Whether we are trying to pull off a pickle recipe for our family or trying to impress a gathering with a well-timed joke, a large chunk of our daily cognitive, social, and communicative activities are invested towards making memories, and retrieving old ones.
I use the word chunk not because it sounds cool (it undoubtedly does) but because, incidentally, it is used by Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist who works on anxiety and memory as well as by David Herman, a cognitive narratologist. The latter examines how cultures and collectives remember and encode data, beliefs, and values, through narrative chunks that often operate as storytelling functions and figures such as metaphors. Memory studies as a discipline is perfectly (and sometimes precariously) situated between the molecular and monumental dimensions of remembering and forgetting, examining neurons as well as narratives, subliminal sentient experiences as well as shared social rituals.
Memory manifesting in its absence
As we experience, often to our embarrassment, memory may manifest itself by paradoxically producing its absence. Examples can include struggle to remember a name or where one kept a key (the latter being a very common experience for this author). It can also acquire complex collective dimensions whereby cultures and nations forget certain events and figures from their past, sometimes accidentally sometimes strategically (Paul Connerton’s essay ‘Seven Types of Forgetting’ is a brilliant study of the same). It is safe (and scientifically valid) to assume that one cannot study memory sans a study of forgetting, that commemoration may also be complexly shaped by forms of oblivion or even erasure. Thus, the verbs could and did normally associated with forgetting (as reflected in the title of this piece) also imply intentionality, action, or agency rather than passive accidental erasure.
It gets even more interesting and strange as one begins to plumb the depths of the mysterious memory-machine. For then, you realise that memory is not just retrieval or reconstruction. It is also oriented towards the future, both at the level of imagination and action. This is true in the immediate personal sense (for example one can go ahead and maneuver a meeting only if one remembers the relevant information) as well as in the collective sense as evinced in the futuristic appeal and aspiration of nostalgia that may be instrumentalised and even weaponised for political purposes.
Charan Ranganath (a globally acclaimed neuroscientist with Chennai connections) offers a brilliant bird’s eye view of the processes of memory in Why We Remember? In a work filled with anecdotes from music concerts, birthday parties, and complex neuroscientific experiments in laboratories, Ranganath writes how, despite growing up almost entirely in the United States, his memory of Tamil words always experiences more retrieval whenever he visits Chennai. Research reveals that context is a vital element in the memory process. If one re-situates or disconnects contexts, strange things can take place in the memory machine.
The ‘butcher on the bus’ phenomenon
A funny example is known as the butcher on the bus phenomenon, whereby one’s familiar butcher is not recognised or remembered simply because he isn’t in his market clothing and happens to be traveling in a bus like all other passengers, thus appearing atypical and out of context. Memory is thus both semantic (recalling data related to learnt knowledge) and episodic (sensitive to sentient experiences and connected to contexts). It is both retrieval (where the neuroanatomy of the hippocampus plays a vital part) and information and emotion processing (where the prefrontal cortex comes in). It thus integrates information with emotion, knowledge with experience, emerging less as a static entity and more as an interactive activity. With so much going on, it is but obvious that memory is both mysterious and mischievous, throwing lifeboats and anchoring the self during moments of cognitive and existential struggle, while also playing tricks, like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, pouring wrong potions on the wrong heads.
The manipulative dimension of memory is well-known and documented in research and writings alike. Elizabeth Loftus’ neuroscientific work on memory, misinformation, and punitive processes foregrounds how frequently false memories may be planted, sometimes through strategic interrogation techniques that may be racially or socially biased. Likewise, Salman Rushdie remembered how afraid he was of being invaded, as a boy during the 1962 Indo-China war, despite the fact that he was outside of India during that time, simply because the many news reports and radio broadcasts made a strong affective implant that subsequently operated as false memory. Thus, apart from its problematic proximity to forgetting and future-imagination, memory is also notoriously manipulative and plastic.
The reconsolidation theory
As Joseph LeDoux theorises, the reconstruction model of memory may be replaced by reconsolidation, whereby what one retrieves at each recall may not be the original memory of the original experience but the last remembered version of the same, each recall being profoundly and complexly shaped by the environment around the remembering subject. Frederic Bartlett’s example of memory schema is a perfect example of the same whereby a group of Cambridge students were made to read a native-American fable and asked to re-write the same multiple times from their original memory and the results revealed how the rewritings became increasingly ‘infected’ by the cultural and social location and biases of the remembering and rewriting subject to the point that the final draft of the story incorporated many elements from Anglo-American cultural contexts while effacing and erasing elements from the original native-American legend. Therefore, contexts and emotional situations matter in memory, often to the point of playful plantations and manipulations.
Many years ago, as a PhD student in Durham, this author wrote a poem called ‘Conatus’ (self-preservation as defined by the Dutch philosopher Spinoza) with the lines: ‘Memory is what happens/when neurons make love/at the back of the head/across the folds of a semi-solid sponge/that weighs less than a shopping mall guide’. Almost 13 years later, and after all the additional reading and research, memory remains a mysterious, and often, mischievous machine impossible to be entirely unpacked or understood. Neuroscience has offered many magnificent insights; we know increasingly more about forms of amnesia and recalls. But as the neurosurgeon-protagonist in Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday discovers through an epiphany in the end, the rich associative architecture of memory and cognition goes beyond neural nets and synaptic structures, connecting to words, emotions, senses, and spaces in ways that require reflections from literature, music, and art, among others.
Memory studies as a discipline offers this alchemy of allied knowledge networks to examine how we remember and forget, how we heal and move on, how we reconstruct and imagine ahead, with complex compounds of contexts, apparatus, and affect. In the process it reveals that the true magic of memory often lies in the ordinary everydayness where the familiar form can sudden transform and transport. Where time-travel often becomes real. And where fluidity is all.
(Avishek Parui researches on and teaches memory studies at IIT Madras, where he is the faculty coordinator of the Centre for Memory Studies (CMS). He is also the chairperson of the Indian Network for Memory Studies. [email protected])
Published – March 17, 2025 05:05 pm IST