A New Way to Think About Your Oldest Memories
The research you do into your past can reveal crucial clues about you
Thinking of your history, also known as your autobiographical memory, is a continuous procedure. Consider taking a moment to determine the times over the last few hours when your thoughts drifted back to the past that occurred in your life. Maybe your attention was drawn to a photo of you or your family. You may have accidentally found an old high school transcript as you searched for something different. Was the title of this Chemistry teacher?
It is common to search through the archives of your memories, but research on the subject has received very little focus. The majority of research on memory is focused on recalling the information presented by researchers in the course of a study. You are required, for instance, to identify a list of numbers, words, or patterns while the examiner notes your accuracy and the time it took to create the stimulus. When doing such an investigation, you’ll have to shut out unrelated thoughts, like whether the subject is someone you previously knew.
What Does It Feel Like to Think About the Past
Beyond whether having a thought of the past feels happy (not every single one of them does, obviously), it is helpful to learn the emotions that come with having to participate in the process of “time-travel” that takes you back to your past experiences. In a thorough review, Universite Grenoble’s Chris Moulin and colleagues (2022) suggest that the primary factor driving the entire process of reconstruction of the past is a sense of familiarity. According to them, “familiarity” is “a subjective feeling arising from the fluent processing of a stimulus; not an inherent feature of anything you have seen before.” When they refer to”fluency,” they mean “phenomenological familiarity.”
Translating these concepts into simple terms, the authors propose that you recognize an autobiographical memory because it appears to be part of your personal experience. In a sense, all memories refer to experiences from the past, like the knowledge you have of historical events. However, in autobiographical memories, familiarity results from your personal experiences.
The Problems With Autobiographical Memory
The concept of fluency instantly opens possibilities that this might result from something that didn’t happen or was not the way it is what you “think” it did. In the case of deja vu, for instance, you mistakenly think you’ve experienced similar experiences.
You may have an autobiographical mistake you’ve carried with you for a long time without realizing it’s untrue. Maybe you’ve been taking the thought of a “fact” about your high prom, for instance, that no one ever asked to be your date. This has always made you feel like a complete lost cause. After a while, you get an email from someone who has been in touch with you during high school, wishing to connect once more.
Moulin and his co-authors emphasize a different aspect of fluency: it can occur independently or via controlled effort. A glance in the direction of the photo of your family member and you are a case of “involuntary,” as does the phenomenon of deja vu. Various things around you can trigger this experience, including the photos in your smartphone’s social media or photos feed.
The term “voluntary” autobiographical memories have different paths. Fluency here is something you want and not something that happens by itself. According to French authors note, it’s the struggle to locate an old autobiographical memory, for example, the name of an old individual or place, that falls into this category. It’s called”tip-of-the-tongue” effect “tip-of-the-tongue” effect. The information is not in your mouth. However, it is deep and inaccessible within the archives of your memories from the past.
If you’re fortunate, there’s a person you can talk to with whom you’ve shared your experience so that you can recollect the event with them. The authors even recommend that in this regard, autobiographical memory may have significant social components when we create the most memorable personal memories with people we have come to know and love.
All of this raises the question of whether there’s a thing as an autobiographical memory that is involuntary actually. “It seems likely,” the authors claim, “that physiological processes can bring information to consciousness in an uncontrolled and meaningless fashion.” Aside from daydreaming, even what appears to be involuntary could be triggered by stimuli from the surrounding environment, even if unaware.
Sometimes, Moulin et al. observe it is possible to make up for the missing information through “scaffolding” or building the outline of the event based on the general knowledge of what is happening on similar occasions. You might not be able to recall the day you graduated from high school as such, but you can think that the students took to the stage, had their diplomas presented to them, and were in the company of friends and family. However, this model won’t help if you’re trying to remember the breakfast you had the day you graduated.
Digging Into Your Past
These suggestions will give you some fascinating possibilities to consider the next time you attempt or are prompted to learn the specifics of a previous event. If you enjoy exploring those paths, you can improve your proficiency by using the tools available via verification methods, such as social media and internet searches, or by asking your loved ones and friends who have been through the same thing to tell you their memories.
While making history socially, you can also return to old friendships that might have gone off the radar, for example, the prom date. Even if you can’t recall any former people, places, or things, this will aid in filling in the details from your life tale. As Moulin et al. observe, “we arrive at constructing…a rich, complex representation of our personal past through these initiatives.”
