My Memories Live in an Old Farmhouse

Some places seem haunted. Not by ghosts, but by the past and by our memories.

I traveled last weekend. Not for pleasure; not for work. I traveled back to my old family home for a funeral. I haven’t lived in the area since I was a child. I haven’t visited since my father died more than a decade ago. While I was in the area, I drove past the old family farmhouse. Apparently, my memories lived in that farmhouse and grew from that soil. So many memories came flooding into my mind.

Maybe you had this experience. You’ve visited a place where you haven’t lived for years. You drive past your former house. Or you visit your elementary school, high school, or college. Maybe you find yourself walking on a trail you hiked as a child. Suddenly memories flood into your mind. The memories may be pleasant or painful. They may be important or trivial. But the memories return.

Sometimes it feels to me like the memories live in that location. I don’t normally think about those memories – they don’t come into my thoughts. I can go years without recalling my childhood experiences visiting that old farmhouse. Running down the dirt road, crawling through the barns, cracking pecans, eating dinner in the long kitchen, smelling the odors of that tobacco curing barn. Those memories never come to mind. But drive past the farmhouse, and suddenly, I remember. My memories seem to not be in my head. Instead, my memories seem to live in that farmhouse and they greeted me when I came back to visit.

As a memory scientist, I can both appreciate the warmth of the suddenly appearing memories and contemplate the explanation. Memories, even these unbidden memories, depend on retrieval cues. When we experience events, we notice many different things. We may notice the sounds and the sights. We may experience tastes and smells. We do things and say things. We think and feel. Of course, this experience happens in a particular location. Creating a memory is a process of binding these aspects into a whole.

Re-experiencing one feature from an event, may cause the reactivation of other features, thus bringing a memory to mind. Since those features were bound together to create a memory, experiencing one feature may bring to mind the rest of the experience. Almost any feature can work. Memories may come to mind based on visiting a location, as happened for me last weekend. But a taste may bring a memory to mind, as in Proust’s classic example of eating a petite madeleine dipped in tea. A song may serve the same purpose (see my earlier post on music evoked nostalgia). If you hear a song from your youth, then you may suddenly recall the experiences of that time.

In general, cognitive psychologists refer to this as the encoding specificity principle. Sometimes a retrieval context matches the original context in which the event was experienced or encoded. The better the retrieval context matches the encoding context, the more like a memory will come to mind (Tulving & Thomson, 1973). This effect of retrieval cues bringing a memory to mind may be most effective when the cue has not been attached to other events and experiences (Berntsen, Staugaard, & Sorensen, 2013). That old farmhouse stands out in my life. I don’t visit often, and I haven’t created new memories in that location in years. Thus seeing the farm brought those old memories to mind.

Place can be a powerful cue for retrieval memories (this can work even for people with Alzheimer's disease). Since there are some places we visit rarely, like the old family farm, those memories may have few opportunities to come to mind during our regular daily lives. But if you visit that old home, the place cues those memories, bringing them to mind. Since you haven’t thought about those memories for a long time, the experience can be surprising. Depending on the content of the memories, this can be a wonderful moment of nostalgia as you relive experiences that have long been hidden.

Place works wonders as a retrieval cue. I visited many places during my visit. Some I had even forgotten completely. But I would turn a corner and see a place. Suddenly I would not only know that I have been there before, but I would remember what happened there.

Based on the re-appearance of long-forgotten memories, some people suspect that all of your memories my hide someplace in your mind, waiting for the right retrieval cue. This probably isn’t the case. We do forget things, and even good retrieval cues often fail to bring things to mind. We also rewrite the past and change our memories. Memories are malleable. Nonetheless, some memories may be waiting for discovery, waiting for you to visit the right place. That’s why it can feel like my memories live there rather than in your head. I’ve not thought of those memories for years, But when I visited some of those childhood places, the memories were waiting for me.

I visited my old home to say goodbye to another piece of my childhood, to another member of my family. But my visit also brought back a gift. The gift of my memories that still live there, in that old farmhouse.