Memories are Made of...

We have two forms of ultra-short term memory. They are:

ICONIC memory

and

ECHOIC memory.

Well, that was interesting, wasn’t it? Where do we go from here?

There are other memories that are ultra short term and they are associated with touch, smell and taste. The ‘smell’ memory is closely linked with recollection since the olfactory lobes that collect smell and the olfactory cortex that ‘recognise and store’ the information are very close – possibly only two or three nerve synapses apart.

Are you still awake?

Iconic memory lasts about half a second. It is this that allows us to see movements in a film, for example, as a flowing motion and not as a series of rapid snapshots – of which, more later.

Echoic memory lets us resolve a sentence that someone says to us and make sense of it. It lasts for around two seconds so it is longer lived than iconic memory.

Experiment:

Get someone close to you, geographically not personally, and tell them something, make it fairly long – something along the lines of, “I think that I should like to go to Majorca on holiday this year.” Put a space of about three seconds between each word. Then get them to repeat back what you said. It is slow but you may be surprised to find that they can remember very little of what you said.

This experiment will show that echoic memory is what allows you to comprehend a full sentence easily.

Going back to iconic memory for a moment. Many of you will have heard of 'Subliminal Messaging'. This is a method of passing information to a recipient without their knowledge.

Subliminal mesaging can be done aurally but the one that most of us have heard about is carried out visually.

During a film one frame is shown that has a word, or an image, on it. It might say 'thirst'. The plan is that everyone watching the film will now feel thirsty. Sadly, the effect is very limited. Those who are already thirsty will become more so but those who are not thirsty will not be swayed.

Other experiments have been carried out but with limited success.

 The jury, as they say, is still out. Your thoughts?

Then there’s short-term memory.

Read the paragraph above to your friend. Wait for about twenty seconds and then ask them to tell you what was in it. Once again, you will find that there is little recall – just an odd detail, or two.

Working memory is different again, that is using what is in your head to continue with defined functions.

Short-term memory can be aided by ‘chunking’ – putting numbers, for example, into small chunks of three or four digits instead of trying to remember whole numbers all at once.

Are we beginning to see how memory is fallible? Do we begin to see how unreliable witnesses are?

We believe, honestly, that what we recall is what we have seen or heard. The fact is that we lie. We do not want to and we do not intend to but the fact remains that we are often mistaken in our recollections.

Now add in psychotropic drugs.

Certain psychotropic drugs turn your brain into porridge. Solving simple problems becomes an arduous task because all thought processes slow down. You feel that every thought is pushing through that thick porridge in an attempt to connect with the next thought; sometimes it fails and the thought is forgotten before a connection is made.

Many psychotropic drugs endure in the body’s system.

LSD, is a prime example of a drug that can give you ‘flashbacks’ many years later. This will occur even if only one small dose is taken, it is not dependent upon quantity.

Some of the drugs that are taken for controlling people with schizophrenia also stay in the system for some time, not enough to control the mental aberration but enough to give side effects.

All of these type of drugs affect memory.

As does diet.

The propensity of those who take alcohol to forget things – sometimes conveniently, one supposes, is well known. These periods of forgetfulness will also occur with taking cannabis and its sundry by-products.

The people who take this will often deny it but it is another example of how the mind will ‘fill in’ gaps to present a whole picture.

Remember that everything you see, hear, touch, taste and smell exists only in your head. That is your world. Totally.

There is nothing else. Those things that you experience that appear to be external are merely the projection that your brain makes to assure you that you live among other people and objects. Yes, those people and objects exist.

Experiment:

If you are a male choose an attractive female and if you are female choose a desirable male for this.

Walk towards them and try to walk through them. You will fail because that person is really there and not just a figment of your imagination.

You may now explain to them that they were part of an experiment and you would be delighted to tell them all about it over coffe and cupcakes.

Nevertheless that person only existed, to you, inside your head. The person you bumped into was a projection by your mind that located that person in time and space in front of you.

If your ultra short term memory and short term memory lapse the event may have been transferred into long term memory. The duration of that is, potentially, unlimited.

If your mind has been affected by drugs – including alcohol, your recollection of the bumped person may be different to reality.

That reality, the one that exists only inside your head, is the only one that matters to you. If the person was, in actual fact, unattractive you will never know if you never meet that person again; in your mind they will be desirable and that is your truth.

Writers live in a different world. We have several realities that we transfer into our stories.

The characters that live in our heads live in our mental realities. The story that we write about them is just a narration of what they are doing with some description of their surroundings.

If we have several stories in our heads, as most of us do, then we are living in several realities. They all exist. They can all be projected around us in the same way as the world that the rest of the population ‘sees’ is projected. There are times when I have walked down an alien road and felt the gravel under my feet, I can smell the sap from alien trees and hear the birds whistling in the branches.

Sometimes coming back to ‘normality’ is a shock. Sometimes it is a little bit depressing and sometimes it is a relief.

Does this make writers different from other people? I have no idea. I have never been other people. None of us knows what goes on inside the heads of those people that are projected in front of us no matter how long we have known them.

Unless they write it down.