Monday, May 12, 2014

An Urgency to Capture Memories



I try to spend a couple of hours having coffee with my father on Saturday morning before the Saturday “craziness” begins with brothers in-laws, nephews, nieces and a few acquaintances begin their weekend visits and pull my dad’s attention, conversations and thoughts in just about any direction.  Both he and I are early risers and coffee between 6:30 and 9:30 provides and escape from the reality of daily life and allows us to concentrate on one or two topics.  A very rewarding “quality” time that I always hope could be a time for transferring knowledge from his generation to mine.   But I have learned that this “transfer” cannot be forced and it has to flow naturally when he feels like talking about it.

In many cases I spend two hours answering questions he may have about people, nature, headline news, science, and any other topic including discussions of ailments and medicine.   In some cases, that I enjoy the most, he talks about his life.  He lets his memory flow and I try to either take notes or make an effort to remember what he says.  He is 88 years of age and seems to concentrate his stories on three stages of his life:  Key events in his childhood; his latter teenage years; and his twenties.  He also talks about his siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, and in all these cases his memories are event driven; that is significant events that happened in his or their life.

Sometimes I get very frustrated at the absence of details of his life.  There is a pattern of his memories that are based on events, and in some cases fond or disturbing memories of friends and relatives.  What is amazing is that even when I ask him for specific information about a brother or another relative, he does not remember.  For example, what did his brother die from?  He could not tell me.  The brother that was closest to him!   Sometimes I wonder if he did not want to tell me, or that he deliberately wanted to keep certain information from me.  People who grew up in a certain age, and many people from his generation, are very cautious of giving family and personal secrets and I wondered if that is what was happening.

Then this past weekend I decided to begin reading a three novel series that I had read in the late seventies and early eighties.  I had seen these three novels on sale on the web and they had been on sale for fewer than six dollars.  I had very fond memories of those novels and I wanted to experience the complete story again just like I did when I first read them.  The books had come in the mail on Saturday and I completed reading the first book on Saturday night.  I have to admit, it was as, or more enjoyable as the first time 35 years ago.  I closed he book and sat there thinking.  Not about the plot, but of the fact that it was almost all new to me!  I estimated that I had forgotten over 95 percent of the details!  I remember three or four of the main points and the general theme, although not very accurately, but that is it!  The name of the characters, the situations, the details of the plot, the various subplots, nothing – nada!

The next question that flowed in my head was:  What amount of information from that period did I really remember?  It turns out not very much, at least not details.  I thought very hard of what my life was like between 1975 and 1985 and the only thing I could remember were major events and procedures.  I was an engineering and an economics student and many of the equations and facts that I learned, I still know.  But then I thought,  "I remember those things because I continued to use them!So, what happened to all the details of my life?  I must have done some regular routine things during that time, study, help clean house, help make dinner, play with the kids.  But my mind was a complete blank.  I went downstairs and started to go through my photo albums from that period, it helped me form a more concrete memory of the events in those photographs, but many of those were of events that I remembered without the photographs!  So what happened to my other memories?  where they not "stored" in a neuron-based brain disk file?

I thought back to the conversations with my father and I can almost see what is happening.  I believe now that his memory “problem” is not of being absent minded or not willing to talk about his history, he simply does not remember just like I could not remember details or events from 35 years ago.  Moreover, coming from a very poor family and not affording a camera, he does not have pictures of his youth to help him remember events.

Serendipitously, I was reading a summary of the science journal Nature this morning and came across an interesting article by Helen Shen (May 12, 2014) “New Brain Cells Erase Old Memories” that finds that neurogenesis interferes with past learning in infant and adult mice. The research “suggests that newly formed neurons in the hippocampus — an area of the brain involved in memory formation — could dislodge previously learned information.”  Since we grow new neurons throughout our lives, we not only have the limitations of our memories limited to only our “Episodic,” “Semantic” and “procedural memories - were we tend to remember only events and episodes; or things that we had to learn from textbooks; or procedural stuff, mostly memories that allow us to do things without consciously thinking about them, but we also have new brain cells that are constantly destroying the limited memories that we do have!  I so much wish I would have kept a diary all my life.  I would not have as big of problem as I or my father is having.

So, reading the book on Saturday evening and discovering the limitations of my memory has given me great urgency to document not only my experiences but to spend more time with my father to help him remember and document his.  I also need to visit my remaining aunt and uncle and try to capture some of their knowledge so it can be transferred to my and the generations that follow.



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