The Forum: Memory

I listened to a radio programme called 'The Forum' on BBC Radio Four, as the episode was titled 'Memory', and looked into the idea of memory itself, asking questions on why and how we remember things. The discussion was led by radio presenter Bridget Kendall, and the guests were Dorothy Bohm, a documentary photographer, Raymond Tallis, a neuroscientist (who now writes about the relationship between science and philosophy), and Zinovy Zink, author of 'History Thieves', a book in which he unravels his family history.

The broadcast was really interesting as it posed questions that I am really interested in in my work - why are memories formed? What impact do they have? Do we distort memories?

Photographer Dorothy Bohm very much uses photography as a way of capturing time and preserving memories. She mentions putting 'a limit to forgetfulness'. She also states: 'In my photography, I hold time. I have a picture of a child, and that child will be a child forever.' I think this really says something about the permanent and static nature of photography. Once something is photographed, it lives on for as long as the photograph survives, which, in the age of digital photography seems infinite. Printed photographs would eventually fade and become damaged and worn, but taking a photograph today feels as though it will exist forever, whether that be on computers, cds, or online. I think photography really does fill in the blanks for forgotten memories, but it also fails to tell the whole story and can fail to preserve a memory in this way.

Bridget Kendall suggests:

'The power of a visual image can imprint on your brain in such a way that all your other memories somehow get elbowed out, don't they? Do you sometimes feel that photography can do that, that it can preserve memory, but perhaps it also distorts the whole picture of what could be there as memories?'

I have recently been reading Susan Sontag's 'On Photography', and she tends to agree with this idea that photography can be linked to the distortion of memory, stating: 'photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks.' Sontag also states 'photographs fill in blanks in our mental pictures of the present and future.' Sontag suggests that photography can distort memory, and mental images can be confused with photographic images.

I was interested to hear about memory from a neuroscience point of view, but Raymond Tallis stated that 'neuroscience can tell us very little about memory.' I think this is why I am so intrigued around the subject of memory - there seems to be no explanation as to how and why we visualise our memories. Raymond Tallis stated that memory is 'a present experience of a past experience' which I thought was a succinct way of describing it.

Raymond Tallis: 'what's already starting to emerge from our discussion is the extent to which memory isn't something utterly solitary and individual which you can find in the darkness of the individual skull, it's something that's collective, and shared.'

'We are, unlike any other creatures, part of a community of minds. We have a shared explicit public arena to which we together refer and we pay joint attention, once a prime example of that of course is that form of pooled memory called 'history'.

'But one of the quite disturbing things, and there is evidence of this from Psychology, that every time you recall a memory, you change it... that's what I find quite disturbing, even when you're trying to narrate your own life accurately the very process of doing it and telling yourself about yourself distorts what it is that you're trying to capture.'

This is what I find particularly interesting about memory - the ever-changing distortion of it. Things come in-and-out of focus for different reasons; stories possibly exaggerating certain parts, photographs filling in blanks, parts becoming completely forgotten. I think memory is very much a living thing, parts of it decay over time if you abandon them and don't recall the memory, whereas other parts become prominent and remain detailed if you think about them a lot, or if they have a lot of significance to you, and especially if you have photographs that serve as a reminder.

Raymond Tallis: 'I don't think that memory is entirely internally constructed; it has external constraints and external checks, and the very fact of making sense of ourselves in the context of public understanding of what we are, or an understanding of what we are that's drawn from public discourse.'

This is really interesting for me as my work deals with the idea of collective memory, and Tallis here suggests that memory is very much constructed by both the individual and the collective. We are affected by everything around us, and this all feeds into our memory.