Memory Lane: The Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember
According to psychology professors Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy, what we often view as flaws in our memory processes are actually some of our brains’ most powerful features.
Memory Lane: The Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember by Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy, Princeton University Press
I have one particularly clear memory from my first serious relationship: in it, my boyfriend and I are driving up Lincoln Memorial Drive on a sunny day, the warm breeze coming off Lake Michigan streaming through our rolled-down windows. Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day” is playing on the radio, and my boyfriend starts singing out loud, something I’ve rarely seen him do. As he belts out the eighteen-second sustained note along with Withers at the end of the song, he looks elated, and I feel happy watching him.
This boyfriend later dumped me, unceremoniously—in fact, the end of the relationship was so swift, so devastating, that I eventually sought therapy through my university’s counseling center to recover from the aftereffects. And to my horror, I started to hear it everywhere: Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day.” Was the song having a late 2010s resurgence? It seemed to be playing in commercials, at the grocery store, at the coffee shop, every hour on the hour on the radio. Just hearing the opening notes of the song would trigger unwanted memories of my now-ex—instead of feeling joy remembering that day in the car, I was gutted with grief, and all the fresher, painful memories of our breakup would inevitably flood in. For years, I would be unable to listen to the song without feeling physically sick, and I wondered if I’d ever be able to listen to it again.
In their new book, Memory Lane, psychology professors Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy write that “our memories are constantly adapting and changing as we encounter new information and reflect on the past.” Our memories aren’t preserved in amber; we don’t go through the mental museum of our lives appraising every single artifact of our past with an objective eye. Instead, we are effectively reconstructing our memories each time we recall them.
Greene and Murphy compare our memory-making processes to building a Lego tower. In this metaphor, when we first create a certain memory, that Lego tower will have a certain shape and be built of a certain number of bricks with a wide variety of colors, each representing some element of the memory, such as the location, who was there, what emotions we felt, et cetera. Then, the tower will be taken apart and put away. The next time we recall this memory, small details will change—maybe we’ll build a slightly shorter tower, or we’ll swap out red bricks for blue bricks, and so on. If we form any other memories with similar elements—for example, the same person appearing in a different setting—we may start to pull pieces of that new memory into the old memory’s tower, eventually merging similar memories and discarding the smaller mundane details of each one.
Every time we reactivate a memory, the synaptic networks underlying it become plastic again. This means that the associations between neurons in the network may be modified before being reconsolidated and locked down once more.
On one hand, the malleability of our memory systems leaves us vulnerable to errors and even to manipulation. In the latter half of the book, Greene and Murphy analyze the phenomenon of false memories. They note that our brains’ resistance or receptivity to misinformation changes throughout each stage of our lives based not only on the physical development of our brains but also on what other information and experiences we’ve accumulated that can help us make sense of the world. The way information is presented—for example, a question being phrased in a leading way during an interrogation, or a photograph being doctored just slightly enough—can distort our recollections, adding bricks to our original Lego tower that were not there before, until we find ourselves remembering something that may have never happened at all.
But it is this same malleability that grants us powerful gifts, such as our imaginations. Our flexible memories “allow us to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and imagine the world from another person’s perspective—a critical skill for living in a society.” The same plasticity that can make us susceptible to false memories is also what allows us to plan for the future by visualizing versions of ourselves doing things we’ve never done before. It is the foundation of our ability to create brilliant works of fiction and art as we invent—and, in a way, remember—places and people and situations that have never existed before.
And fortunately, it is the fluid way that our brain reconstructs memories that slowly dulls the pain of the worst moments of our lives. “Forgetting a memory can be protective and reduce the potentially negative impact of reliving the event over and over again,” write Greene and Murphy.
With my therapist, in the aftermath of that terrible breakup, I set a goal for myself: not that I would forget anything from this failed relationship (which, back then, felt like an impossibility anyway) but that, someday, I might overwrite those memories with improved versions. What I didn’t know then is that this is essentially how our brains work anyway. Greene and Murphy note that, after we’ve built enough similar Lego towers, our brains begin to speed up the recollection process by relying on a schema, pulling together elements that have frequently reoccurred across similar memories to then build shortcuts to help us interpret and encode new information.
Unfortunately, for several years, this meant that Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day” (a truly excellent song!) was trapped in a schema along with “ex-boyfriend” and “heartbreak.” But, in time, some of the uglier Lego pieces fell away, and others got replaced, and without my realizing it, the Lego towers that had once loomed large and ominously in my brain seemed to shrink into the distance. One day, seemingly out of the blue, I found that the song didn’t bother me anymore. Then, years later, I found that I couldn’t get enough of it, playing it over and over like I’d discovered it for the first time. Maybe, in some way, I had—my brain had quietly moved this particular Lego piece into a different tower and transformed it into something new, something I’d now be happy to revisit time and time again.
In the final pages of the book, Greene and Murphy invite readers to accept the reality of our memory processes—flaws and all—so we can better work with rather than against our own brains. Understanding that our memories are imperfect by design, we can be kinder to ourselves and to each other when details slip and stories change. Greene and Murphy remind us that our brains, with their built-in capacity to protect us from past harms and inspire us with visions of alternate realities, are worth celebrating.
