What some people think is, all potential long-term memories go through what they call a consolidation period, where they are vulnerable to being lost. That’s why when you have some sort of major head trauma or someone cuts out your medial temporal lobe or something, you’ll probably lose what happened in the weeks or months just prior to accident but you’ll still remember your childhood. Your childhood is consolidated and last night’s party isn’t. Apparently there’s also some sort of evidence that when consolidated memories are accessed, they become vulnerable again, so you might also lose whatever you were remembering around the time of, say, getting hit in the head with a hammer repeatedly, which is something my mother has anxiety dreams about. But it’s not just that memories can be deleted, but that they can be changed. So everytime you retrieve a memory, you’re also modifying it. Which is why people are such unreliable resources, compared to, say, computers.

This is the sort of stuff I learn about in the cognitive neuroscience classes I take. I also learn more “concrete” things about underlying mechanisms of this and that. I am particularly fond of the NMDA-type glutamate receptor and the impressed reaction people have when I tell them I am studying neuroscience. Like that somehow proves my worth, marks me as a bonafide smart person. At least until you think about how stupid it is to do something just because you like the way you think it sounds to other people. The “just because” is an exaggeration, of course. But the truth is we know next to nothing about how the brain works, and all the studying I’ve done has left me with only some tiny fraction of that next to nothing knowledge, and it’s not entirely clear to me that I’ll ever make use of it once I stop waiting for my life to happen to me. What does this stuff have to do with the writing life I want for myself?

My favorite story to tell myself is that I’m a writer, an artist. I continue to tell this story no matter what behavioral evidence to the contrary I might have. And according to one of my psychology classes, the discrepancy between who I think I should be and who I actually am is what makes me anxious. And the discrepancy between who I wish I were and who I actually am is what makes me sad. This is what passes for understanding. I give this theory as an example only because it resonates with me more than most.

My impression was always that writing shaped my memories. Like many other people who write (or who think of themselves as writers), I’m prone to statements like “I haven’t really lived something until I’ve written it down” or “I write to know what I’m thinking.” I’m terrified of losing everything that’s happened since the last time I kept a daily record. And I have a fear that my life is worthless if I can’t use it to communicate something. There’s research on how language shapes perception. The words that we call the world can define the way we see it. The vision lab where I work has been poking at the idea that there is no such thing as visual memory. Could it be that everything we remember is verbal? I am fascinated by this, and terrified by it. All the power of a writer is captured by this. But I feel trapped by my belief. Of course there could be a type of memory that is neither visual nor verbal. M says he thinks without words and can remember these nonverbal thoughts, but often has great difficulty communicating them to others. There are things that can’t be translated. Is my devotion to words keeping me from experiencing something profound? Or do I experience it all the same but feel like if I can’t report it, it isn’t real?