Stories of Memory is going to ANTIFREEZE, 'Manchester's very first art car boot fair' this Saturday! There will be over 60 artists occupying a pitch in very different ways - it should be an interesting day out. Come along... (see details of time/place below.)

My introduction to the Stories of Memory pitch at the event:
'Have you noticed the tiny moments when something, someone or somewhere from your past pops into your head? Was there anything that could have triggered the memory? … maybe a smell, a sound, a certain song, an object, a word, a shape, a colour, a texture, a physical or emotional feeling?'

'What form do memories take, when they turn into stories? If memories could be created, captured or investigated in a lab, what would the lab itself look like? Come along to the Memory Lab, created as part of the project ‘Stories of Memory’ and see for yourself. You may get the chance to leave a memory there, or take one away with you.'

http://www.multimap.com/s/M7wfs331

I've been mapping my archive of trigger/memory couplings to see if there are any patterns in them...


(a) by spatial type (on the windows of my old studio):






















At the moment, I'm categorising them as 'couplings' of triggers/memories of

• form
• line (of movement)
• (enclosed) space

(b) by geographical area (of the memory, not the trigger):









It seems as if I'm more likely to remember a place unconsciously if I've only been there once or twice. I think this might be that my first impressions of a place might be to map it out spatially in my mind, and then I'll lose that heightened spatial focus once I'm used to it.











(c) chronologically:





triggers above timeline





memories below

• red = (memories/triggers that have an essence of) lines of movement
• yellow = (memories/triggers that have an essence of) form
• black = (memories/triggers that have an essence of) enclosed space

I've noted down 23 instances of 'couplings' of unconscious memory recall with the relevant trigger, 22 of them have been real memories, things that I've actually witnessed, but 1 of them is (sort of) imagined....

I was just curled up in my student bedsit in the mid 90s, feeling a bit sorry for myself and remembered a fisherman I'd known when I was 8 years old. We were staying in a house for a few months that was perched above a boathouse. This fisherman used to look for crabs to use as bait, and I remember him telling me that he wanted to find the ones that had just shed their shells as they were still soft and the fish would be more attracted to them. He explained this was why he needed to look underneath rocks to find them, as they would be hiding as they were more vulnerable before their new shells had hardened.

I think the memory of the fisherman and the crabs came to me because I had a similar feeling. I was remembering the crabs even though I'd never seen them... an imagined memory?

Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat and Awakenings writes of the strength of 'appropriated' memory in his article On Memory. He talks of two childhood memories, both relating to the Blitz. He recently discovered that he could only have been present to witness one of them but explains that both memories felt real to him and that he 'must have constructed the scene in my mind, from (his brother's) words, and then taken it over, appropriated it, and taken it for a memory of (his) own.'

He goes on to question whether the brain differentiates them at all:

'But although I now know, intellectually, that this memory was "false," secondary, appropriated, translated, it still seems to me as real, as intensely my own, as before. Had it, I wondered, become as real, as personal, as strongly embedded in my psyche (and, presumably, my nervous system) as if it had been a genuine primary memory? Would psychoanalysis, or, for that matter, brain imaging, be able to tell the difference?'

I have a sense that what I'm remembering is from a recording of a sort of 'mapping' as I've entered a place. Quite often the memory is an aerial one and therefore impossible for me to have witnessed that way. This would correlate with Sacks' suggestion that the process that the brain goes through in creating an imagined/ translated memory is the same as when it creates a true one.

Click here for the full article by Oliver Sacks

Source: Sacks, Oliver. On Memory, The Threepenny Review, volume 100, Winter 2004.

I read an online article that reported on some research suggesting that older patients may show signs of short-term memory loss due to distractions rather than an inability to focus.

It is cited as 'the first hard evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of the brain that memory failure owes more to interference from irrelevant information than to an inability to focus on relevant information.'

The coauthor of the report, Dr. Mark D'Esposito proposes that 'rather than think of it as someone having an attention problem and a memory problem, you can just think of it as someone having one problem - the inability to filter out distracting information - that's affecting other domains such as attention and memory.'

In their research Gazzaley and D'Esposito (2005) used a test that recorded the part of the brain that focused on information and the part that suppressed it - by showing the participants images of scenes and faces, asking them to just focus on one of the two categories.



'As these brain scans show, when younger subjects attempt to ignore scenes, they are successful at suppressing activity in the area of the brain that deals with scenes (top left) over the activity seen when they attempt to remember scenes (top right). Older subjects, however, show little suppression of activity in that area (lower left) over what they exhibit when asked to remember a scene (lower right)'. (Images courtesy Adam Gazzaley/UC Berkeley)








Although this research is focused on the short-term memory, it fits in with my observation of the relaxed frame of mind I tend to be in when the often long-term memories pop into my head.

This sets possiblities of collecting/ harvesting/ nurturing unconscious memories. I'm not sure that I want to go that far at this point, but am bearing it in mind for future points in the enquiry.


Click here for full article.

Original source: University of California, Berkeley

Noting down memories along with their triggers...

I watched the two part documentary that followed Terry Pratchett for a year, after his diagnosis with Alzheimer's.

He has a special type of the disease (P.C.A) that affects his visual memory first - what struck me was that he struggled to remember how to do his tie or jacket up. I hadn't even thought of this type of thing as being a memory before.

When Terry was visiting his consultant, they tested him to see how far the disease was progressing. One of the tests was to copy the image below, and he found this difficult as the part of his brain that dealt with visual memory was losing its full functioning - so visual memory can even be as short-term as the time needed to take his eyes off the diagram and over to the blank page to copy it.

I've been reading Theories of Memory: A Reader (Eds. Rossington, R. & Whitehead, A. 2007) and am starting to realise that 'memory' isn't as easy to define as I'd assumed. In the introduction, the editors summarise some of the different readings of the term available from academic texts:

• habit memory (skills, responses or modes of behaviour) compared to conscious memory (the 'recalling or recollecting past experience'). Rossington and Whitehead (p.3) point out that Warnock (Memory, 1987, p.9) wants us to understand that 'they are not exclusive but in continual dialogue with each other'.
  

• external memory (connected with thinking processes and everyday normality) compared to deep memory ('the memory of the senses' which returns the survivor to the agony of the camps in an intense reliving of the experience). The editors (p.7) write of Auschwitz survivor, Charlotte Delbo's understanding of the nature of her memories, that in order to survive... her memory has split into two'. (Days and Memory, Delbo, 1990).
  

• postmemory (describes the way in which individuals can be haunted by a past that they have not experienced personally but which has somehow been 'transferred' to them, often unconsciously, by family members). The editors cite Marianne Hirsch's creation of the term (Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory, 1997).
  

• collective memory (memory shared by a group of people).
  

• false memory (possibly 'accessed' through suggestion and therefore unreliable).
  

I'll start with the short film I made to start my enquiry into visualising some of the 'couplings' of memory and memory trigger.

Click here to see it.