How To Remember.

On the mysterious abyss of the human brain and how to trouble shoot bad memory.

Oscar Wilde said

“Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.”

If this is the case, my diary is a book of unreadable words.

You see I can’t trust my brain to remember things anymore. Like a cliff face being battered by waves, over the years my memories have eroded and my past has slowly crumbled into the sea. Vast swathes of my life are gone to me, or if not gone, then seemingly inaccessible, behind some door in my brain that is soldered shut. I have made my bad memory into a personality trait; I joke about it with friends; roll my eyes and remark, well I won’t remember will I? to any question that depends on my memory to answer it. But behind the sarcasm is gathering panic.

Naomi Klein, in a recent article for the guardian about Israel’s memorializing of October 7, said,

“Remembering in its truest sense is about putting the shattered and severed pieces of the self together (re-member-ing) in the hopes of becoming whole.”

I lie awake at night and worry about my severed self. It’s a new gnawing worry, that has flowered into something bigger in the last few years, a sense of pervading precariousness. My brain feels like a game of Jenga. Parts of my past have been pulled out of it without my noticing. If I can’t remember my life, then I can’t remember who I was, and if I don’t know who I was then I can’t get a hold of who I am. There’s nothing below me, no sense of what came before. I do not feel whole.

I have no scientific explanation for why my long term memory is so poor. I suspect that decades of erratic and irregular sleep working as a DJ were deeply destructive for my long term memory. I worry that years of hedonism frazzled my brain from the inside out. More recently, my short term memory has become wildly untrustworthy due to peri-menopause. I frequently can’t remember the most basic of things/names/places. Twice during a book event in Bristol this year, I lost my way completely, mid sentence, and had to ask the interviewer what I was talking about. It felt like in the Roadrunner cartoons when Wile.E.Coyote runs off the edge of the cliff and hangs suspended in the air, his legs still running, before he plummets down into the canyon. I was still talking, but the meaning of my words fell away. I was in a strange wilderness in my head; an eerie intimation of what it might feel like to have dementia. I no longer trust myself to remember anything in high pressure situations.

I only really started to notice when I turned forty. In that way that we do when we reach milestone birthdays I tried to look back at my life, but when I went to remember, everything was opaque. In my initial panic at realising I couldn’t remember my early childhood, I made a podcast to try and help me. It was called ‘Finding Annie’ and every episode began with someone in my life recounting a memory they had of me. I used that memory to dictate the theme of the episode. Looking back it was a way to channel that sense of absence I felt into something productive. If I could archive other peoples memories of my life then I could slowly build a more fully realised sense of self.

The podcast lasted a few series, (it was too complex a premise) but it was comforting to know that if I couldn’t access my own memories then I could tap into other peoples. But what about when those people are gone? When the people we love die, parts of us die with them, for they carry a consciousness of us as people that makes us real. Who are we if we are not that persons’ partner, child, best friend? Who are we when the history of that relationship disappears? Especially when the other person acted as the memory bank?

My mother made photo albums for all of us. I have two on my book shelves now, one chronicling the first ten years of my life, and one for the following ten years. Everything I know about my early life comes from those photos. I looked through the albums again for this piece. There I am at five years old dressed as a fairy in the garden, at six sitting on my sisters lap as we swung on the swing in our garden. At seven, in a duffel coat standing on a snowy road outside my Grandmothers house, the day before my Grandfather died. There is a sadness looking at these photos now because there is nothing in my head that connects me to those pictures. The Proust effect dictates that autobiographical memories triggered by the senses, particularly smell and taste, can be among the most potent. But there are no sensory jolts for me looking at my younger self. It’s like looking at someone else. I know this is me, but I can’t access the memories behind the photos. I genuinely don’t know if I’ll ever be able to retrieve them.

The brain can do wild things. I’ve just finished reading the proof of the brilliant new novel by Karen Thompson Walker called The Strange Case Of Jane O. It follows the story of a young mother who arrives in a psychiatrist’s office after suffering a worrying episode of amnesia. The last thing she remembered was filling her kettle in the kitchen of her apartment. Twenty seven hours later she found herself lying in Prospect park, covered in leaves. She had no recollection of how she got there or where she went. The psychiatrist thinks she is suffering a rare type of amnesia called Dissociative Fugue which is usually triggered by stress.

Dissociative Fugue is beyond horror. This article from 2006 details a forty year old mill worker called Jeff Ingram, who was going to visit a friend dying of cancer in Canada when he disappeared. Jeff remembers waking up in Denver feeling ‘alone and terrified’. He had no idea who he was or where he was. ‘He had no wallet or ID, just $8, the clothes he was wearing and a pounding headache.’ After hours of wandering the streets he ended up in hospital and was finally reunited with his fiancee after an advert was put on national television in which Jeff made a plea;

"If anybody recognises me, knows who I am, please let somebody know"

A month after being ‘found’, when this article was written, Jeff had flipped through all his photos, read through old letters, listened to stories about his old life, but he still had no idea who he was. All his childhood memories, his family holidays, high school graduation, his first kiss, his whole life had disappeared into some remote abyss in his consciousness.

"It's very hard to put into words," he said. "It's probably the most frustrating thing that a person can ever go through, is to lose their identity. Because your past is what makes you who you are today — good or bad.”

Is there a reason Jeff’s brain unplugged his memory function? The brain is so much cleverer that we are able to comprehend. When people suffer trauma in their childhood, their brains have the capacity to hide their memories in their unconscious. These memories cannot be accessed because the brain is protecting it’s carrier from the pain of recall. But a suppressed memory can turn poisonous if not recalled. If the patient themselves can’t remember the memory, how can they be helped? There is a process called State Dependent Learning” which goes by the theory that if memories are formed in a particular mood, arousal or drug induced state, then they can be retrieved when the brain is back in that state. The brain must be returned to the same state of consciousness as when the memory was encoded. Dr. Jelena Radulovic, the Dunbar Professor in Bipolar Disease at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine describes it ..

“The brain functions in different states, much like a radio operates at AM and FM frequency bands. It’s as if the brain is normally tuned to FM stations to access memories, but needs to be tuned to AM stations to access subconscious memories.”

By the looks of the photos in my albums, I was in a happy state. I was the fourth of four. I was loved fiercely, but not intensely, I was not fussed over, I was safe and secure, carefree. I don’t think my brain has hidden anything from me in order to protect my emotional pain threshold, but I am comforted by the suggestion that everything could still be in there, just in a different frequency.

And then there is my children. On a selfish level, if I can’t tune in to the frequency of my own childhood memories, then I want to remember my children’s. On top of this I worry that I have failed to actively remember their lives for them and that means they won’t be whole either.

I tried. I had an idea once to present my sons on their birthdays with a written synopsis of the previous year. That lasted one year. Then I started a hard back lined notebook and cut out printed photos and got the boys to write and draw in them. It started well, it lasted a few years but both have stopped now and I have stopped trying to get them to do it.

For the last few years there’s been nothing beyond the iPhoto app on my devices filled with photos and videos. Conscious as I am of my own inability to retain things in the way that I would like, I declare certain days of my children’s lives days to remember! I snap away with my phone camera on these special occasions; a last day of primary school, a goal scored, his first sleepover. And now iPhoto taps straight into our nostalgia by offering curated memory montages from our archives, complete with sentimental music. But photos depict change in a kind of staccato rhythm, they are visual dots joining a life together, they don’t show the fabric of an existence. What about the days that just pass in their quiet ordinary way, with food eaten and work done and the seasons slowly changing outside the window. What about remembering how we grow? How we change? Like the fact that my son, at the aged of 11, has finally stopped needing me in the room with him when he falls asleep. Or that my youngest likes to twerk in response to any question I ask him. Photographs don’t show the things that they are upset about, or excited about, or the last thing they say at night, their little bed time rituals.. all these parts of a person that make up a whole.

I tell myself to wilfully remember. It must be like a muscle, that If I practise enough it can start working. I need to preserve these little phases somehow. To keep them safe somewhere so that they don’t disappear. I want to give my sons the gift of their story.

I should start with a photo album like my mother made for me. But man, there are so many photos. Do I feel guilty about not having the energy to trawl through the tens of thousands of photos I have of my kids and single out the right photos and put them into curated albums? Yes. Yes I do. Am I angry about having another thing to feel guilty about when I know that my husband does not get sleepless nights about said documenting of children? I am. I know this to be true because I asked him. I sent him a long voice note explaining this piece, and the burden of responsibility I feel to remember and document our children’s lives and I asked him did he feel this at all? He replied with

Nah I don’t.

I mean it is funny. No one is asking me to do this. I don’t know. I just feel like life is slipping away. Every weekend I ask my youngest how his weekend was and he says in a pained, plaintive tone,

“It just went too fast”.

I feel his despair. We did a chat on here recently, my subscribers and I, based around the theme of remembering. It felt good to share my night time fears, my burden of responsibility, my growing sense of panic at my forgotten past. The chat was enlightening in so many ways. I realised by the end of the chat, that all of my worry and anguish over my lack of memory is rooted in the passing of time. It’s going too fast for me and I can’t keep up. My need to document, to remember, is really a need to grab time and hold it still, to stamp it down into something concrete and everlasting. If I can remember the last month, then it won’t be so alarming that it’s been and gone, in a puff of smoke, to never return.

Also, in a world in which we are so profoundly powerless; that is so deeply frightening and so filled with struggle and pain, documenting the lives of my loved ones is a form of control. It’s saying, we were there, we did this, we lived. It counts for something.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to change my brain to retrieve long term memory. I feel deeply envious of people who can flick through the rolodex of their past and pick and recall memories on a whim. This sense of a whole archived life to browse through at your leisure. How does that shape a person? How does it feel to have a whole sense of self?

It was suggested in the chat, gently, that I need to put less pressure on myself; life is hard enough without this added burden of remembering everything. My Mother is eighty two now and her short term memory has deteriorated in the last few years. A lot of the time she can’t tell me what she did yesterday, but she can always give me a detailed and sensory account of her childhood years. I’d love to think that one day the blurred lines of my childhood could still come into focus. I don’t want to write off my long term memory as broken. So much is going on that I do not understand.

As for now? I’ve been reading up on how to incorporate daily practises to better my remembering skills. I thought I would share what I’ve learned with you.

How to optimise your memory.

There are three phases of remembering. The first is the act of processing information into a memory, this is called Encoding. The second is the human version of pressing the save button, storing the memory, consolidating. This, unlike computers, has to be done continually. The third is bringing that memory to the mind .. recalling it. Failures can happen at any point of these three processes, but mostly, they happen in the encoding stage. We’re not devoting enough energy to wilfully remembering a moment, we’re not paying enough attention to the moment itself.

Habit is the enemy of memory, When we fall into habits of doing things automatically, without a heightened awareness of doing them they can fall through the memory cracks. Think about a holiday where you lay on a sun bed by the pool for a week. Not so many memories compared to the holiday where you went on adventures.

Variation is your friend. Vary up everything, from your route to work to your bookmarked tabs, to the people you follow on instagram, rearrange your furniture, see different people of different ages.. the more variation you have in your life, the more attention you are forced to pay, thus the more moments will be encoded.

Learning - anything new, be it a language on duo lingo, how to use a drill, gardening, wines, and reading of course! Any situation where you are learning, means you are more likely to have vivid memories of your learned thing.

Multi-tasking is the enemy of memory. This is why it’s particularly hard for women who carry the mental load. Always remember the more present you are in an action, the more attention you are able to pay to it, the more likely you are to remember it.

Social media and online news consumption make it worse. When you scroll your brain is being pounded with images and video and sounds and words. It can’t function to encode things properly.

Speak the words of your actions out loud. This sounds bonkers but it is effective. Try it next time you put your phone down. Say it out loud: I’m putting my phone on the bedside table. If you focus your attention on these early actions then you can save yourself from forgetting them later.

Outsource and offload. The notes app on the Iphone is my saviour. Now with the added bonus of transcription. Create a folder in your notes, then every time you remember something you’re supposed to do, (usually for me this happens at 3am) write it in your list. If you’re on the move record a voice note. Transcribe an email or message in your notes on the go so you can send it later.

Have a whiteboard or planner hung up somewhere in your house where you can write things down.

Set your calender alerts.

And if all else fails, write a real diary.

I started keeping a written diary in my mid teens and have continued throughout my life. Some of the entries are excruciating to read; the teenage poetry, the code words for things that I thought no one would ever understand, and the entries of my twenties whereupon the writing is mostly indecipherable due to my seemingly permanent state of drunkenness. But it’s all there, my take on my life and the people around me in an assortment of hardback notebooks of different shapes and sizes, after which from the age of around twenty eight, I went digital. Now I have a Pages document that I write in as and when I feel like it, that amounts to 310,000 words. At the start I wrote as an attempt to understand myself but now I write with a new awareness, that this document acts as an archive of my life; it helps me know myself. It’s all I’ve got. That and the photo albums and the people who have known me all my life.

Substack is similar to a diary in a way. If not a factual account of our lives, it’s a sort of tapestry of our emerging ideas and expressions, that over time can act as an archive for who we were, how we lived, how we felt about our selves and the world around us. I, for one, am glad to be here.