Thinking About Memory and the Need to Forget

People without a fine memory often don’t realize they are forgetful.

Others, including bosses and friends, might inform them. At one point, I employed an office manager who failed to perform assigned tasks and denied she received instructions. She was earnest but insisted I’d never told her what to do.

I could have written every request, but that would have taken time I didn’t have. The relationship did not end well.

When I was young, I didn’t need to write anything down to bring it to mind—not appointments, school assignments, or directions to an address. In the days before cell phones and cars with built-in navigation systems, a first-class sense of direction was necessary. That, or mounting a compass on the windshield, as my directionally challenged Uncle Sam did.

My adeptness in recalling and following directions wasn’t always enough. A hard-to-get date with a student nurse led me to her crowded part of the city. I got to her dormitory in plenty of time but found neither an empty parking place nor a garage.

I went up the street, down the street, right, left, rinse, repeat over and over. Eureka! I found a space, parked, and frantically rushed to get her. One problem. I was so confused and disoriented that I had no idea where my car was. Good impression, correct? But I did stumble upon the vehicle, and there were more dates. As Blanche Dubois utters at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire, 

Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

In this case, the gentle indulgence of someone I didn’t know well.

Some of us recall too little, while others retain too much. Each injury, disappointment, error, humiliation, misfortune, heartbreak, and insult. Imagine such a parent blaming you during childhood. The list never shortens because the storage space is endless. Pity those held to account for each new failure and reminder of old ones.

Fingerpointing harms many of those targeted while the less vulnerable push back or end the relationship. It is a miserable and lonely way to live for anyone whose index finger is too active.

Others accumulate every loss and cause of sadness, rerunning their injuries on a revolving internal wheel of misfortune. It is better to grieve, find gratitude, and learn to make friends who display the kind of character necessary for intimacy.

Some people possess useful visual memories of places and faces. One odd skill I inherited is seeing an aging face resembling a person I knew in my teens and watching it return to an individual’s appearance of decades before.

A patient of mine told me a heartbreaking story about recapturing the forgotten facts of a life. Her mother had dementia. The elderly woman’s husband had died long before, but she had lost the ability to retain the knowledge of his death, which drifted away each day. Upon waking, she asked where he was and insisted on finding out. Her caretakers revealed the truth and restarted the shock and tears of the widow. Daily.

Perhaps the most extraordinary example of the capacity to retain information is described by William Egginton in The Rigor of Angels. In 1929, the groundbreaking neuropsychologist Alexander Luria evaluated Solomon Shereshevsky, a journalist in the Soviet Union.

His memory “had no distinct limits.”

This amazing man became a mnemonist working in the circus. To enhance his skill, he refined his natural ability with a new approach to it:

To be able to recite back the lists of numbers, random words, poems in foreign languages, and even nonsensical syllables that audience members would call out to him, he landed on the strategy of picturing them drawn on a chalkboard.

Unfortunately, Shereshevsky discovered the ever-larger number of chalkboards he read from and retained in his head interfered with recalling the most recent ones he fashioned while performing for the patrons of that day. Egginton recounts, “Shereshevsky waged an almost constant war against images and associations from the past that threatened to flood his every waking moment.”

To Alexander Luria, the neuropsychologist who continued to test him, the man was disabled further by another facet of his retentiveness.

Shereshevsky’s world was “rich in imagery, thematic elaboration, and affect” but also “lacking in one important feature: the capacity to convert encounters with the particular into instances of the general.”

Phrases such as “catching a cab” would barrage him with possible interpretations, interconnections to old thoughts, visions, experiences, and multiple meanings. One can imagine him being overwhelmed to the point of compromising his everyday life.

One way to think of this poor man is to compare him to a King Midas. The difference between the two is that Midas wished for the “golden touch.” Shereshevsky requested no part of his double-edge talent for retaining every experience.

Photographic memory, anyone?

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The top image is Carmel Valley Memory, a 1999 work by Eyvind Earle. It is followed by The Gate of Memory, created in 1864 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Third in line is Presence of a Memory by Alekos Kontopoulos. The final painting is Ladies of Arles (Memories of the Garden at Etten), a work of Vincent van Gogh, dating from 1888. All of these are sourced from Wikiart.