The Mystic Chords of Memory

Thanks to the astonishing, growing sophistication of cognitive neuroscience, we are beginning to fathom the very seat of memories that are stored deep within the brain’s medial temporal architecture, in an area between the ears called the hippocampus. (Hippocampus means “seahorse” in Greek, and sure enough, the structure’s shape does slightly resemble a seahorse.) We are also beginning to grasp how our brains encode, retrieve, and reconstruct these memorable, often emotionally tinged episodes.

When cognitive neuroscientists consider how we collect, store, and access memory, they start by identifying two basic types. The first of these memories, called “explicit” because we can consciously observe their processes, draws from personal experience and events rich with association and resonating with emotion. This is “episodic” memory, built around specific, “memorable” events.

The second, “semantic” memory, also centering in the hippocampus but stored more globally in the brain, catalogues facts and concepts, and how we name and understand their relationships. If you are not a cognitive neuroscientist, you might be tempted to call this “wisdom” that is acquired and retained and deployed over a lifetime.

Aromas and flavors switch on a neural wayback machine that releases a cascade of deep recollection. Skilled novelists make clever use of sensual memory that so quickly evokes time and place. Here think of the stale quays of James Joyce’s Dublin, the “bewitching breath” of Joseph Conrad’s Singapore, or the “immaterial” but enduring memories of Proust’s redolent Paris. Allow me to beg your indulgence with illustrative stories that resonate.

Scents and Sensibilities: Aromas and Tastes Trigger Episodic Memory

When I reach in for a distant but distinct memory of the pier on Barnegat Bay, a thought of the fermenting eel grass wafts by. And this cues a recollection of the bitter, brackish taste of the estuary itself. Which leads to a memory of passing a beginners’ swimming test off the pier, buoy to buoy. Another more savory memory from ten years later: the orange-cream-vanilla aroma of the frothy drink sold at the stand on the boardwalk; Pretty Woman playing as the background soundtrack to that wacky teen-scene “down the shore.” And now, a whiff of numero cinq can’t fail to call to mind a prom date (part ritual, part fun) with my high school sweetheart (and future wife), the fragrance recovering detail. She was dressed, I can’t now forget (and neither can she, to her mild, wry chagrin) in a fashion-forward statement of the era, like a pink Bo Peep.

Little Bo Peep Cosplayer, Anaheim California, 2017

Source: Photo courtesy Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

A Foul Little Game and Semantic Memory

Semantic memory is even more intriguing, as it combines sensual experiences with language. I’ll share a slightly rueful-comic episode that fits here.

In my childhood neighborhood, a soggy district bordering a tributary of the Delaware, only a mile or so from the Princeton campus but wild for all that, our family lived across from a game preserve that featured easily climbable pine trees and plants native to a marshy forest floor. A natural playground.

An older kid took me exploring the far reaches of this habitat one very early spring. He invited me to bend down to see the waxy purplish plant that melted through snow. He said not to touch it; it was poison. But, he said, “watch this” and squished it with his heel. A sharp, pukey, sulfurous odor arose. So did my gorge. I remember him laughing and then crushing another plant for effect. Same assault to the nose and the gut. Same playful torment. Vivid.

His foul little prank with skunk cabbage has stuck with me. “It smells just like a skunk,” he had said. “Skunks spray on them,” I remember him saying. And this bit of misleading folklore and the image he loaded me up with also lingers. It comes back whenever I hear the word “skunk.” And more strongly when downwind of roadkill. Semantic memories tend to be sticky.

Back to the Old Neighborhood

We collect memories and retain them over decades. We retrieve them voluntarily or sometimes accidentally. Here is a further story about a literally semantic memory related to a local accent.

During her brief stay at a hospital in Florida, the staff had taken my mother’s wedding ring to the security office for safekeeping. I went to retrieve it, walking along with the guard for a distance long enough to encourage conversation. He wanted to stop off at the cafeteria for a glass of “ahrr-anghe” juice. (I still pronounce the word that way, a relic of childhood.) With our pronunciation in mind, I asked him if he hailed from suburban Philadelphia. He said, “yeah, you could say that.” “New Jersey?” I asked. “Yeah,” to this too. And here I made a guess. “Hamilton Township?” Surprised at this, and a little suspicious, he began to give me the cop’s fish-eye. Prior to his retirement job, he had lived most of his life in Hamilton Township, New Jersey.

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The Mental Wayback Machine

I explained that I’d left there when I was seven. Even after a half-century had passed, that strong dialect from that tiny spot was apparently still ringing in my ears. That hyperlocal accent has changed since then, adding a bit more nasality and insistence, migrating closer to New York, more like the intonation that Edie Falco used in her portrayal of Carmela Soprano. My memory of the ancient echo was bounded both by time and place. My own accent, I like to tell myself, has moderated since.

He said that he had a couple friends in the security office that I’d want to “tawk” with. They were on break, they said, “you know, drinking caw-fee.” There was the cue again. Naturally I had to ask: “Say, you fellas wouldn’t happen to be from suburban Philadelphia?”

Sure enough, it turned out that these guys, dialect cousins about my age and era, had chain-migrated from that same small place. Their intonations opened a sonic and psychic highway that carried me against the flow back to the old neighborhood.

Our identities are bound up with these kinds of memories. Our memories help us know where we belong. We locate our selves with memory.