Amygdala speaks: The tapestry of a memory
On a boring afternoon in the recent past, I was scrolling through my Goodreads feed(ironic how these things are called feed, don't you think? It's as if these various apps and sites provide fodder for thought, which in most cases they fail to do, but anyway...) and I stumbled upon a book called Stumbling on Happiness. It had fairly good ratings and the synopsis seemed interesting too. I picked it up, albeit mistaking it to be a self-help book. Now it was anything but that, nevertheless, it was one book that changed my worldview drastically. So drastically that my thinking has been altered irrevocably by it, and I wish at times that I'd never read it, because then I could still live in my fool's paradise happily. The book had several interesting conjectures, but I will touch upon just one of them here.
Let me start with this: Reflect on your last birthday(substitute this with any other eventful occasion). How would you describe it? It would be reasonable to say that the first emotion in your mind would be a happy(positive) or a sad(negative) one. Needless to say, this emotion is associated with some event that took place on that particular day. Going a step further, can you recall that entire day? A perfect scene-by-scene recall? Unless you have an eidetic memory, I would presume not. Then, how is it that without taking into account everything that transpired on that day, you are able to state that this was a happy/sad day?
Psychology, or even plain observation, can give you the answer to this. Our brain mostly relies on "peaks" and "endings" to evaluate something. Say you were on a vacation, and on the last day, something really bad happened. Whenever I asked you to evaluate the vacation, you would inevitably label it as bad, regardless of how good the rest of it was. Similarly, if you had an ordinary day with something really amazing that happened in between, this is the label that your brain would store. Any mention of the day would bring up only this amazing event, obscuring everything else by its amplitude of extraordinariness.
This is just the tip of the iceberg though. If I asked you what exactly was your reaction to a particular event in your life, you find it very easy to come up with vaguely convenient adjectives like happy, amazing, boring, tedious, horrible etc. If I forced you to go into detail, most of the times, you can expand on these adjectives, giving a more or less complete description of your emotional reaction.
This is what we call memory. What differentiates us humans from the poor goldfish that we pity for its lack of the same.
We assume that recall is something akin to querying a computer for the contents of a particular address and then having it spout out the result accurately for us. But is human memory really that? Can our brains, that relatively tiny mass of nervous tissue that occupies our cranium, process every single thing that happens to us and then index and store it all away only to serve it to us on a platter every time we try to recall something? Imagine the sheer volume of data that needs to be stored this way. Also, how do you get those "tags"(nice,amazing,meh,dreadful) every time you query for an event? Does your brain process through hours of film and evaluate every associated emotion, performing numerous mathematical calculations and taking weighted averages, to finally give you a result?
Seems improbable, doesn't it? Just as machines seek to optimise their use of memory, apparently, so do our brains. In videos for instance, there is huge amount of data to be stored and crunched in every frame. However, in most cases very little data changes between two frames. Therefore, a commendable approach to video compression is to store only the deltas i.e the differences between one frame and the next. Our brains need to find an even more economic way to store events, because there's just too much data.
Let me start with this: Reflect on your last birthday(substitute this with any other eventful occasion). How would you describe it? It would be reasonable to say that the first emotion in your mind would be a happy(positive) or a sad(negative) one. Needless to say, this emotion is associated with some event that took place on that particular day. Going a step further, can you recall that entire day? A perfect scene-by-scene recall? Unless you have an eidetic memory, I would presume not. Then, how is it that without taking into account everything that transpired on that day, you are able to state that this was a happy/sad day?
Psychology, or even plain observation, can give you the answer to this. Our brain mostly relies on "peaks" and "endings" to evaluate something. Say you were on a vacation, and on the last day, something really bad happened. Whenever I asked you to evaluate the vacation, you would inevitably label it as bad, regardless of how good the rest of it was. Similarly, if you had an ordinary day with something really amazing that happened in between, this is the label that your brain would store. Any mention of the day would bring up only this amazing event, obscuring everything else by its amplitude of extraordinariness.
This is just the tip of the iceberg though. If I asked you what exactly was your reaction to a particular event in your life, you find it very easy to come up with vaguely convenient adjectives like happy, amazing, boring, tedious, horrible etc. If I forced you to go into detail, most of the times, you can expand on these adjectives, giving a more or less complete description of your emotional reaction.
This is what we call memory. What differentiates us humans from the poor goldfish that we pity for its lack of the same.
We assume that recall is something akin to querying a computer for the contents of a particular address and then having it spout out the result accurately for us. But is human memory really that? Can our brains, that relatively tiny mass of nervous tissue that occupies our cranium, process every single thing that happens to us and then index and store it all away only to serve it to us on a platter every time we try to recall something? Imagine the sheer volume of data that needs to be stored this way. Also, how do you get those "tags"(nice,amazing,meh,dreadful) every time you query for an event? Does your brain process through hours of film and evaluate every associated emotion, performing numerous mathematical calculations and taking weighted averages, to finally give you a result?
Seems improbable, doesn't it? Just as machines seek to optimise their use of memory, apparently, so do our brains. In videos for instance, there is huge amount of data to be stored and crunched in every frame. However, in most cases very little data changes between two frames. Therefore, a commendable approach to video compression is to store only the deltas i.e the differences between one frame and the next. Our brains need to find an even more economic way to store events, because there's just too much data.
Ponder over this explanation now. What if our brains chose a few data points from every event and stored them alone? Thereafter, when you try to recall something, these data points are interpolated-- are weaved together to form a tapestry, if you would like a simpler analogy-- to form the actual event in its entirety. This complete picture is then served to you in full HD, with a bow. But the brain is a skilled craftsman--you never realize the weaving that goes on in the background. It is all abstracted to you, all you see is a query and a result.
Birthday--surprise party, friends. cake, gift, happy, dinner. Sunday- sleep, grocery, rain, movie, mall.
Query for your birthday,Result: Friends threw a surprise party, there was this amazing chocolate cake, got a really nice gift, then went out for dinner. Ah, it was a great day--still brings a smile on my face!
But this compression is lossy, isn't it? Inevitably, during this sampling, there are things that get left out. Similarly, during the weaving back of a memory, things that weren't really there get added. Interpolation is more of an exercise in curve-fitting, or imagination if you want to phrase it that way. What your brain thinks you would have felt, rather than what you actually felt.
How, then, can we trust memory? Maybe, on that birthday that you now fondly recall, you actually felt lonely when it was all done. But that detail wasn't considered important, and wasn't captured. Consequently, it isn't part of what you recall now. You recall the past with such a nostalgic air. But what is to guarantee that it was that great? How do you really know that this is what you felt then?
The answer is, you don't. You have to live with this curse. :)
P.S: It is this, Dear Reader, that changed things irrevocably for me. I look at everything I recall with paranoia now. Is this how it really was? Or merely a convenient rendition that my brain is trying to feed me? It made me wish that I'd never known this, so that I could be content with my memories. :P
Also, a really silly digression: Remember the "All's well that ends well" ? What if the Bard actually took an interest in psychology and figured out that the endings mattered more than everything else upto that point and hence said this line? :P
Comments
Post a Comment