Memory, p.23
Memory, page 23
From JEAN-PIERRE CHANGEUX and paul ricoeur, What Makes Us Think? 2000, translated by M.B. DeBevoise (2000)
Ricoeur: The case of memory is particularly favorable to the continuation of our discussion. Phenomenology and the neurosciences are in agreement, in fact, with regard to description while diverging with regard to interpretation. Let us consider the problem of description for a moment. It is not by chance that you cited William James in connection with the distribution between immediate memory, understood as working memory, and indirect, or long-term, memory. In Husserl’s Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, one finds a comparable distinction expressed in the vocabulary of ‘retention’ and ‘remembrance.’ In the case of retention, the recent past, which has ‘just’ occurred, ‘still’ remains present to consciousness, whereas the distant past no longer plays a role in the present that James calls ‘specious’ and you call ‘apparent’; it is reached through an interval of time by stepping backward into a time other than the present described as ‘no longer being,’ which is to say ‘having been.’ You observe that the sense of the unity and continuity of conscious experience depends on working memory – the whole of the duration, I would add, being put together by means of a series of retentions of retentions.
Moving from this observation to consider the question of memory traces, phenomenology may be seen to operate on the plane both of description and interpretation. The descriptive aspect can be examined with the aid of several new pairs of contrasted terms. First there is the distinction introduced by Bergson between ‘habit memory’ [mémoire-habitude] and ‘pure memory’ [mémoire-souvenir]. For it is one thing to execute a familiar task, for example to recite a text learned by heart; it is another to recall learning to execute such a task. The latter form of memory concerns a singular, nonrepeatable event that occurred once in the past. The relation to time, which I will come back to in a moment, is different in the case of each term of the contrasted pair: in the case of habit memory, the past is acted out and incorporated in the present without distance; in the case of pure memory, the anteriority or priorness of the remembered event stands out, whereas in habit memory it does not. This distinction concerning the relation to time is important for dissociating memory and learning, as against the tendency of the biology of memory to treat the two phenomena as continuous – to remember and to memorize are distinct phenomena.
Another pair of terms concerns the relation between spontaneous recollection and more or less labored recall: one pole is represented by Proust’s involuntary memory; the other by an effort of memory, which is a type of intellectual effort and which reduces neither to the association of empiricist tradition nor to calculation. This effort involves what Bergson and Merleau-Ponty call a ‘dynamic schema’ capable of directing memory searches by discarding inappropriate candidates and recognizing the ‘right’ memory. The phenomenon of recognition is itself very interesting, in the sense that the remembered past and the present moment of recall overlap without being identical: the past is not known, but re-known, as it were – recognized.
A third remarkable pair involves remembering as memory of oneself and, at the same time, as memory of something other than oneself. One may speak here of a polarity between reflexivity and worldliness: on the one hand, as the pronominal form of the French verb ‘to remember’ [se souvenir] suggests, it is of oneself that one remembers; on the other hand, the specific intentionality of memory carries it toward events that are said to have happened, to have occurred. Events occur in the world and are linked to places – the places of memory [lieux de mémoire] famously analyzed by Pierre Nora. In the case of the most memorable events, these places are ‘marked’ by collective memory, as a result of which the events linked to them are made memorable; they are inscribed in geographical space just as commemorable events are inscribed in historical time – that is, in the world around us. The connection between reflexivity and worldliness is established by bodily memory, which may itself be immediate or deferred, acted out or represented: it is a self of flesh and blood that we remember, with its moments of pleasure and suffering, its states, its actions, its feelings – which in their turn are situated in an environment, and particularly in places where we have been present with others and which we jointly remember.
Changeux: So far, I agree. The implementation of such a dynamic schema of memory recall by trial and error in terms of a neuronal network seems to me entirely possible and relevant. We will come back to this.
Ricoeur: A final point regarding description: neurobiologists insist on the distinct and derivative character of ‘declarative’ memory, which is structured by language – mainly by narrative. I wonder whether it is possible to escape the connection between memory and language; the link seems so close that, in the case of problems related to a lesion or other dysfunctions, one can hardly do without the accounts of the subjects themselves. Nonetheless, this is a question that Husserl posed in the unpublished writings: does the prenarrative level rise above muteness? Can one join Dilthey, then, in speaking of the ‘cohesion of life’ – and therefore of the coherence that life creates with itself – underlying the narrative coherence of personal accounts? For the moment I leave the question open.
Your reference to time, in introducing the problem of memory, leads me now from description to interpretation. The question of memory traces is unavoidable to the extent that the notion of time involves reference to something absent. Plato was the first, to my knowledge, to have formulated the essential paradox: memory, he says in the Theaetetus, expresses the presence of something absent. But whereas, for the imagination, the absent is unreal (as Sartre emphasized in The Imaginary), for memory the absent is prior, marked by the adverb ‘previously.’ Prior to what? To the memory that we now have of it, to the account that we now give of it. Of course, memory and imagination constantly interact, in the form of fantasy, among other things; also owing to the tendency to display our memories in images, as on a screen. This doesn’t prevent us from expecting our memories to be trustworthy, and our memory faithful to what has actually taken place – we do not demand this of the imagination, which is permitted to dream. As untrustworthy as memory may be, it is all we have to assure ourselves that something previously took place. The past is therefore absent from our accounts in a specific way. Neuroscience introduces the notion of a trace in order to account for exactly this presence of something absent. Preservation, storage, mobilization at the moment of recall – the competence of objective science with regard to these material operations is indisputable.
For my part, I have no trouble integrating your notions of cortical geography and neuronal inscription with the notion of a basic substrate, understood as an indispensable condition. Besides, in the case of dysfunctions, whether due to lesions or something else, knowledge of these neural mechanisms comes to be altogether naturally incorporated with the experience of one’s own body, in the form of therapeutic intervention aimed at adapting behavior to a ‘catastrophic’ situation, to use Goldstein’s term once again. But the use of such knowledge as a practical matter seems to me more problematic, indeed irrelevant, in the case of felicitous memory – even though the forgetting against which we struggle serves to remind us that such memory is not absolutely felicitous, or fully functioning, since forgetting oscillates between the complete erasure of memories and the blocking of memories that are available but inaccessible. In this regard, psychoanalysis is inclined to suppose that we forget less than we fear we do and that with effort – Freud’s famous ‘effort to remember’ – we can recover and reincorporate whole pieces of memory in a more readable and more acceptable personal history.
Chaǹgeux: You mention forgetting. Two psychologists, Hermann Ebbinghaus at the end of the nineteenth century and F. C. Bartlett in the 1930s, were the first to quantitatively analyze the development of memory traces. They measured the rate of forgetting through quantitative and qualitative evaluation of conscious recall. The first method makes use of meaningless syllables; the second, by contrast, of meaningful stories. In both cases the trace undergoes a rapid decline within an hour; then a slow process of forgetting over a period of days, weeks, even months. The trace becomes fragmented. Separate elements disappear, others persist. The recall after several months of a complex story displays modifications, omissions, changes in the order of events and alteration of the details. Recalling a memory trace involves, in Bartlett’s phrase, ‘an effort to understand’ – a reconstruction based on preexisting schemas and on what has been retained. The agreement with Merleau-Ponty’s theses, and even with Freud’s ‘effort to remember,’ is clear. Nonetheless, to create meaning in the course of restoring memories also risks changing them, falsifying them – quite innocently, of course.
In a pathological context, there are ‘source’ amnesias, often due to age, where the patient can no longer remember when, where, or how a memory was acquired. Recollection in the case of other amnesias is associated with a curious sort of speech containing obviously false, contradictory, bizarre, and in any case improbable information. These fantastic confabulations, typically the result of frontal lobe lesion, are the result of inadequate reconstructions, errors of evaluation in the recollection of memories, and a failure to properly situate them in the context of one’s personal history.
In normal subjects, memory distortions and implantations of false memories frequently occur. Their experimental implementation is simple. One presents the subject with a series of slides depicting a complex event and then reads him an account of the event containing deliberate misinformation; after several other tests, he is finally given a memory test. The result is obvious: not only is a very high proportion of false memories introduced during the misinformation stage, but the subject unhesitatingly believes them. The implantation of false memories in adults, as in children, can have serious consequences. In the United States recently there has been a sort of epidemic of cases of ‘resurrected’ memories involving persons, sometimes undergoing psychotherapy, who think they have recovered long-forgotten memories of childhood mistreatment (most commonly sexual or other violent abuse). Illusory memories can thus be created in vulnerable patients, leading them to invent a false autobiography.
The Art of Memory
From CICERO, De Oratore (55 BC), translated by F. B. Calvert (1878)
I am not, like Themistocles, of so retentive a genius as to prefer the art of forgetfulness to that of memory; on the contrary, I am grateful to Simonides of Ceos, the reputed originator of the system of artificial memory. It is related that on one occasion, when he was supping with Scopas at Crannon, in Thessaly, and engaged in reciting some verses which he had composed in honour of that very prosperous and noble personage, he introduced, by way of embellishment, much poetical allusion to Castor and Pollux. At the conclusion, Scopas told him, in rather too sordid a spirit, that only half the stipulated sum should be paid him for his poem, for the other moiety, he might look, if he chose, to the Tyndaridae, who had engrossed full half of the eulogy. Shortly after, a message was said to have been brought to Simonides, that he was wanted at the door, where two young men were eagerly inquiring for him; he immediately rose and went out, but saw nobody. In the short interval of his absence, however, the hall where Scopas was banqueting with his friends fell in, crushing him and the whole party to death, and burying them in the ruins. When the mangled remains could not by any means be identified by their friends, who came to recover the bodies, Simonides had so distinct a recollection of the exact spot occupied by each individual that he was able to give satisfactory directions for their interment. Taking a hint from this occurrence, he is said to have discovered that order was the luminous guide to memory, and that those, therefore, who wish to cultivate this faculty should have places portioned off in the mind, fixing in these several compartments certain images to represent the ideas they wished to remember; thus the order of places would preserve the order of ideas, and the symbols would suggest the ideas themselves – the places standing for the wax and the images for the letters.
But a verbal memory, which is not so necessary for us, must be distinguished by a greater variety of symbols: there are many words connecting, like joints, the different members of language which cannot be represented by any corresponding images; for these certain arbitrary symbols must be invented to be always used in their stead. But the memory of things is properly the memory of the orator, and this we may attain by the creation of distinct and aptly arranged images, so that the signs shall suggest the sentences and the compartments their regular succession. Nor is there any foundation for the objection of the indolent, that the memory is likely to be oppressed with the load of images, and that ideas easily retained by the natural memory are only rendered the more obscure by this artificial process; for I remember having seen two remarkable men with memories of almost superhuman tenacity, viz., Charmadas at Athens, and Scepsius Metrodorus in Asia, the latter of whom is said to be still living, by each of whom I was assured that he could inscribe in the different compartments of his mind whatever he wished to remember as easily as he could trace the letters in wax. Though memory, therefore, cannot be wrought out of the mind unless implanted there by nature, if latent it certainly may be elicited.
From ANON, Rhetorica ad Herennium (1st century BC), translated by Harry Caplan (1954)
Now let me turn to the treasure-house of the ideas supplied by Invention, to the guardian of all the parts of rhetoric, the Memory.
The question whether memory has some artificial quality, or comes entirely from nature, we shall have another, more favourable, opportunity to discuss. At present I shall accept as proved that in this matter art and method are of great importance, and shall treat the subject accordingly. For my part, I am satisfied that there is an art of memory – the grounds of my belief I shall explain elsewhere. For the present I shall disclose what sort of thing memory is.
There are, then, two kinds of memory: one is natural, and the other the product of art. The natural memory is that memory which is imbedded in our minds, born simultaneously with thought. The artificial memory is that memory which is strengthened by a kind of training and system of discipline. But just as in everything else the merit of natural excellence often rivals acquired learning, and art, in its turn, reinforces and develops the natural advantages, so does it happen in this instance. The natural memory, if a person is endowed with an exceptional one, is often like this artificial memory, and this artificial memory, in its turn, retains and develops the natural advantages by a method of discipline. Thus the natural memory must be strengthened by discipline so as to become exceptional, and, on the other hand, this memory provided by discipline requires natural ability. It is neither more nor less true in this instance than in the other arts that science thrives by the aid of innate ability, and nature by the aid of the rules of art. The training here offered will therefore also be useful to those who by nature have a good memory, as you will yourself soon come to understand. But even if these, relying on their natural talent, did not need our help, we should still be justified in wishing to aid the well-endowed. Now I shall discuss the artificial memory.
The artificial memory includes backgrounds and images. By backgrounds I mean such scenes as are naturally or artificially set off on a small scale, complete and conspicuous, so that we can grasp and embrace them easily by the natural memory – for example, a house, an intercolumnar space, a recess, an arch, or the like. An image is, as it were, a figure, mark, or portrait of the object we wish to remember; for example, if we wish to recall a horse, a lion, or an eagle, we must place its image in a definite background. Now I shall show what kind of backgrounds we should invent and how we should discover the images and set them therein.
Those who know the letters of the alphabet can thereby write out what is dictated to them and read aloud what they have written. Likewise, those who have learned mnemonics can set in backgrounds what they have heard, and from these backgrounds deliver it by memory. For the backgrounds are very much like wax tablets or papyrus, the images like the letters, the arrangement and disposition of the images like the script, and the delivery is like the reading. We should therefore, if we desire to memorise a large number of items, equip ourselves with a large number of backgrounds, so that in these we may set a large number of images. I likewise think it obligatory to have these backgrounds in a series, so that we may never by confusion in their order be prevented from following the images – proceeding from any background we wish, whatsoever its place in the series, and whether we go forwards or backwards – nor from delivering orally what has been committed to the backgrounds.
For example, if we should see a great number of our acquaintance standing in a certain order, it would not make any difference to us whether we should tell their names beginning with the person standing at the head of the line or at the foot or in the middle. So with respect to the backgrounds. If these have been arranged in order, the result will be that, reminded by the images, we can repeat orally what we have committed to the backgrounds, proceeding in either direction from any background we please. That is why it also seems best to arrange the backgrounds in a series.
