Memory Is Less True Than We Think. So Write It Down

• Related post: Wake up your neuroplasticity

Explicit memory is conscious access to recollection, and it develops along with language expression and comprehension after about 18 months of age. The brain structures of explicit memory include the medial temporal lobe, parts of the hippocampus and the orbitofrontal cortex.

There are several types of explicit memory. Semantic, factual memory includes memory of meaning, such as assigning the image of a brightly colored butterfly wing when we express our self-image in a collage.

Semantic memory is encoded in the left hippocampus and the left prefrontal cortex. Semantic memories feel experientially different from other types of explicit memory, because they are mostly language-based and arise from left-hemisphere activity.

Episodic memory, another type of explicit memory, binds and arranges fragments of semantic memory. Semantic memory tells you what a spring butterfly looks like, while episodic memory tells you about the spring butterfly you saw last spring. Every new experience with butterflies revises our semantic representations of butterflies. Robin’s later memories are revised by her memory of how she felt about the butterflies surrounding her body. Did her memory of her body, as heavy or light, change? Voluntary self-awareness and self-accepting autobiographical memory are also updated through experience.

Voluntary awareness in episodic memory coordinates information from multiple, layered cerebral lobes. Executive function arises from distributed brain processes, the negotiation of self-awareness, social insight and the prefrontal regulation of limbic feelings, while spatial information stored in the posterior parietal cortex is sequenced and organized. Automatic memories are implicit, non-declarative memories that include sensory information and the perception of episodic events.

Episodic memory probably derives from the hippocampus’s role in cognitive mapping. This highly advanced survival skill lets us build four-dimensional models that transcend time. By about age two, toddlers begin to show a more sophisticated view of themselves. They start to show a sense of time as they learn the order in which events happen. By age two, stories are constructed at a rate of 2.2 per hour in ordinary conversations between parents and children. These stories are tied to interpreting reality and giving it meaning. At this stage, parents become self-aware and teach their children self-awareness by encouraging them to share the parents’ own stories.

Autobiographical memory, a subtype of episodic memory, provides our own unique sense of past, present and future. Autobiographical memory is encoded in the right hippocampus and the right orbitofrontal cortex. Autobiographical memory is mental time travel. It includes memories of personally special events, such as the first time you used paint at school, memories of art activities in general, a gestalt of years of art-making, and personal facts such as who the US president was when you were born. Emotion strengthens memory. Emotional states in particular produce lasting, vivid memories known as flashbulb memories. These arise in response to personal events or to special social events that shock vast numbers of people, such as Princess Diana’s car crash in 1997. Flashbulb memories generally show strongly persistent, high levels of surprise, high impact and repeated verbal and mental reenactment. They put you back somewhere, like jumping through. The visceral intensity of this jumping through leads us to evaluate the experience emotionally right away, without going through the normal process.

Autobiographical memory, like other memories, is less true than we expect. Old schemas and positive or negative expectations downplay or take over the mechanisms of autobiographical memory. All temporal, spatial and perceptual information is first interpreted by semantic memory, where our beliefs about the unique features and fine details of particular experiences are held, waiting to be encoded. General beliefs and expectations determine what gets retrieved. They include sensory input and implicit theories about what people, including ourselves, are like. The wishes and desires automatically activated while we experience something, the nature of memory, true memories and false memories are all formed in the same way. As the old saying goes, we remember what we remember because we believe what we believe. We tend to assume that the choices that are the product of memory are more beneficial and attractive than the ones we couldn’t choose. We tend to distort reality and believe that what we chose is best and that what’s ours is good. In the process of making artwork, clients activate many procedural and autobiographical choices while creating a visual story. Therapeutic encouragement strengthens their sense of competence, and art-making lets clients adjust past views and beliefs about their capacity for self-expression. Successful art-making enhances the memory of a competent self.

The process of recall itself revises memory. When we dance, internal and external cues find abstract or concrete expression, much like explicit or implicit memories of color and form. In the artist’s mind, artistry embraces and grafts together the artist’s narrative intentions and other unpredictable cues, such as the bodily representation of pain. Vivid original memories and highly relived memories almost always have strong visual images associated with them. Strikingly visual imagery prompts working memory to expand older, stored information. Furthermore, memories of events, especially of emotionally charged events, are sometimes very different from what actually happened. We keep re-editing memories that have already been revised. Dance reminds us that a memory is a pattern of connection, interacting with neurons in other networks or within its own network. Works of art are continually reconstructed memories. The involvement of other networks provides unique connections that creativity can reach.

That’s exactly why it’s worth writing down the facts and feelings of the day while they’re fresh: a record gives you a steady reference point that recollection alone can’t.

• #autobiographical
• #memory
• #recall
• #changes
• #explicit
• #art
• #therapy
• #clinical
• #neuroscience