminiscence bump. During this period of our lives, many of our experiences are new and startling; there are so many firsts, and they stay with us for the rest of our lives. Middle-aged people who are asked to recall their fondest memories typically mention something from this period of their lives, Berntsen’s research reveals. This area of psychological research is amazingly free from controversy.

      But does it help if you keep a diary the way Ida Jackson does?

      “Yes, it does help, but it might mean that we replace our memories with written stories,” Berntsen says.

      What else helps make memories last? It turns out that several factors determine whether an experience sticks with us as a memory.

      One

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