Memory Manipulation/Not A Day Goes By

Hey.  Been thinking a lot about what I want to write about today.  I've had difficulties these past two days.  It's like I'm waiting for something to happen, waiting, waiting.  Sunday in addition to reading, I worked on the song, "Not a Day Goes By".  When I learn a new song, I sing it over and over until the words and melody live in a deep part of my brain.  When I really know a song, the lyrics never fail me - I summon them effortlessly, organically.  But that song - if it takes up residence in my heart and becomes my future - a self-fulfilling prophesy, things will be grim.

Not a day goes by. Not a single day But you’re somewhere a part of my life. And it looks like you’ll stay.  As the days go by I keep thinking when does it end?  Where’s the day I’ll have started forgetting.  But I just go on thinking and sweating, and cursing and crying and turning and reaching and waking and dying. And no, not a day goes by, not a blessed day.  But you’re still somehow part of my life and you won't go away.  So there’s hell to pay and until I die, I’ll die day after day after day, after day, after day after day after day til the days go by, til the days go by, til the days go by. 

The brain.  Let's talk about that again.  Carol sent me a link to a radio show that she listened to, spellbound - the subject Narrative Identify. Here's the link.  Jonathan Adler is interviewed on Wisconsin Public Radio by interviewer, Jim Fleming.  He starts by asking "What does it mean to say that your identity, who you think you are, is just a story?  I mean, I don't feel fictional.  So let's go first to psychologist and researcher Johnathan Adler for a crash course in narrative identity."   He goes on to describe that we are not particularly accurate reporters of the things that happened to us - our memories are based on true stories but there are a myriad of ways we could tell the same story.

OK, so nothing new there, right?  What's new apparently is in studying how peoples' mental health is tied to their stories of themselves - the stories they choose to include in their narrative, whether they are characters that are acted upon or whether they feel in the driver's seat of their stories.  They tracked people's narratives who underwent psychotherapy and noted that, over the course of successful treatment, peoples' stories changed, they actually reconstructed their memories to align with their psychological needs. Apparently people, trying to get better, take command of their stories and re-story them in a way that supports their mental health progress.

So this is kind of wonderful right?  If I tell you that you are the stories you tell about yourself and that you can consciously re-story yourself into better mental health, that's amazing right?  But it's also deeply unsettling because if you're thinking like I am, you've just been told that you ARE the stories you tell about yourself and that those stories don't very accurately portray true realities - remember you are not a particularly accurate reporter of the events that shaped your life.

Seriously??  This is either the best news I've ever heard or the worst.  I have to figure this out.  So we cling to these stories about ourselves where we are observer, participant, victim, hero, and it's largely a fiction???  What are we left to hold on to? This is the stuff of insanity!  If you think too much like I do, this could put you over the edge into loony-land or it could be a liberating reality.  Think about it - what we believe about ourselves is a personal narrative that plays fast and loose with truth.  We are largely fiction.

Question:  If our constructs are not real then what is?  What can we agree is true?  That is the biggest of all questions.  What use are our memories if we have manipulated them to better serve us?  What do we have left?

I just finished the Hunger Games series and the heroes in that book fight with the same questions. Their memories and realities have been deliberately tampered with by villains and they struggle to hold onto their mental health.  It was an uncanny book to read in light of this article landing in my lap. Doubly unsettling.

Memory is a weird thing - we are so attached to it, so sure it is accurate.  Now seems like a good time to tell you about one of the saddest memory experiences I every had.  I have a friend who told me in passing about a book or movie recommendation from a friend.  I didn't think much of it - it was just a passing comment.  Later I made mention of it and, because he didn't remember telling me about it, he jumped to the conclusion that the only way I could have learned of the recommendation was because I had figured out a way to read his e-mail.  It wasn't true but there was nothing I could say to him to make him believe me.  His words, "It will take a miracle for me to believe anything other than what I remember.  I am 100% positive I never mentioned the recommendation to you."   He never even entertained the possibility that his memory could have failed him.  Because his good opinion was so important to me, I did the only thing I could think of  - I voluntarily submitted to a lie detector test to exonerate me.  I passed of course, there was never a question.

Most recently I was surprised to hear Mark tell the story about me extinguishing the burning girl at the Christmas party we both attended (her scarf was on fire).  I had been telling the story that I lunged across the room and patted the flames out.  He corrected me and said, "No, you ripped the scarf off her.  Don't you remember?"  I don't.   That may be a minor correction but it shook me to have created an incorrect script, a story that I would tell over and over again that wasn't quite true.

Challenge today is to listen to the interview.  It's exciting research and the implications are that we have the power to change ourselves and the future by re-writing our pasts and giving ourselves stronger stories to live by.  Now that we know our stories often only carry partial truths, we should question all our assumptions, question everything.  I am toying with the idea of taking a story from my past - one that I've told over and over and re-writing it with different perspectives.   I might even seek out the characters in my story and see what they remember.   How freaky will it be to take a sacred personal story and play with it, shape it, change it while still preserving the underlying truth of the event - as if it were written by different people.

Tomorrow, that story told two different ways:  the way I've always told it and then re-storied.  I think I might be going off the deep end which is actually kind of exciting - do you wanna come with me?

Peace,
Sarah