Eagle touched down on the surface of the Moon? Do memories from the Moon appear spontaneously in his daily life? Does he walk on the Moon in his dreams?
Psychology professor Dorthe Berntsen examines, among other things, spontaneous memories in her research. These are memories that appear on their own, without our consciously searching for them. But how do we capture a person’s personal memories in the moment? Berntsen is interested in the average memories of ordinary people who haven’t performed extraordinary feats, in outer space or elsewhere. To research spontaneous memories, she gives her subjects a timer and a notepad to carry around with them as they’re going about their normal day-to-day activities. When an alarm sounds, she asks them to write down whatever memory comes to mind. She found that what people often remember is something their environment reminded them of. Spontaneous memories are not unlike a cat’s memory when it sees the cupboard door that once closed on its tail—and jumps. For people, though, the associations are much more complex. The environment is full of potential cues that may trigger obscure memories. The things we see, and also smell, taste, talk about, and hear—particularly music—are paths into memory.
“Remarkably often, music is mentioned as a trigger for a personal memory,” Berntsen tells us.
When her test subjects share the memories they had during the course of the day and when they had them, they point to music on the radio as a typical cue to a particular memory.
Play the music you loved listening to when you were young, and see if you are not suddenly back in the place where you first heard it. The feeling and the mood can come on so strongly that you suddenly remember smells and colors, clothes and details from your home, things you thought you had forgotten.
“Soft music began to flow from the ceiling speakers: a sweet orchestral cover version of the Beatles’ ‘Norwegian Wood.’ The melody never failed to send a shudder through me, but this time it hit me harder than ever,” is how Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood begins.
The book is a nostalgic love story woven through with symbolic meaning from the Beatles song by the same name, and the opening of the book describes the strong memories music can evoke in us. Whole landscapes and stories can appear, unbidden, in our awareness.
It is well documented that music, which speaks so directly to our feelings, is a powerful memory cue. But what about smell? The olfactory bulb, which allows us to perceive odors, is located very close to the hippocampus. We may forget it sometimes, but humans are animals, and animals depend on their sense of smell to avoid danger. Why, then, isn’t smell the best key to our personal memories? But smell is an important cue. Berntsen’s research shows that our sense of smell is particularly important early in life. Perhaps this has something to do with childhood memories being less tied to our later interpretations and stories about ourselves, allowing more room in our memories for smell, which is more immediate and sensuous. Or perhaps it is because the odors we smelled in childhood aren’t ones we encounter every day. When we get a whiff of childhood, it’s a potent trigger for a distinct memory trace, because it hasn’t been watered down daily during the years that have passed since we last smelled it. It is a time capsule which takes only a moment to send us back in time. Think about this: Can you remember the smells of your childhood home?
In Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, he opens up a world of memories when he soaks a madeleine cookie in weak tea. Taste and smell are similar gates to the land of childhood.
“Apparently, Marcel Proust’s trip into memory did not start with him eating a madeleine—a disappointingly tasteless cookie; tasty, but not distinct. Proust was eating toast, but along the way, he replaced toast with a madeleine cookie. A piece of art is more than just memories; it gives the memories a form,” says Linn Ullmann, who in her novel Unquiet explores her childhood memories and her relationship with her father, the world-renowned director Ingmar Bergman.
The path into her memories followed the winding road of free association, not the logical archival approach one might have chosen when writing an authorized biography, yet her method is the one that best mirrors the way memory works. A life history can just as easily unfold while chasing a white rabbit as by following the historian’s strict logic. Ullmann’s research period was thus not spent scouring the comprehensive archive of her father’s letters and documents, but by following her emotions and immersing herself in art and music and dance, putting herself in the right mood for the book she was about to write.
“Writing about memories is hard work; it’s more than just transcribing recollections. I used to think I couldn’t remember anything in particular from my childhood, but when I began writing I could conjure up complete episodes,” she tells us. The memories Ullmann describes in her book are malleable. They are not static archives that hold perfect representations of things she has experienced. Because memories take many forms, we can approach them in different ways.
“Like the choreographer Merce Cunningham, I am thinking about what happens as our eyes follow the motion of a body from center stage to the outer edge. When I write, a small motion can suddenly become important, and something larger can become insignificant,” she says.
In her book she describes how she celebrated Christmas the only time she ever spent it with her father. She is newly divorced, he is a recent widower. They walk through the snow from his small apartment to the Hedvig Eleonora Church in Stockholm. The snow whirls in front of their faces and around the church spire. She describes how, for a long time, she thought that he needed her because he didn’t want to spend Christmas alone. With time, her understanding of that night changed. He always celebrated Christmas alone—in fact, he preferred it that way. It was she who needed him. The memory turns itself around and becomes another memory.
“I can’t remember if the snow really fell that way. At the end of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’ he describes the kind of snowy weather I am talking about. I don’t know if it’s actually his snowy weather I wrote into my story. However, it doesn’t matter; things I have read and things I have experienced have blended together; I am not writing a biographically true story,” she tells us.
Why do so many authors draw on their own memories? Maybe there is something authors can teach us about memory?
“Memory is a basic survival tool. We use it to tell stories about who we are; we are our own stories. Our love stories help us build our romantic relationships. On birthdays and anniversaries, people make speeches about things we have done. We tell stories about ourselves and about each other, on a personal level, on a national level, and an international level, as cultural stories. But our memories are actually fragmented, special, and creative! Memory is a force that both creates and preserves, because it writes new stories at the same time as it maintains our lives in little time capsules. For me, as an author, it is an exciting and unreliable tool. I often remember incorrectly,” she says.
What Ullmann does is not unlike what all of us do, all of the time: we make things up, structure and transform, and suddenly our memories include things we haven’t really experienced—just read, seen, or heard. Like James Joyce’s description of snow that wove itself into the tale of the walk to Hedvig Eleonora Church. Memories are unreliable.
“I wanted to see what would happen if I allowed us to emerge in a book as though we didn’t belong anywhere else. For me it was like this: I remembered nothing, but then I came across a photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe that reminded me of my father. I began to remember. I wrote: ‘I remember,’ and felt unnerved by how much I had forgotten. I have some letters, some photographs, some scattered scraps of paper, but I can’t say why I kept precisely those scraps rather than others, I have six recorded conversations with my father, but by the time we did the interviews he was so old that he had forgotten most of his own and our shared history. I remember what happened, I think I remember what happened, but some things I have probably
