Fib, memory

„Das habe ich getan“ sagt mein Gedächtnis. 
„Das kann ich nicht getan haben“ — sagt mein Stolz und bleibt unerbittlich. 
Endlich — gibt das Gedächtnis nach. Nietzsche (↓)

Dau.I the Librarian, is retro-actively pursuing a B.Sc. in Psych & Soc, after her MLIS. She has been interested in the formal academics of Psychology since she was a teen, so deserves to get a scrap of paper from yet more study of the subject. We-the-family get to hack at her project reports and submissions - thereby learning something new while polishing our crap-detectors. The family that strives together, thrives together? She recently lent me a copy of  The Rag and Bone Shop: How We Make Memories and Memories Make Us (2021) by Veronica O'Keane, who is now Prof of Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin. This is on message for me because I've been interested in Memory . . . since before the birth of the Blob. The post-title is a riff on Nabakov's autobiographical memoir Speak, Memory [Bloboprev].

Prof O'Keane has lived in exciting times since she was reading psychiatry as a student 40 years ago. Back then, with a straight face, experts would explain Freud's peculiar obsessions with penises and little girls  and how talking might help people get over their madness. Since then tech has delivered much better molecular and cellular mechanisms for when the mind-trolley leaves the tracks of what society allows as normal. And anti-psychotic anti-depressive meds can give a life-changing fix to the unhappy for far less investment than hours, days, years of psycho-therapy. Yes, MegaPharm share-holders win big-time;  yes, there can be egregious side-effects; yes, we are over medicalising normal variation . . . but for hundreds of people in Ireland today medication allows them to get up in the morning and go to work and have a bit of craic, at the water-cooler and the week-end. 

The kind of neurological detail which is now available is that individual neurons in the right hippocampus will fire as a rat-on-a-grid pass a particular location. But that the next neuron to fire (as the next external location is crossed) is identifiable but not adjacent to the first. This is in contrast to Penfield's homunculus where the [sensory or motor] toe neuron is connected to the foot neuron etc. albeit on the scale of slabs of neurons rather than individual neurons. That's the modern nanotech break-through: scientists can monitor the inside of a single living cell.

O'Keane quotes Henri Bergson as believing intuition is based on memory . . . as it must be. Intuitions are the result of  experience and learning even if we might not have consciously been aware of the lesson. it is no surprise therefore that Elders are better at guessing than their children and youngsters. Life experience clocks up facts, inventories successful outcomes and learns from mistakes. Younger people haven't been around long enough to build up their have-a-punt database. Age must be the basis of my success at table-quizzes.

The chapter on false memory and how it arises is particularly on topic for me, because I've been called to jury service in May. I shall be super-skeptical about eye-witness testimony, no matter how tall the stack of bibles upon which it is sworn. Elizabeth Loftus, the grand vizier of the field, is cited. Memory is dynamic: every time we recall something it's like taking a china soup-tureen out of the kitchen. By the time we've finished showing it to the vicar, the matching ladle has fallen to the ground and been replaced with fire-tongs; the soup has been swapped with tea; and it's been chipped by brisk contact with the marble counter-top.

This book is not without its quirks and peculiarities [too much bigging up TCD for some?] but is a brave attempt to lay out the science and mechanisms of memory in terms that won't baffle Joe and Josie Poblacht.

↪“That’s what I did,” says my memory. “I couldn’t have done that,” says my pride, and remains adamant. Finally, memory yields. Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil.