Have you ever rewatched a favorite TV show or Movie and you see things you didn’t see before or somehow the point of the show or plot of the show is different than you remember? This happened to me a lot during the last three years. I figured since I was home I should watch all those dvd’s/vcr recordings I bought. I literally cancelled my cable tv and just watched what I owned. When I went back to watching new stuff, I bought a Roku streaming stick and I only buy channels I watch and when I am done with the show I cancel that channel.
but I digress….about Memory.
I looked up some articles on Memory, how the brain works.
When I am going to perform a routine with my Ponies, I do that routine myself, over and over again, until I know at the sound of certain music, where I am supposed to be and where I am going. I am encoding visual and audio details. Once I have these, I can look at how to make the whole performance smoother, more fluid, how to improve the performance. I must also practice with my Pony, to encode what I am doing as a Handler, how to make my performance artistic also. After I perform do I retain the ability to always do this routine? No. I can pick it up more quickly if I go back to it without a lot of lapse in time. If I was continually performing this routine every week, every two weeks, I would retain it, but if I simply stop, and then go back after a couple months or more, I am relearning. The longer the lapse of time, the more I am relearning.
When I pick up my flute, can I still play it? Yes, as I did when I started playing the flute. I remember how to read the music, how to finger the notes. My embouchure is weak because the muscles I need to work are weak for lack of using them the way I need to, same with diaphragm muscles to support the air flow.
Remembering a story I read or show I watched, how does this seem to change? People change over time, how they perceive ideas and evaluate them changes, I have emotionally and spiritually grown over the years. Yet, I think something else occurs in addition to this.
My understanding of these articles is that we receive information through different senses and encode it. we combine different senses together, we prioritize how important this information is. When we recall a memory, it can be an association with something happening in real time, it can be because we consciously seek it. However, when we go back to the file, do we go back to the original file, or the last time we recalled that memory and the influences that changed how we encoded that? In reading these articles, one of the aspects doctors talk about is that witnesses’ should only be tested once for their recall of a memory. Everything affects how we remember a memory, from leading questions, visuals of lineups, discussions of what happened, this new information changes how a person recalls a memory from before this encoding. The original encoding gets photoshopped.
This is why childhood memories change, as we tell stories about them, if we embellish in any way, that gets added to the story, and our memory recall shifts.
And then there is the trivia stored in our brain, that name we can’t remember at the time but wake up at 2 am knowing. The brain is a fascinating complex organ, the seat of intelligence, the encoder of our senses, the initiator of body movement and functions, the library we draw our interpretation of behavior from.
Just don’t be righteous regarding your memory being correct, because this seems to be a very fluid thing.
Photo by Craig Morey