Frame by Frame, a Memory Made...

Photo © Kel Harvey - News Content © Financial Times

Tim Harford's byline in todays FT carries an interesting piece regarding memory and the mind's structuring of experience - 'We won't remember much of what we did in lockdown'. He likens the vividness of memories stored from new and novel experiences to the algorithms that compress video. When a scene changes little, the compression is simple - a keyframe's data is stored and followed by smaller chunks of data marking only the differences between subsequent frames, rather than storing all of the data needed to render each frame in its entirety. Where you have a rapidly changing scene, the process has to produce many more keyframes and fewer 'difference-only' frames.

His analogy is that we hold onto experiences more firmly if they are one-off or rare events in our lives: a holiday in a place previously unvisited, an event of historical mark, getting married, our children's births, etc. All seem the more vivid in the memory in retrospect.

He cites the psychologist Barbara Tversky, who has proposed that '...our minds are built on a foundation of of cognition about place, space and movement.'

This seems to me to be a pretty intuitive and logical hypothesis, as we as a species were pre-linguistic in the earliest parts of our development and unable to rely on any symbolic transmission of information relating to our surroundings. An innate ability to structure our world into complex mind-maps seems wholly reasonable simply for survival and is evidenced clearly in the animal kingdom as a whole.

It follows that the everyday, repeated nature of most of our spatial interactions with the world become normalised into our subconscious and that the lack of any standout landmarks renders most of our daily mental transactions unremarkable and not particularly worthy of recall. Think of driving, for example; a familiar route, driven often, is usually made without great awareness of our surroundings; but as soon as something changes and threatens our or someone else's well-being we're soon aware of exactly where we are to take action.

A singular, novel event or place will be cemented in memory because of exactly that survival mechanism of noting anything that stands out from the background hum. It becomes a mental landmark: a signpost for the future.

Harford uses the '"where were you when you heard?"' example - the Berlin Wall, or 9/11 for example. Or indeed the Space Shuttle explosion or Chernobyl. I remember precisely with all of these. The last of which memorably coincided with us being on a mountain walk over the Carneddau when rain brought fallout from the Ukraine to North Wales. Not something you forget.

Novelty and surprise obviously keep us mentally alert and cognitively fit to deal with a rapidly-changing and often dangerous world, but the familiarity of well-trod paths and byways, of a home-base and stability are equally important to balance out the fight-or-flight adrenaline and take away the stress it induces.

Language and culture have given us tools to abstract our world into a manageable form of words and artefacts, the facility to step out of the event-stream periodically, if only philosophically. Back again to A Shropshire Lad: taking time out to just stand and stare.

Zen in a nutshell.