story of my life

[coraa]

Rambly; also: navel-gaze-y. Be warned.

It sometimes seems to me that I have a better memory than many of the people I interact with day-to-day. I'm not talking about a better memory for things like to-do lists, or details of what I'm working on, or paying the bills on time or practicalities like that. I'm also not basing this on observation -- as I'm notoriously absentminded about things like 'remembering to take my cell phone with me' -- but on other peoples' reports of their long-term memory. Because that's what I'm talking about: long-term 'historical' memory, being able to remember scattered incidents back to when I was three years old, being able to recall things that happened to me from about age five in reasonably good chronological order with a fair amount of detail. (Full-sensory, too. I remember the color of the wood of the Heidelburg Tun -- and I wasn't far off, either; I just checked the picture on the Wikipedia article -- the smell of my aunt's garden, the taste of blood when I fell off the parallel bars and split my lip open at age nine, and the way the torn lip felt against my tongue.)

A lot of my friends say that they can't remember back that far, or that they don't remember things in order, or in very great detail, or don't remember things at all unless someone or something reminds them. (And I don't doubt them a bit; how could I possibly, with something like memory?) There could be a lot of explanations for that, but sometimes I wonder if this is part of it:

A lot of my friends are scientists, or engineers. I'm a writer, a word-person; more to the point, I've told myself stories since... well, since I can remember, which is to say back to when I was three. And not all of those stories were wholly invented. I've narrated my own life for as long as I could remember, retreading details and recasting it in my own mind -- not just reliving it, but trying to turn it over and fit it into the larger narrative of my life. That time I fell off the parallel bars? It got replayed, not only because it hurt (ow), but also because it fit several of the narratives I told myself about my life: I tried to do the flip that resulted in the fall to fit in with a group of popular girls, and so it became part of my narrative, much later, of fitting in (or not); I failed, which fit, later, into a narrative about being clumsy and unathletic. I'm not saying that falling-off-the-parallel-bars was a pivotal moment in my life -- far from it. But when I tried to make sense of my life, when I told myself stories about Not Being Popular or Being Clumsy or whatever, I'd retread it, turn it around, remember it. And keep remembering it. Over and over and over and over and... To this day.

(Sometimes even in nested memories! I have a particular memory from first grade that I remember, and remember remembering, and remember remembering remembering, chained upward until... well, now. And I've often narrated my own movements, sometimes even from third-person -- that sounds bizarre, but it's true -- so sometimes I'll remember the words I used to describe my own walk home from school, remembering the picture I was making inside my head that afternoon when I was twelve. And lodestone memories: the time, in second grade, a friend asked me how I could know that I was awake and not dreaming, and I said of course that I couldn't, and wondered if it was a dream... and then returned to that memory every few years and thought: what if I woke up now, and it was a dream? What if I really am still six years old, dreaming a world and a life, and tomorrow I'll wake up and walk with Eileen across that frosty playground -- and envy her waist-length fat french braid, and exhale hard to make my breath show up on the cold air -- and tell her: last night I had this dream.... So I come back to it, because I wonder, because wouldn't that be a story?)

I wonder if this tendency to narrativize (not a word, I know!) my life is part of why I remember it so well -- because I've been practicing remembering, keeping things in working memory for a long time, until the habit of recalling them was easy. And of course this has a down side. Whenever I'm in a particular kind of bad mood and start to tell myself the Story of Why I'm An Idiot, my brain is quite happy to bring up thousands of examples in full living color, going back, literally, to when I was three years old. Furthermore, given that I've been recasting these stories repeatedly to myself for, in some cases, twenty-two years, chances are nearly 100% that I have altered many of the details or even made incidents up whole-cloth. Still. Some of the memories are true, or at least true enough to be corroborated; for many of the rest, I don't think it really matters how close I am to the truth. In general, I'm glad to remember that I played Peter Rabbit's mother in the first grade puppet show, or that there was mother-of-pearl buried among the roots of the plum trees in our backyard when I was nine, or the color of that Tun, even if I might be embellishing them -- but I do wonder if that's why I remember them: because I made them a story, and made them less true, but more memorable.

(Of course, now you're all going to tell me you narrativized your own lives and also have rotten memories, and ruin my theory -- nonetheless! I do think it's why I remember, at least.)

Comments

[lucasmembrane.livejournal.com]

Interesting. It's definitely true that I'm not a word person, and I don't narrativize my life that way (more now than I used to, but still not a lot), but I also wonder if some part of my problem is brain damage.

I fell a lot as a child. I had three separate concussions that we know of. Some time after the third one (which was somewhere between the ages of five and ten, cuz that's the house it happened in), I developed a stutter. I didn't have the repeated syllables, but I would get blocks where I'd know the word I wanted but couldn't make my mouth move or force the air out of my lungs. Speech therapy made it all better, but it's interesting the way it just sort of appeared - the mean onset of developmental stuttering is 2.5 yrs according to Wikipedia, and I was at least 7 or 8.

Anyway, back when Amber was in her neuroscience class, she hypothesized that this could be a result of damage to Broca's Area, since I had a couple of other quirks and mental blocks that are handled in that part of the brain as well (unfortunately, I can't remember what they were, but Amber might). It's not really worth the trouble of trying to figure it out, of course, but I do rather like the idea that I suffer from some sort of brain damage :)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I remember Broca's Area and the associated Broca's aphasia from my linguistics classes in college -- very interesting!

The thing I find intriguing is how comparatively many of my friends complain of poor memory -- not only you, but also donaithnen (who complains of broken mental reverse-lookup) and, I believe, thegreatgonz, and to a lesser extent jmpava and a few more.

I could probably also make a stab at blaming other things (my stubbornness, and my ability to hold a grudge) to the tendency to storytell and retread. Not attractive traits, maybe, but very me.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

Researchers currently believe that we don't remember things so much as re-remember. It's kind of like saving over the same files on your computer. You can imagine how corruptions might crop up over time.

However, I will say that the ability to recall and to tell a linear narrative is associated with brain development. For example, children under five have a very difficult time telling any story in linear order, and one of the reasons beating children has fallen out of favor is that reinforcing discipline and what the child is being disciplined for can be very difficult when they haven't developed those reasoning or narrative skills.

I would guess you practice remembering, which helps.... We are also living in a time when many of a memories are kept externally. Ahhh... the dangers of literacy!

[donaithnen.livejournal.com]

Which of course brings up the question of whether those of us who have difficulty remembering things actually have problems remembering the seed memories or re-remembering the rest of it :)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Researchers currently believe that we don't remember things so much as re-remember.

That makes a lot of sense. I do suspect that I more remember remembering than that I actually remember the source memory. And yeah, corruptions -- and I've read about the studies about the ease of inventing memories with a startling amount of clarity and detail, without realizing you're doing it, that are actually completely made up. (I think one of them was asking people to retell the time they got lost in the mall, and most of them could do it with details and anecdotes and so on, even though none of them actually had gotten lost in the mall as a child...)

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Yup. I narrativize too, and have told myself stories from a very young age (my mother once told me that a neighbor mentioned this when I was about 4--hearing me in the yard, all alone, telling a story as I acted it out), and I have a lot of early memories. If I understand what you're describing, my memories are perhaps not as detailed and orderly as yours, but there are a lot of them.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yes, that exactly. I would shut myself in my room (to keep from being distracted by my younger brother) and then dash around acting out the story I made up. For quite a long time.

[donaithnen.livejournal.com]

Or perhaps you tend to narrativize your life because you have so much source material to work with?

I've often lamented that i either never experience or never remember the cool and amusing stories and anecdotes that everyone else seems able to come up with at the drop of a hat. And my biggest self-criticism about things i try to write is the dilogue and other interactions between the people in the story, i wonder if that lack is because i'm not as social as a lot of other people and so don't have a proper basis to write such things, or if i don't remember the social interactions i've had/witnessed well enough to base anything off of them. (Or a combination of both of course.)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Or perhaps you tend to narrativize your life because you have so much source material to work with?

I kind of doubt that the causality works that way -- I've been narrativizing since I was five or six, basically for as long as I can remember, and back then I didn't have that much source material. But it could be!

(The third option for the writing thing, of course, is that writing dialogue is notoriously hard for a lot of people and you might just not have enough practice with it. But I really have no idea how much you practice, so that might have nothing to do with it. Similarly, a lot of the 'cool and amusing anecdote' thing is actually not so much in having a lot of awesome memories but in knowing how to retell them interestingly... some people can tell you about doing their laundry and make it riveting. But you're right -- having a good memory can't hurt.)

[livinglaurel.livejournal.com]

(Of course, now you're all going to tell me you narrativized your own lives and also have rotten memories, and ruin my theory -- nonetheless! I do think it's why I remember, at least.)

//grins Well, I thought about it....I DO constantly do the storytelling-in-my-head gig ("words, words, words....") and my memory _is_ pretty rotten, altho I think that might have something to do with decades of untreated substance abuse/depression/wtf-evar. -- I do have a sort of visual memory for knowing where a passage in a book is -- right or left-hand side of the page, how far up or down, page number, and so on -- but looking up texts on the net is slowly atrophying that.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

*grin* Well, and I've learned over the years that a Grand Unifying Theory of anything on LJ will result in sixteen replies saying 'yeah, I totally don't work that way, I work like X,' where X is sixteen different things. (Which is nice, actually. Diversity is refreshing.)

That reminds me of a peculiar memory tic I have. I can't remember where I am in a book very well... unless I actually look at the page number and consciously subvocalize "53" or "97" or "204." Then, even if I don't pick it up or think about it for days, I'll know when I pick it back up that it was 53, or 97, or 204.

[livinglaurel.livejournal.com]

HA, I think if you throw ANYthing out on Elljay, you'll get about sixteen replies back going "Absolutely not!" and sixteen replies going "Absolutement yes!" Which is amusing, and cool, when it isn't annoying.

-- Oh, I do that too! the subvocalization, I mean, or just "fixing" the number in my head. And once I do that, it sticks.

[clairebaxter.livejournal.com]

I do that too, but the trouble is, I remember all of them from the last few days. So I'm looking at 53, 97, 204, 300, then I remember that was from yesterday's book, and I try 12, 56, 141, and 302. Not as useful as your style of remembering.

[triath.livejournal.com]

I don't remember things as well as I'd like to, but I also use the story-telling method of remembering my past. My family traditionally tells funny stories of our day around the dinner table, so I learned quickly that I needed to A) Pay attention to things that happen to me B) Remember them and C) Think of how they could be told in good funny story format.

Often my memory stories are triggered by another event, but many of them are still in there somewhere.

However, for the day to day and the emotions, I find this journal to be very helpful at recording my history.

[madduckdes.livejournal.com]

I have an astoundingly good memory - when it feels like kicking in. I kind of alternate between absentmindedness versus "No, you said *this* word, and you said it with *this* tone; yes, I'm *positive*."

My memories sort of float around like whole contained gems that are disconnected from each other. The memory itself is coherent, but it may not link up with what came before or after. And the further back you go, the less connected it is.

I think there are definitely story people and not story people, numbers people and not numbers people, practical memories people vs trivia people, etc. I remember numbers better than letters, but words better than numbers, and looks better than words. I poorly remember touches, smells, feel of the wind, stuff like that. I basically *only* recreate those things and figure that's what it would have been like, rather than having a genuine particular memory that I'm drawing from.

I narrate my life, but I don't bother remembering the narration. I know that I do it because I have a sense of it being something that I do so consistently that I don't bother remembering the individual instance; this is similar to not needing to remember what it felt like to fall asleep last week to know that I did in fact fall asleep. I narrate because it's fun, it's interesting, it passes the time. It helps my brain feel alive. I think I started doing this because I get bored so quickly, and too much boredom makes me anxious. While I'm telling a story in my head, talking to myself about my own life as it happens, from third person as if someone else would ever care enough to read about it, I feel more real. Isn't funny how a story that no one ever hears can do that?

[fairnymph.livejournal.com]

I'm the same way, I think. I also remember things vividly from an early age.

<3 I loved this post!

[cwendy41.livejournal.com]

I think I have a pretty good memory of past events as well.

However, I've also read that if somebody tells you that something happened, eventually you start believing it. For example, they did a study where a few kids were told that they were kidnapped. They were given details about it. After a while, the kids believed that it had happened to them, right down to the very last detail of what they were wearing, when the incident had never happened. Psychologists can cause trouble this way (usually unintentionally).

There's this one memory that I have from when I must have been 2 or so. I went down the slide backwards and hit my head. But the thing is, I can't tell if it's a dream I had when I was little or if it really happened. (None of the adult parties responsible will fess up to being careless with a kid, so I can't asking them for an answer.)

[porfinn.livejournal.com]

I have always been curious if having a smidgeon of talent for remembering things as a child, and receiving praise for it, nudges the child into working that talent more than...say...a kid who is praised for artistic ability...and that small spark of talent is developed into a skill. I've also noticed that those people who remember better, also seem more interested in "things". It seems that there are things people remember, but it has to be of enough interest to motivate the brain into making the effort. I've also noticed that stress can play havoc with memory. I'm also curious why it is more "natural" te remember the uncomfortable, difficult to remember the truly painful, and not habit to dwell in the beautiful. It seems much more normal when people are in an uncomfortable place to remember other uncomfortable incidents.