Rambling Musings on Memory

Memory is a strange and slippery ghost. How malleable it is, how curious that we can be so certain of what happened and yet so far from the truth. Fascinating that the further we get from an event, the more convoluted things feel, and yet the more sure we are about our own recollection.

I remember in college how I was shocked to learn in psychology that eye-witnesses in crime are so unreliable. How sure I felt that my memories of a moment were pure. I could understand, of course, such an event is traumatic, and that will certainly color things, but what I see or hear or experience is mine and how could that be changed?

I remember, too, in philosophy, debating over the subjective and objective, trying to tease apart what is real. If I remember an event one way, does that make it real? What if two people remember the same event differently, how do those realities reconcile? Or is objective reality external to our experience, and we are simply wrong about what happened most of the time?

For a long time, I thought such concerns were unnecessary, silly even, applying only to a subset of life's happenings. The outcome of a ball game, the plot of a book, the content of a lecture, the rollercoaster ride at a birthday party, lunch with friends, a dance, an ocean swim, a hike, a vacation - what is there to misremember? Sure, recollections become hazy, and there are gaps in the details, but where is the import?

As I grew older, things became more blurry. What was the cause of the friendship that grew distant? Why did this relationship sour? What was the argument really about? Why am I feeling deja vu? Every time I tell a story, why does it change, and does it matter? When I hear someone else tell the same story, how does it influence what I believe?

I subjected myself to years of sleep deprivation, and oh, how it pulls memory apart! After being up thirty hours as an intern, my memories fuzzed. Which patient had decreased tendon reflexes? Was the creatinine normal? How come this patient's story seems so familiar? Was I remembering someone I admitted my last call three days ago? My pager buzzes at 4AM, and I've been up nearly twenty-four hours. I call the nurse, and she says I already answered that page half an hour ago. I wade that terrifying plane suspended between consciousness and slumber. I begin dreaming of patients, of the hospital. I round twice, once as I emerge from the depths of sleep, and again as I stumble bleary-eyed in the hospital.

I started repeating conversations to friends. Did I already tell you about...? I can't remember if you knew... My friendships frayed at the edges. My relationships unraveled. Because sometimes you are expected to remember a fight and a compromise, and memory can be so unfair and unyielding.

(Of course, these are memories I describe, and who knows how accurate they are? What can we believe? What can we trust?)

I float to the surface. I sleep now, not great, not even close, but better, less fragmented. Memories bubble up. Some feel so strong, so visceral. They must be real. I don't know what to trust. This person lied; this person soothed me. This person claims I said, "Good riddance," but I don't remember the conversation. This person who I used to see every week has fallen out of my life. My friends say I encouraged them to get (metaphorical) tongue piercings and tattoos, but I remember the story differently. What I remember from 9/11 is patently different from my friend standing beside me, and what it means to me is so different than what it means to him.

How did so much of my life collide under my feet? Where are the fault lines? I see those critical moments of my life crashing head-on, the many versions of memory subsuming each other, tectonic plates like rhinos. What results, I am sure, looks nothing like reality. But the landscape of my life has been irrevocably altered by this amalgam of what happened, what I remember happened, what everyone else remembers happened, and how we act on these faulty (pun regrettably intended) assumptions.

Where to go now? I think of my philosophy courses in college and my classmates who wore "WWKD" (What Would Kant Do?) shirts. As ridiculous as it feels, reality must be some mishmash of what everyone experiences, remembers, and believes. Our relationships are colored by what we remember of our interactions with that person, whether or not it actually happened that way. We enter a business deal, choose a career, break off an engagement, drop someone from our will, cut a friend out of our lives, and send holiday cards based on our biased, faulty memories of these people. Each person tells a different story of some critical junction in their lives. I have my story and it's completely different from yours but I can only act on my reality and you on yours. We accept these realities to be different for each of us, that our values, motivations, personalities, character, and desires are shaped by different interpretations of the same events. We move forward, understanding, compassionate, forgiving, and accepting.