There is a 41-year-old woman, an administrative assistant from California known in the medical literature only as “AJ,” who remembers almost every day of her life since age 11… ”My memory flows like a movie—nonstop and uncontrollable,” says AJ. She remembers that at 12:34 p.m. on Sunday, August 3, 1986, a young man she had a crush on called her on the telephone. She remembers what happened on Murphy Brown on December 12, 1988. And she remembers that on March 28, 1992, she had lunch with her father at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She remembers world events and trips to the grocery store, the weather and her emotions. Virtually every day is there.
~ Joshua Foer, National Geographic
I can’t remember anything, which makes my occasional memory dumps all that more remarkable. I think I have what some researchers are calling “external memory,” where you don’t rely on your own organic memory systems because you use external devices to help you remember….books, computers, websites. External memory is not an ennobled concept like “extelligence,” which means a sociocultural system of shared, external intelligence. It suggests the dumbing down of the human race, the opposite end of the continuum that may have peaked with Renaissance Man, who could speak and write his own language, plus Latin and Greek, and if he were a Biblical scholar, maybe Hebrew, too. That man could store whole tomes of science and literature in his memory, then recite it to perfection at a lectern in front of an audience. That’s internal memory, while having external memory is like saying, “I’m a weakling, but I drive a big truck.”
Memory dumps. That’s what I call them because it’s like when a PC has to do a memory dump to analyze a crash. I’ve had times when I’ve been working late and felt so exhausted that my mind feels like it’s beginming to hallucinate. I’ll start to “crash”, or fall asleep, and suddenly wake up with a memory of some incident I had forgotten about for years and years. The last memory dump I had brought me back to something that was not verifiable by anyone else because the people who might have confirmed it, my parents, died years ago. Yet I’m starting to see a connection between things I hadn’t connected before.
As an elementary school teacher, Mr Dyck had a well-documented reputation with his students. In his classroom, when he was chalking up mathematical equations on the blackboard, he had a way of turning slowly, lizard-like, to catch children who were whispering to each other in class. When they looked up, they were startled to find him grinning at them intensely, as if he had never turned away. Even years later, after his pupils had married and borne their own children, they never forgot his spidery arms that seemed to reach out across the rows of desks, or his thighs that towered above their heads as he thundered down the aisle to confront a transgressor.
For many years, Mr. Dyck punished students by locking them in the book storage room with the lights off. Later, when parents complained, he simply locked offending children in the same room, but left the lights on. It didn’t matter. What terrified his pupils and helped enforce perfect discipline in the classroom was not that children were left alone in the room, nor that the lights were off, but that when he was alone with them in the enclosed space, they feared for their lives. He did not verbally threaten, but his presence and his countenance revisited the children in their dreams. Neither the parents nor the school principal could ever accuse Mr. Dyck of any inappropriate language or physically intimidating behavior, but his students knew what he was capable of doing. The fear of the possible was worse than the reality of the present.
After I remembered my experiences with this teacher, being locked in the book storage room, it terrified me irrationally because the experience was once again fresh in my mind…the experience, not simply the details about the experience. Most of our daily memories function like a third-person newspaper report — you were sick with the flu in spring 2003, you were married in such-and-such a place 10 years ago, you paid your gas bill last Tuesday, you were born 32 years ago — this is the meta-data about the experience, not the experience itself. The experience of your senses, the context of who you were and what ruled your life when something happened — these are things we can’t easily bring to mind again because we cannot re-experience a memory. Or so we think. My memory dumps have been the closest thing to re-experiencing the experiences of my memories.
In his song Remembering Marie A., Bertolt Brecht sang about a jaded character who realizes he doesn’t really remember a passionate love he felt in his youth, yet he remembers the mise en scène of that love because of transient cloud in the sky: “As for her kiss I’ve long ago forgot it, but for the cloud that floated in the sky, I know that still, and shall forever know it, it was quite white and moved in very high.”
A.J, the woman in the National Geographic article who can remember every detail of every moment of her life from a certain age onward, seems to prove that we have a record of all our moments locked in a vault. While most of us can never seem to access most of our memories, do they ever surface in “memory dumps” such as the ones I have experienced, or in other ways such as reactions that may seem irrational but are based on subconscious memory? A.J. has the gift of recalling the details of the past, but when she remembers, does she experience it again? Or is it all just a ticker tape of details she can spew out like an idiot savant?
Gaine Ellard, 2007
