Writing from Memory
My earliest memory might be of helping my mother close a pasture gate on a farm nearby the house I grew up in. I say “might be,” because I don’t know for certain. I’ve also seen photos of this farm: the gate, a stream, and a tiny me, age two or three, feeding a horse a carrot. Do I really remember, or am I just “remembering” the photos?
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal about new research into the area of “infantile amnesia” suggests it might be the latter. Some scientists think that memory formation may require a more mature grasp of language that children don’t develop until they’re three or four. Others think we can recall fragments, but can’t integrate them into autobiographical stories until we fully understand the concept of the autonomous self.
But a new study calls both of these ideas into question. Its findings suggest that some children can remember events at age two and even before, but that the memories are fragile. This is because of the way memory works: the brain takes sensory fragments and tags them with specific associations. When we experience one memory cue, such as a smell or the sight of a familiar place, the brain reassembles other fragments with the same tags. The more often they’re assembled, the stronger the memories become. In the case of a two year old, the neural pathway to reassemble the memory is still relatively new and so a bit weak, but, the study argues, it can be made stronger: if parents want to help their children recall events from early childhood, they should reminisce often with their children, which reinforces details and gives meaning to the events.
What does this mean for those with literary pursuits who want to draw on their childhood memories in fiction or memoir? Would solidifying early memories mean that writers in families like the Robisons, whose members Augusten Burroughs, John Elder Robison, and Margaret Robison have published conflicting memoirs, would finally be on the same page? (Margaret Robison’s “The Long Journey Home” came out last month, and is the occasion for an NPR interview comparing her story with her sons’ versions of events.)
Probably not, according to the research. Because the brain is repeatedly reassembling disparate fragments stored in several parts of the brain, it often creates distortions. A distorted synthesis of fragments may become a repeatedly recalled memory, and thus could be very vivid and still be false. Memories aren’t the same as facts, of course, because assigning meaning to what we experience is a tricky job. Even as adults, we’ve all experienced a trip or a fight in which we and our significant other or friend remember the events of the day differently. Was the view beautiful or mediocre? Did your friend address you with reason or sarcasm during your tiff? Burroughs and both Robisons have all written books they understand as truth, and knowing how the brain works to reassemble memories may help us accept their variations.
I’m not sure we’d want it any other way. Even the advice the experts give to help prompt and retain childhood events seems troublesome. If parents are helping children create meaning around what they remember, whose memory is it, anyway? How do we retain our memories and still retain our autonomy?
Perhaps the more exciting prospect of the possibility of retaining very early childhood memories is more fodder for fiction. Scientists noted that many of the memories children recited in the experiments related mundane events. But quotidian memories have given us more great works than we can count. In his new book “ The Story of Charlotte’s Web,” Michael Sims illuminates one such tale inspired by E. B. White’s childhood spent playing in barns and stables. His return to farming as an adult recalled those memories, but it was his new-found understanding of his role as nurturer and beneficiary of the animals he raised, as well as his awareness of mortality, that made the tale great.
Memories are a rich source for writers, but as White himself explained in the epigraph to Sims’s book, “Real life is only one kind of life—there is also the life of the imagination.”
Photograph by OntologicalDoubt, Flickr CC.
