–Paul S. Katz
Director of Neurosciences
The UMass Week of Memory and Forgetting has provided me with fresh ideas about the nature of memory and the nature of society itself. It was fitting to begin the week with a reception at the Institute of Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies that featured an address from the Chancellor, who very movingly reflected on the recent mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, surrounded by pictures of atrocities committed by the Nazis. The Provost reflected on Psalm 137, popularly known through the reggae song, “By the Rivers of Babylon”, and the meaning of how collective memory affects us and how we, in turn, change the meaning of the memory over time. Each of the speakers brought a unique viewpoint on memory and its relevance for our lives.
These themes were amplified on Tuesday at a roundtable discussion with faculty from the College of Arts and Humanities. Historians, linguists, and film scholars each conceptualized collective memory and its effects on people. Although there were varying opinions about the nature of collective memory, it struck a chord with me because I recognized the parallels with memory systems in the brain.
On Wednesday, Dr. Rosie Cowell from Psychological and Brain Science, spoke in the Neuroscience and Behavior Seminar about categorizing the types of memories that are assembled in the brain. One of the notions that she spoke about is that there are hierarchies of cognitive representation in the brain, which interact to have increasingly more complex attributes. Each layer in this hierarchy is unaware, if you will, of the overall memory; it only knows its small piece.
In a similar way, humans as a society interact to form a collective memory that resides outside of the individuals. We often think of these memories as explicit historical events, much like episodic or explicit personal memory. But, like personal memory, there is also implicit collective memory that we may not be aware of as a society, but which shapes societal actions. Implicit personal memory includes skills that we have learned. Society has accumulated many skills that we as individuals do not possess. For example, there is no person on Earth who knows how to build a car from raw materials in nature. The skills needed to build a car from scratch include how to find and manufacture all of the materials that go into a car from the petrochemicals to the metals and how to design, build and assemble all of the components from the engine to the seat cushions. This knowledge is distributed across society. It is stored in many locations outside of humans. To build a car requires cooperation of thousands of people. It is a collective effort with many of the individuals not even knowing that their work is contributing to the production of a car.
Language itself is a collective memory that is constantly being shaped by the individuals who use it. One audience member at the round table spoke of “working memory” with regard to our collective memory. The analogy with individual memory is striking. Working memory in the brain is the current moment to moment awareness, which, of course, is shaped by previous experience. Similarly, our current understanding of words is shaped by our history with those words and continually changes.
On Thursday, as part of the Clinical Psychology Colloquium, Dr. Bruna Martins spoke about the the interactions of memory and emotions. Emotional states are regulated by a lifetime of experiences, allowing elderly people to better cope with hardship. Again, the parallel to collective memory is striking; societies also are resilient when they have a shared history that reshape events to fit the story of themselves.
The Week of Memory and Forgetting ended with a powerful performance by Theatre Re on “The Nature of Forgetting”. This highly emotional piece brought the audience into the experience of a man losing his own personal history to dementia. The actors had consulted with neuroscientists to come up with ways to respectfully portray the anguish and frustration of this debilitating condition. The result was a wrenching, kinetic, effusive piece that was as much dance as theater.
After the performance, the Guillaume Pigé (artistic director for Theatre Re), Alex Judd (the lead musician), Dr. Becky Ready (Psychological and Brain Science), and I sat on stage with Aaron Shackelford, the Director of Programming for the Fine Arts Center, and discussed the performance with each other and the audience. Guillaume explained that the staccato nature of the piece was meant to keep the audience from predicting what will happen next. He didn’t intend to, but this put the audience into the mind of a person with dementia, who also has difficulty predicting what will happen next.
This highlights the most important point: Memory is not about the past, it is about the future. The point of memory is not to reminisce about past experiences, it is to shape future actions. As an example, the actors needed to practice and remember the sequence of movements for the choreography of the performance. As the play elegantly demonstrated, our daily lives are so predicated on our memory that we are devastated when memory fails during dementia.
During the discussion with the audience following the performance, a freshman student asked, “Are we nothing but our memories?” The answer is that we are nothing without our memories. Memories guide our future. The same is true of collective memory. The actions that our society takes are predicated on our collective memory, both explicit and implicit. As a University, we play an essential role in helping to shape the collective memory of society. We preserve part of the collective memory by imparting individual memory to generations of students. We also generate new knowledge and impart that, thereby changing the collective memory of society and helping to guide our future collective actions.