Adventures in Memory. Hilde østby
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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. Are they memories he consciously retrieves and enjoys? Does he reexperience the excitement he felt right before the 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