Where Does Memory Inhabit?

I'm not sure the format of how this should look, so please forgive any faux paus!

Christine Hyung-Oak Lee starts her book with snippets that occurred around her stroke, pieced together from blog entries, photos, medical records, and likelihood estimates based on past patterns, as her actual memory had failed her. Her cherished photographic memory vanished, as did her short term memory. She re-read the same paragraph of Slaughterhouse-Five over and over, as she could not remember more than a few lines at a time. She could no longer carry on conversations with people or function independently.  With the loss of her memory, she also loses her identity -- “the stroke changed my brain, which changed my mind, which then changed me” (p. 49).


When we think of stroke victims, we often think about people with a weak arm, a drooping lip, a slur to their speech.  Hyung-Oak Lee didn’t have these telltale signs and symptoms, as her stroke affected a different region of her brain -- the thalamus. She describes this small collection of cells as the “internet router” of the brain, critical for the creation and retrieval of memories. She explains how short-term memory is stored in the prefrontal cortex (53), the part of her brain that went “offline” after her stroke,” and how everything in long-term memory must find its way there through short-term memory (p. 60). She then defines the different forms of long-term memory, implicit and explicit, and gives personal examples from her past to both make her point and to tell us more about who she is as a character across time and place. The writing in this section of her memoir reminds me of Oliver Sacks, who often combines personal anecdote with medical science, specifically the mysteries not fully explained by current neurology and neuroscience.  
In “On Memory,” Sachs describes the fallibility of memory, perhaps because of the wiring inherent in our brains. After his memoir “Uncle Tungsten” was published, his brother Michael told him that he was not actually there for one of the bombings he wrote about; it was their brother who saw it, and then wrote about it in a letter to both of them. Michael remembered how enthralled Sacks was with the letter, likely invoking mental imagery and corporal feelings that his brain sorted away in the same manner as if he had actually been there, via the same neuro-pathways. Sacks appropriated the memory as his own, and as such, wonders if psychoanalysis or brain imaging would be able to tell the difference.
It seems likely that they would not. For example, a study by Stark, Okado, and Loftus showed that retrieval of both true and false memories lit up similar areas of the brain on MRI’s. Many neuroscientists believe that memory is more like a slide show than a movie, with the details filled in by emotions, expectations, historical experiences, biases, and subsequent conversations, and that perhaps the point of memory is more to help us navigate what may happen in the future, and less to provide accurate recall of a past event.


Although Hyung-Oak Lee doesn’t bring up the concept of epigenetics, it is possible that our memories are stored in places other than just specific regions of our brains. Epigenetics is the study of how the phenotypic expression of genes can be switched “on” or “off” in a way that may be heritable, and does not involve actual changes to the underlying DNA sequence (genotype). In this way, we may carry around the traumatic memories of our grandparents in the DNA found within all of our body’s cells;  memory may inhabit our entire body at the cellular level.  At it’s core.


But all of this risks sounding too scientific.  Just as memory inhabits the genetic code of every cell in our body, and is pulled out of the ethers of our hippocampus when the neurons of our noses smell a lover’s perfume, memory also inhabits the soul. When it changes, so too do we. For several years after the stroke, Christine goes from an extrovert to an introvert, and cannot venture into the world as she once did. The relationship between her and her husband changes to the point of disrepair.  I think of my Mother, the detail-oriented accountant, who can no longer remember even the broad details of my life without the aid of her record-keeping notebook. Who is this new person that I visit biannually? What of the old her has remained? How will our new, ever evolving, relationship look? Memory is a complicated creature.


Further reading:


Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 2, 2017 at 2:25 PM

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  2. AnonymousSeptember 3, 2017 at 1:16 PM

    Your writing really made me think about the role memory plays in shaping not merely who we believe ourselves to be, but in how others experience us. The reactions others have to our behavior has such an impact on our conception of our own identity, as Christine describes. Christine recounts the ways that her parents' reactions to her behaviors shaped her understanding of what was "good" and "bad" behavior. Their disapproval therefore came to resemble the later abuses she allowed from others because she had come to believe she deserved these punishments.
    This suggests that categorizing others' responses to us into "good" and "bad" and shaping our behavior around this is problematic. I am curious however about this experience of being trapped within a mind that is behaving in ways that one finds inexplicable and terrifying, as Christine was. Christine describes being completely aware of how those around her are responding and how her damaged memory impacts them, but is not able to interrupt their dismay--not able to be "good" as she was taught to be. Ultimately she therefore had to figure out how to transcend her parents' idea of good and bad behavior and cease to identify with the American culture her parents were trying to appeal to, for the sake of her own survival.
    This book and your post really made me sensitive to how my reactions might impact others' ideas of themselves. It made me think of the various ways we encounter sickness in others, and the ways we let others know we believe they are sick nonverbally. It also made me think harder about this notion of punishment, of nonverbally telling those around us we disapprove of their actions and to what end.
    -Ariadne

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  3. ElmazwritesSeptember 6, 2017 at 2:10 PM

    Thanks for all the additional information. Studying the brain is for the brave. The confusion of borrowed memory (like Sacks and his brother,) is somewhere on that continuum from collective to discreet memory perhaps. nice!
    e

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