Memory Lane
There is a photograph of me above my desk of a six-year-old version of myself perched precariously in the high branches of an apple tree at my grandparents’ house. I can describe the scene perfectly: the sun dappling through the leaves, the scratched bark against my knees, the feeling of being on top of the world. But recently, I’ve started to wonder: Do I actually remember climbing that tree? Or do I only "remember" it because I’ve looked at that photograph a hundred times? Is it possible that we don’t remember days, we remember moments, and sometimes, those moments are given to us by a camera lens rather than our own eyes?
Psychologists call this phenomenon Source Monitoring Error - quite a fancy name for something that I think is relatively common. It occurs when our brains fail to distinguish the source of a memory. Did the information come from a real-life experience, or was it suggested by a photo, a home movie, or a story told dozens of times by a parent? Over time, the brain weaves these external artifacts into our internal narrative until they become indistinguishable from reality. In a sense, photographs like the one over my desk act as external hard drives for our lives. However, the more we rely on them to store our history, the more our biological memory takes a back seat. We stop remembering the event itself and start remembering the artifact of the event.
Contrary to popular belief, and, frankly, our own experiences of it, memory is not like a video recording for which we simply hit "play" like an old camcorder. It is reconstructive. Every time you recall a memory, you are rebuilding it from scratch. When I look at a photo of the apple tree, my brain is busy taking the visual data, like the colour of my spring jacket, the height of the branch, and builds a sensory experience around it to fill in the gaps. This is where my imagination takes over. I might "remember" the smell of the apples or the sound of my grandmother calling me in from the porch for lunch, simply because my brain knows those things should have been there. It’s not lying to me, exactly; my brain is just being an extra-helpful storyteller.
One of the easiest ways to tell if a memory is authentic or photogenic is to check the perspective. In most genuine, lived memories, we see the world through our own eyes - that is, first- person. However, when we "remember" things through photographs, we often see ourselves as if from the outside, in third person. Close your eyes and think of a childhood memory. Do you feel the texture of the environment? Or do you see a static image of yourself? If it's the latter, you might be remembering a photograph.
It can be a little unsettling to realise that some of our most cherished memories might be constructed from these outside sources, or at least heavily edited. But perhaps it doesn't matter. Whether the memory comes from the experience or the photo, it still forms the bedrock of our identity, the story we tell ourselves about who we are. The apple tree remains a part of my history, even if the memory of it is a beautiful collaboration between a six-year-old’s bravery and a 35mm film camera. We are, after all, more than just a collection of neurons. We are the sum of the stories we choose to keep.
Jennifer