If Only We Could Remember That Living is Enough

We take memory for granted. 

Not our specific memories, of course. Most of us have memories we cherish as well as those we try to forget. Many of us spent these most recent holidays trying to re-create fond memories. Memoirs are a popular literary genre. And we think we know that memory is the foundation upon which learning is built. 

What we take for granted is that we have memories in the first place.

Even babies are born with memories of the womb, of the muffled sound of our mothers' voice, of the warmth, of the connection to another living being. And it could be that it is those memories that cause babies to seek similar connection in the bright, chaotic "outside world." The memory of mommy's voice causes us to turn toward it. The memory of warmth causes us to snuggle in. The memory of connection drives us to suckle. No one knows, of course, but it makes a certain kind of sense from an evolutionary point of view.

I've met a few people who claim they have vestigial in utero memories, but most of us retain very little from before we're four or five-years-old. Last week, I recalled an event from our adult daughter's preschool years while on our holiday visit to New York. She replied, "I don't know if I remember that or if you've just told the story so many times that I think I remember it." Cognitive psychologists tell us that this is the case for most of our "memories" from those years: they've been kept alive by others, by photographs, by videos. 

I find it impossible to conceive of life without memories. How would I know how to brush my teeth if not for the memories of having done it before? I once experienced an unsettling bout of partial amnesia. It lasted a couple hours during which I couldn't recall anyone in my life other than my immediate family. It was frightening, but I could still brush my teeth, still prepare food, still operate my electronic devices (although, one of the freakiest parts was realizing that I didn't recognize any of the my so-called "friends" on Facebook). Most of my memory was still there and I was easily able to cobble together a functioning life from the memory that remained. 

My mother-in-law recently died after a decade of ever-worsening dementia. By the end, not only had she forgotten people, but even, at times, how to do such basic things as eating. She would sit down at the table, then ask, "What do I do now?" We sometimes even had to remind her to chew and swallow. Losing one's memories, I'm convinced, is life's cruelest disease.

Of course, forgetting is every bit as common as remembering, probably more so. On that same  holiday visit, our daughter casually recalled an event from her childhood involving me that I simply don't remember at all. I don't recall most of what happened yesterday, to be honest. 

And then there is the well-documented fact that the more often we recall a memory, the more we tend to change it, meaning that many of our fondest memories are mostly fiction, even as we insist they are true. This bothered me when I first learned about it, but now I see it as a blessing that we are capable of changing the past to suit the present. People say you can't change the past, but I beg to differ: we do it all time.

We take memory for granted because, like breathing, we can't imagine life any other way.

There are many, often conflicting, theories about why, what, and how we remember. Obviously, the urge toward survival causes us to retain memories of where to find food and water. Traumatic memories remind us, or teach us, to avoid things like tigers and geysers and poisonous plants. As Oscar Wilde wrote, "Experience is simply the name we give to mistakes." That also applies to our successes. Memory, with all its vagaries, stands at the center of what we call learning: we use information stored about the past to make decisions for the future

Of course, other animals possess memories and likewise use memory to learn, although, in our arrogance we tend to think of their's as shorter and less complex than ours. I mean, our dogs might return for a decade to the same shrub under which they once found a pizza crust, but what kind of memory does, say, a spider have? Increasingly, however, the evidence is showing us that the rest of our fellow travelers, animals and even plants, have amazingly complex cognition. 

For instance, in her book The Light-Eaters, journalist Zöe Schlanger writes about the evidence that plants also possess the ability to learn through memory:

"What garlic needs in order to sprout, is the memory of winter. That the spring eventually comes is not enough to make life emerge — a good long cold is crucial. This memory of winter is called “vernalization.” Apples and peach trees won’t flower or fruit without it . . . The remarkable thing about vernalization is that it means plants remember. The term undisputedly applies; plants use information stored about the past to make decisions for the future. This isn’t a singular example. Plants take note of the length of a day and the position of the sun. Cornish mallow . . . will turn its leaves hours before sunrise to face the horizon in exactly the direction it expects the sun to rise. The movement itself originates in the tissue at the base of its stalks, where the mallow will adjust the pressure of the water flowing through it to bend in the desired direction. Throughout the day, the amount and direction of sunlight the mallow experiences is encoded in the photoreceptors laid out across its leaves. It stores the information overnight, during which time it will use it to predict where and when the sun will rise the next day . . . Researchers have messed with the mallow by simulating a more “chaotic “sun,” switching the direction of its light source. The mallow learns the new location . . . Memory clearly has deep roots in biology. This makes sense; if the trajectory of all evolution is toward survival, then the ability to remember has a natural evolutionary advantage. It’s incredibly useful for staying alive."

As an educator, I see that nature, all of nature, learns what it needs to learn simply by living. There are those who argue that we need schooling because humans have made life far more complex than has nature, but c'mon! At best, we're on par with ants and bees as far as societal complexity goes. And when we consider plants and the 200 million year head start they have on humans, when we consider the planet they have in fact created, including animal life, including our lives, it's hard to not at least be open to the notion that what we see as species superiority is a failure of memory. We've retold the story of our existence as a work of fiction with ourselves as the main character, forgetting that we live in a universe that is far too complex for us ever to really understand it: even our own brains, the part of our body in which we imagine our memories are stored, is beyond our ability to comprehend. We might get closer and closer to the mechanics of how it works, but we simply don't have the perceptual ability to know how those mechanics result in our human experience. It's often referred to as "the hard problem of consciousness," made so by the paradox of having to use our minds to think about our minds.

The hubris of schooling, the notion that we adults can somehow one-up Mother Nature, has lead us to believe that our children, who are born, like plants, knowing exactly how to learn from life itself, must be tricked and tracked and trained in systems and schemas. Today, few of us don't remember childhood without schooling, although we recall very, very little of what we were actually meant to learn. Indeed, the main lessons that most of us learn from school is that life requires toeing the line, doing what we're told, and staying focused on what authority figures tell us to focus on. 

Life itself sends us butterflies, but school tells us not to chase them. Life sends us answers, but school tells us the only answers worth anything are the ones attached to the questions asked by adults. Life sends us billions of years of memories, of experience, of wisdom, but school attempts to replace that with a meager, dull, narrow range of trivia.

The great educator John Dewey wrote, "Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself." If only we could remember that living is enough.

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