Oliver Sacks on Memory, Origins, and Why Forgetting Is Necessary to Creativity – The Marginalian

“Memory is not an exact replica of the original… it is a continuous act of creation,” researcher Rosalind Cartwright reminded us in her fascinating book about the science of dreams. “The greatest lie of human memory is that it feels true,” Jonah Lehrer wrote shortly before he became embroiled in a growing debate over allegations of impersonation and falsification. But although we already know that memory is not a recording device, the exact extent of its failure escapes – often, easily – most of us.

In a New York Review of Books In an essay, poetic neuroscientist Oliver Sacks tackles that head-on, revealing the surprising ways in which we create our memories, automatically blurring the line between the experienced and the measured:

It's amazing to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened – or may have happened to someone else. I suspect that many of my passions and desires, which seem to be entirely my own, have come from the suggestions of others, who have had a great influence on me, consciously or unconsciously, and have been forgotten.

One thing that Sacks argues is very common – if not consistent – in the creative mind is that of autoplagiarism:

Sometimes this forgetfulness extends to autoplagiarism, when I find myself reproducing entire phrases or sentences as if they were new, and this can be combined, at times, with genuine forgetfulness. When I look back at my old notebooks, I find that many of the thoughts drawn in them are forgotten for years, then revived and remade as new. I suspect that such forgetting happens to everyone, and it may be especially common in those who write or draw or compose, because art may require such forgetting, so that a person's memories and his ideas can be reborn and appear in new situations and ideas.

Citing dozens of studies in which false memories of fictional events were “planted” in people's minds, Sacks explores unconscious cheating, something Henry Miller explored poetically and Mark Twain eloquently, if unscientifically, in his famous letter to Helen Keller. Sacks writes:

What is clear in all these cases – whether imagined or real abuse in childhood, real or experimentally planted memories, of misled witnesses and demented prisoners, unconscious cheating, and false memories that we may all have based on the loss or confusion of the source – is that, without external verification, there is no easy way to distinguish, or borrow a sound or borrowed memory. has been suggested, between what psychologist Donald Spence calls 'historical truth' and 'narrative truth.'

[…]

There seems to be no way in the mind or brain to verify the truth, or at least the precise character, of our memories. We have no direct access to historical truth, and what we feel or assert to be true (as Helen Keller was in a great position to note) depends as much on our imagination as our senses. There is no way world events can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly adaptive manner, unique to each individual at first, and are interpreted differently or reworked whenever they are recalled. . . . Often, our only truth is our only narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves—stories we're constantly dissecting and refining. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory, and follows from its foundations and mechanisms in the human brain. What's amazing is that serious aberrations are rare, and that, for the most part, our memories are strong and reliable.

The sacks end with:

We, as humans, are endowed with memory systems that are flawed, fragile, and imperfect – but also highly flexible and creative. Confusion about or indifference to sources can be a paradoxical force: if we could label the sources of all our information, we would be overwhelmed by information that is often irrelevant.

Being indifferent to the source allows us to integrate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as deeply and richly as if they were the main events. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter other minds, to integrate art and science and religion across cultures, to enter and contribute to common sense, common knowledge. This kind of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were marked and identified, seen as private, only ours. Memory is interactive and comes not only from direct experience but from the interaction of many minds.

In a rare act of defiant honesty, my memory reminded me of a passage in Sacks's mind-altering recent book, Hallucinationswhen checking the memory further:

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's storage jars at scale, but are transformed, dissolved, recombined, and repartitioned with every act of remembering.

In a footnote, he adds:

Because [researchers] in the early twentieth century, memories were imprints on the brain (as for Socrates they were like impressions made of soft wax) — imprints that could be activated by the act of remembering. It was not until the important studies of Frederick Bartlett at Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s that the classical view was challenged. While Ebbinghaus and other early investigators had studied rote memory – how many digits could be remembered, for example – Bartlett presented his studies with pictures or stories and accounts of what he had seen or heard that were somewhat different (and sometimes actually altered) from each recall. These experiments convinced Bartlett that he was not thinking of a static entity called 'memory,' but a dynamic 'remembering' process.' He wrote:

Remembering is not the re-awakening of countless unchanging, lifeless and fragmentary sequences. It is a conceptual reconstruction, or construction, that is constructed in relation to our attitude toward the active mass of past organized reactions or experiences. . . . So it doesn't mean it's really accurate.

Could it be that memory failure is essential to our collective creativity and to the slot machine of ideation? Stealing like a professional may, after all, be the brain's default setting.

Oliver Sacks Photo by John Midgley via Wired