In Search of Memory

The theme of today is memory.

I worked on a confidential project today at work that fundamentally is trying to solve the problem of gaps in human memory (taking that in a lofty, thematic sense).

I forgot to take a photo today until it was nearly midnight, even though the distinguishing memory from today was my 2nd ever Bikram Yoga session, which was much less painful than the first. (But also didn’t feel as amazing after.)

I’ve been trying to read Proust was a Neuroscientist, a book I borrowed from Charley, for days now. I can only catch 10 minutes on the subway to and from work each morning, so I’ve made only very creeping progress. Taking the thesis to I enjoy the literary quality of the writing and feel like some of my prior verbal comprehension is starting to come back to me. Jonah Lehrer argues that science is not the only means of understanding the world (and by proxy, the brain), and instead turns to art as a mirror for understanding of life and its complexities. I agree that “life imitates art”, but mostly on a metaphorical, thematic level. The analogical reasoning Lehrer describes in how these artists (poets, novelists, cooks, painters, etc.) somehow displayed a deep understanding of how the brain works is ironically concluded by analogical reasoning itself. He picks examples of artists whose beliefs tended to align with modern understanding of neuroscience, such as Walt Whitman’s intuition that the soul comes from the body, rather than existing as some separate spirit as believed in the 19th century, from his convictions and his poetry’s themes. I smell a cognitive bias (confirmation theory? subjective validation? hindset bias?), but the examples are still fun to skim through, even if I can’t finish a single chapter without wondering if my brain was affected by a cognitive bias.

This section on Proust and memory reminded me a lot of Cloud Atlas‘ main theme of Russian nesting doll-history and cocooned time:

… we like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them. But they aren’t. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes.

That’s eerie and a little poetically sad. (It’s also fallacy #32, the Misinformation Affect, of YANSS.) It’s the subject of so much science fiction and philosophical pondering. How do we ever know what we think we know about ourselves, our existence, is real? I can’t fathom how a brain comes up with these things, how trillions of synapses are firing to convince myself to entertain, even for a second, the idea that I don’t really exist, that I’m maybe a pod hooked up to a human-feeding Matrix machine or a speck of dust on the back of a giant turtle that is the universe, or that I’m a butterfly dreaming of being a (wo)man.

Take the human mind. Scientists describe our brains in terms of its physical details; they say we are nothing but a loom of electrical cells and synaptic spaces. What science forgets is that this isn’t how we experience the world. (We feel like the ghost, not like the machine.) It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness.

The very first chapter of Proust is probably most effective at capturing the spirit of this book. Whitman started diving into what our souls were made of, and how our spirit and consciousness came out of these physical bodies that we could cut up and study and feel and analyze. But centuries later, for all we know in neuroscience, there’s still no easy answer. Our identities exist somewhere in the synapses between neurons, in the gaps between trillions of brain cells firing all at once, giving us our identities and enabling us to find our own ways of love, war, and survival as a species, even after all this time.

Science needs art to frame the mystery, but art needs science so that not everything is a mystery. Neither truth alone is our solution, for our reality exists in plural.