Wherefore Art Thou, Fond Memories?
It is common for us to collect and sort the events of world history, like warm ashes in a fireplace, and proceed to empty them into ‘kinds’ of change. Whether registered to us as long-term impacting to the economy of Europe or a merely farcical rememberance of the birth of comedy, the events of our past are much easier to understand, much easier to teach our children and much more simple to develop into a cohesive image when they are given distinctive and meaningful categories.Ultimately, as humans, we are capable of developing a vivid and holistic picture of the past in our minds allowing for instant and precise recall. World Wars, Revolutions and University Graduations are just a few to name that are easily placed into such taxonomies and can be recalled on the spot, with incredible precision. This is well for events on the scale of global impact, but what about the pivotal events within our own lives? Are we also well equipped to reminisence in exquisitite detail and recall even the faintest scents and sounds of the past? The answer is yes.
While it might seem upon first glance that indexing the pivotal events of human advancement is merely the job of historians and archaeologists, I would daresay that each and every person is imbued with their own cognitive mechanism both capable and well-used, for the function of bringing memorable order to our past. In our mind we might catalogue all of the events that occured while living in a certain apartment, all events that occured during school, in our classroom, in our friendship circles and so forth until the most specific fibre of memory is weaved, among the many thousand of our unconscious memories, into a fantastic tapestry accessible to us instantly for recollection. It would seem that our astute minds have prepared for us our own family tree of memories, beginning with an identifying hub such as school, and ending with the most specific and unique emotion, such as anxiety in asking that special loved one for a first kiss. Expressed in its most simple form, we are natural cataloguers. The exercise of delving deeply into surface memories will eventually find the roots within the subconscious - these cognitive tunnels may in fact reveal cruical aspects of your psyche.
To begin, I should mention that I have dwelled upon this idea in any moment of solitude I find, and it is a skill that is sharpened by, at the very least, open sharing of memories with others who have a keen ear. In psychological terms, the frequent recall of fragments of memories from the past is likened to research into behavioural reinforcement procedures, where the dominant response (thus being the memory) is reinforced with specific familar cues and with frequent access, becomes solidly encoded in our mind and more easily recalled.
One of the strongest catalogues of memory in my mind, catalogued in a synthesis of sights, scents, sounds and emotions, are the schooling years which are perpetually turned in my mind even to this moment. Very few of us talk fondly of our school years for they were formative in a brutally direct way and surfaced many of the insecurities and uncertainties that opened like fresh wounds from the transisition between childhood and adolescence. But in truth much of our character has arisen from this time and it is intrinsically interesting to uncover.
For the purposes of this example, I think as far back as pre-school to the young faces of child care workers who once seemed friendly and familar to me - adepts of their work who were amiable and responsible, a vast concrete, sand and grass playground shadowed by the shade netting above us and our play excluded from the voracious passing of cars upon the main road. I recall the bushy, wild hair styles fashionable in that irksome confusion between the 80’s and 90’s, the old appliances used as toys, the pale red walls adorned with clowns and stars, beds made of grey canvas that never seemed restful enough amidst the overexcitement of that place. There was a kitchen in the backdrop, so inconspicuous that many of us at that tender age fatefully mistook it for the bathroom, and even cold metal bars on the windows ensuring no thief could possibly steal our precious moments as bright-eyed infants. There was grave sadness when having to leave that dreamy paradise and glee when the morning birds sung a herald for a new day.
I began my degree in Psychology aspiring to become a child psychologist, hoping to find reason for our immense capacity to surface one seemingly insignificant memory and end with a plethora of memories and reactions we had forgotten for this much time. I began with discontentment about the role of childhood and infant memories, for the primary knowedge known to me was heresay, lead by misguided morals and was greatly out of touch from the emotive and spiritually equipped individuals that we are as human beings. According to the research of the present day, infants are not equipped with the neurological wiring to encode memories as vividly as adults and this period is often referred to as ‘infantile amnesia’. But research has also noted that increased practice in memory recall ultimately aids in making the encoding process stronger and more reliable and in some cases, has even halted Alzheimer’s present in the brains of solitary nuns from affecting them. The implications for this are quite expectedly, rather astounding.
The notion of ‘cognitive excercise’ is not a new concept in knowledge but it is still certainly an earthshattering one. All manner of exercising the mind - from crosswords to rehersal to card games all aid in strengthening existing neurons and creating new links — ultimately making more of that grey area usable for solid memory, mathematics, logic and vocabulary. To this end, if you are intrinsically fond of nostalgia, I wholeheartedly recommend giving your mind a thorough workout; especially by recalling similar memories.
If you are an avid mind miner and dream decoder, don’t hesitate to document each coming sensation or memory, for you might find in essence that you are closer to knowing thyself (much to the pride of Socrates), in some raw but profound way. For example, if I had not cogitated upon these ideas, it may have been more difficult to remember my first song epiphany on guitar.
Comments are closed.
