Tuesday 3.45: The warder of the brain

Note: This is an essay I wrote originally for a newsletter at work.

In 2013, researchers at MIT successfully implanted false memories in the brains of mice through a process they called optogenetics. Using lasers, the researchers targeted specific neurons in the mice’s brains, activating engrams, which are cells encoded with the traces of episodic memories—memories of personal experiences tied to particular times and places.

Results were recorded in altered behavior: A mouse who had previously learned to avoid a certain area of his habitat because it gave him a mild electric shock no longer avoided it; another who had no exposure to stress became wary of what were, in reality, safe areas. Activating and de-activating engrams, researchers were able to control what the mice remembered and to implant some memories that hadn’t been there.

What struck me most about the study was the demonstration that memory is matter. That engrams exist in cells as photosensitive physical bodies. This means a memory has mass, a material reality. Now, that might not seem like that big of a deal until you consider the way memory functions in your everyday life. Misremembering a name, a date, or a narrative episode takes on new meaning when you consider that something biological in your brain—rather than a conceptual, relative association—has been altered.

I am the sort of person who thinks about something like this and then sits quietly, potentially for hours.

We’re all prone to misremembering. Sometimes we tell a story so many times we believe we were there when it happened, when in fact we weren’t. Or our fondness for certain people or places inserts them in memories incorrectly. We might recall old injures, physical or otherwise, as being suffered under circumstances contrary to the record; trauma adds a whole other layer. The creation of some false episodic memories can be interpreted as a simple tendency, a defense mechanism, a bias, etc., but while such a concept is relatively easy to understand theoretically, again, we are only just beginning to understand the physical, biological realities of false memory.

The Covid-19 pandemic, which created for many a somewhat oxymoronic trauma of mass alienation, affected memory on more immediate terms. Surveys analyzed by neuroscientists at the University of Westminster indicated that many people became more forgetful in the wake of shutdowns and public quarantines. The most frequent reports were an inability to place events temporally: to remember when something happened. Researchers connected this phenomenon to the physical reality the pandemic had imposed: a general, literal lack of movement. Moving through the world provides us with cues, a sense of time and place. If we’re deprived of the everyday sensory cues of an external reality—for example the sights, sounds, and yes, even the smells of a daily commute—we lose the beats of our own narrative, and we lose our sense of time.

More broadly, time is understood and experienced as the measurement of change. A reduction or elimination of change then engenders the distinctly peculiar feeling of lost time, in which one does not so much lose time as sense that time itself has lost its essential component, and so, its own reality.

Measuring change and mapping the cues that establish narrative, episodic memory is also a collective engagement, a possible definition of history. But, of course, the collective memory of history is anything but objective: the dynamics of power, hegemony, and perspective determine which memories are encoded into the collective consciousness, which stories get told, by whom, etc.

The confrontation—which the individual imposes upon the prevailing historical narrative—of these collections of atomized engrams forms “counter-memory” and “counter-history,” which French brain-haver Michel Foucault described as (I’m criminally paraphrasing here) a memory-formation practice that runs consciously contrary to official social and political histories, taking into consideration the effect of power on collective historical memory and developing a counter, in which suppressed voices, ideologies, and experiences are entered into the record. This sort of memory-making, Foucault said, was inherently revolutionary: Where there is power, there is resistance.

It’s critical to understand memory-making in this sense as a socio-political construct, and to recognize its bearing on the formation of a present identity. Consider, for example, recent debate regarding the removal of statuary memorializing Confederate, Secessionist, or slave-owning figures: Here, several layers of history and counter-history are evident, having developed in opposition to prevailing narratives and commonly held beliefs about the US Civil War, which themselves were shaped by shifting historiographic perspectives on war, nationalism, economics, etc. between say, 1890 and 1945. Whether we advocate for the protection or the destruction of these monuments (which as a physical, commemorative construction of a memory-place function as a whole additional can of proverbial worms), we’re confronting a historical narrative so as to establish an identity in our continuous historical present. This continuous confrontation of the past means that, as William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead and gone. It isn’t even past.”   

And it is in this confrontational resistance, from whatever perspective, that the act of remembering and memories in all their states of actuality can transform social realities: Remembering becomes a confrontation of memory that inscribes the contours of our future.

Seeing the subjective, social, and ultimately fallible reality of memory-making as also biological, and subject to the physical laws that govern the water we drink and the air we breathe, can help us come to terms with our own personal roles in this daily confrontation of identity and collective experience. We can begin to embrace the complex, diligent, delicate art of memory-making, and to transcend our own mouse-like experience by first accepting it. Only then can we meaningfully confront and resist the spaces of counsel and familiar comfort, with the same critical skepticism that we do the spaces of harm or peril, in pursuit of a better world.