Last week we went to a wedding reception.
The parents of the bride are friends of ours. There was a pre-dinner short boat
trip on the Thames. On the deck I saw a couple of other people who were mutual
friends. We gravitated towards each other and ended up standing together on the
deck.
I got busy talking to them but in the back
of my mind something kept niggling. While getting on the boat I saw a familiar
face but could not put a name or context to it. Who was that man? If I could
remember where I met him before, I might be able to put a context and then maybe
I could even recall his name.
To say that you know a person you have
to know the context in addition to name and image. When we meet a person and have interaction
with, the brain acquires all these bits of information and automatically stores
them. Unfortunately each bit is retained in a separate place, on top of that, as
the time passes they are moved around perpetually depending on the priority our
brain assigns them.
How does the brain prioritize, does not
enter into our consciousness. Sometime very mundane and banal facts are kept in
the fore of the mind and at other times even crucial or apoplectic events are forgotten. Our brain does not share a lot of things with
us! Is it an evolutionary asset or a design fault?
Forgetting events and people associated
with unpleasant or unimportant events certainly keeps us in positive frame of
mind but forgetting important episodes puts us at a great disadvantage. The
problem is that it is our brain that decides what is important, not our
conscious mind. People who had been in rather close contact in past feel hurt
when they find out that you cannot recall their names, faces or contexts. They impart
blame as if you have “consciously” forgotten them.
Luckily, one of the friends who I was
talking with said “have you met Rehman? He is here on the boat.” Suddenly the
veil disappeared I remembered him. He worked with us in the same
department and lived only a few blocks away. That was 20 yrs
ago! All these bits of information were in my brain safely stored, just needed
a trigger to bring them to my conscious mind. A few minutes later when he came near
us, I met him with all the warmth that my memory has just delivered!
If you think memory is for keeping an
accurate record of past, then it is flawed and defective. But as a tool for
imagining future scenarios and thus preparing us to face the uncertainties of future
better, it is a design marvel. This really is the purpose of memory.
“Indeed, our ability to revisit the past
may be only a design feature of our ability to conceive of the future” Suddendorf & Busby 2003
