provoke sharp emotional highs stay with us particularly well. Whizzing toward the earth from fifteen thousand feet in the air, for example. Or a first kiss, after anticipation has been building for weeks. Another important ingredient for a lasting memory is how much it deviates from what we expect—how distinct or remarkable it is.
Many memories are similar to a number of other experiences we have had. It’s hard to tell them apart—thinking of them doesn’t remind us of one specific incident. Like all the times we take the bus to work. We have a cumulative memory of these experiences under the heading “bus trip to work.” Or all the times at the beach that have merged into “sunbathing at the beach”: that feeling of a summer breeze grazing our face while we squint at the sun. This is not a single event; it has happened many times. Every time, we have soaked up the summer warmth and wished that the moment would last forever. Caterina Cattaneo added to her memories of diving when she dived for the seventy-third time: that feeling of sinking into the dark water, the bubbles rising toward the light surface, the maneuvers with the tank she had done seventy-two times before. All of this became part of the general memory of “diving,” “diving in the Oslo Fjord,” or “winter diving.” But more exciting events remain as independent, unique memories. Like the time Caterina saw a rare marine slug for the first time, or the time she saw a seahorse in Madeira.
“The brain works with memory on two conflicting principles,” psychologist Anders Fjell, from the University of Oslo, points out. “Part of the brain’s work is to try to categorize and assimilate as many of our experiences as possible in order to save space, while the hippocampus fights to retain unique memories.”
The hippocampus is finely tuned to notice and pick up events and experiences that stand out for being different. Their uniqueness is what creates a memory trace, a shiny pearl in the necklace.
As with all other information we encounter, the more we ruminate over and talk about a unique incident, the more ingrained it becomes in memory. All the little tales about our lives that we share around the lunch table, at parties, or on Facebook—small talk—make memories stick. The paradox is that those memories then become stories in our minds more than living experiences.
Dorthe Berntsen’s research center is situated in Aarhus, Denmark. There, on top of the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, you can enjoy a view unlike anything else in the world. On the roof, artist Olafur Eliasson has installed a circular tunnel of glass in every color of the rainbow. In every direction you look, you can see spires and low-lying stone domes that date back to the 1600s in various shades of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and purple, depending on where on the roof you stand. Just as the city of Aarhus is rendered here in multiple beautiful shades, our memories are also seen through a filter: our emotions.
The fate of a memory is mostly determined by how much it means to us. Personal memories are important to us. They are tied to our hopes, our values, and our identities. Memories that contribute meaningfully to our personal autobiography prevail in our minds.
Personality and identity can also be maintained without memories. Even Henry Molaison, the man without a memory, obviously had a sense of a self. He knew who he was, even though he didn’t remember the full story of how he had become that person. Who we are is partially determined by factors like temperament and habits, and how we face the world and all its challenges. But our core memories in our own personal autobiography define us. Even if we don’t write six volumes about ourselves, as Karl Ove Knausgård has done, all of us walk around with an autobiography stored in our memory. It isn’t just a random stream of events we have experienced; our memories are structured and organized in accordance with our own life story. We are all authors.
“A life script is what we call it in memory research,” Dorthe Berntsen says. “It’s a script for how life should unfold; it structures our experiences.”
If you ask children what they want to be when they grow up, they might answer police officer, firefighter, or doctor, or maybe author, psychologist, or skydiver. In other words, they know that adult life includes a job, perhaps even marriage and children. Before we even start school, we understand that life has direction. Our life script contains expectations of how life normally looks, with milestones such as starting school, getting a driver’s license, graduating, starting a career, getting married, becoming a parent, and retiring. Gradually, as life progresses and we adjust our expectations, our life script also helps us access our memories by providing chapters we can browse in our book of life: “School,” “Marriage,” “Work,” “Skydiving.” When we activate part of the life script, we activate all the related concepts in the network it’s part of, just like marine slugs, air bubbles, flippers, and seaweed triggered undersea memories for the divers in our diving experiment. When something reminds us of our student days, we mentally travel back to the student cafeteria, making it possible for us to remember many experiences from that time, especially emotionally loaded memories—ones that stood out, that we thought about often and discussed.
“We can’t walk around remembering everything we’ve done in life all the time,” Dorthe Berntsen emphasizes. The life script gives us an overview of life. It portions out our memories. Should we search in the wrong chapter, we won’t find the memories we are looking for. Parts of our life history are therefore not always available to us right in the moment. When we enter a new chapter of life, it takes more effort to retrieve memories from an earlier chapter.
Stepping outside our life script comes at a cost, something astronaut Buzz Aldrin knows well. He was the second human in history to set foot on the Moon, an event that turned his life upside down. His personal memories are, to say the least, remarkable. There are not many who can look up at the Moon and reminisce! In one of his memoirs, he describes his lunar memories in vivid detail:
“In every direction I could see detailed characteristics of the gray ash-colored lunar scenery, pocked with thousands of little craters and with every variety and shape of rock. I saw the horizon curving a mile and a half away. With no atmosphere, there was no haze on the moon. It was crystal clear.”
As Buzz Aldrin is about to set foot on the Moon, he takes his time to absorb some of the impressions the beautiful view offers: “I slowly allowed my eyes to drink in the unusual majesty of the moon. In its starkness and monochromatic hues, it was indeed beautiful. But it was a different sort of beauty than I had ever before seen. Magnificent, I thought, then said, ‘Magnificent desolation.’” This description became the title of one of his books about the Moon landing, Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon, from 2009.
When Aldrin began training as an astronaut, he had his sights set on the Moon, and everything he did became part of a new life script that included landing on the Moon. The life script contained earlier chapters from his time serving in the air force and studying to become an engineer, the natural introductory chapters to his personal saga. But representing NASA—and perhaps becoming a large part of the United States’ Cold War identity—was not part of the original script. Aldrin dealt with the strain of being in the spotlight by consuming alcohol. In description as detailed as his memory of the Moon landing, he relates his memories of his first glasses of whiskey and the feeling of calm they brought him. Sinking into alcoholism was far less heroic than traveling to the Moon, but fighting his way out of it was equally brave. And for that, there was no script.
“How did it feel to be on the Moon?”
Buzz Aldrin has been asked that question thousands of times. It’s the world’s best opening line, one would think. To Aldrin it has become as familiar as a broken record, and he won’t answer the question any longer.
“I have wanted NASA to fly a poet, a singer, or a journalist into space—someone who could capture the emotions of the experience and share them with the world,” he writes. Still, it would be incredibly interesting to find out how his memories from the Moon have affected him through the years.
