The Story of the Self

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“If life has a base that it stand upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills – then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory.” A Sketch of the Past, Autobiographical Essay by Virginia Woolf.

To know who you are as a person, you need to have some idea of who you have been. And, for better or worse, your remembered life story is a pretty good guide to what you will do tomorrow. “Our memory is our coherence. Our reason, our feeling, even our action.” Wrote the surrealist Spanish born filmmaker, Luis Bunuel. Lose your memory and you lose a basic connection with who you are.

When I cast back to an event from my past-let’s say the first time I ever recited a poem to an audience – I don’t just conjure up dates and times and places. I do much more than that. I am somehow able to reconstruct the moment in some of its sensory detail and relive it, as it were from the inside. I am back there, amid the sights and sounds and assembly hall smell. I become a time traveler who can return to the present as soon as the demands of “now” intervene. This sort of memory is known as “autobiographical memory”, because it is about the narrative we make from the happenings of our own lives.

When you ask people about their memories, they often talk as though they were material possessions, enduring representations of the past to be carefully guarded and deeply cherished. But this view of memory is quite wrong. Memories are not filed away in the brain like so many video-cassettes, to be slotted in and played when it's time to recall the past. Sci-fi and fantasy fictions might try to persuade us otherwise, but memories are not discrete entities that can be taken out of one person's head, Dumbledore-style, and distilled for someone else's viewing. They are mental reconstructions, nifty multimedia collages of how things were, that are shaped by how things are now. Autobiographical memories are stitched together as and when they are needed from information stored in many different neural systems. That makes them curiously susceptible to distortion, and often not nearly as reliable as we would like. We know this from many different sources of evidence. In the realms of memory, the fact that it is vivid doesn’t guarantee that it really happened. Even highly emotional memories are susceptible to distortion.

What accounts for this unreliability?

One factor must be that remembering is always re-remembering. If I think back to how I heard the awful news about the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi (at the airport to board a flight), I know that I am not remembering the event so much as my last act of remembering it. Like a game of Chinese whispers, any small error is likely to be propagated along the chain of remembering. The sensory impressions that I took from the event are likely to be stored quite accurately. It is the assembly – the resulting edit – that might not bear much resemblance to how things actually were. The memory researcher Martin Conway describes the two forces that go head to head in remembering. The force of correspondence tries to keep memory true to what actually happened, while the force of coherence ensures that the emerging story fits in with the needs of the self, which often involves portraying the ego in the best possible light.

One of the most interesting writers on memory, Virginia Woolf, shows this process in action. In her autobiographical essay, A Sketch of the Past, she tells us that one of her earliest memories is of the pattern of flowers on her mother's dress, seen close-up as she rested on her lap during a train journey to St Ives. She initially links the memory to the outward journey to Cornwall, noting that it is convenient to do so because it points to what was actually her earliest memory: lying in bed in her St Ives nursery listening to the sound of the sea. But Woolf also acknowledges an inconvenient fact. The quality of the light in the carriage suggests that it is evening, making it more likely that the event happened on the journey back from St Ives to London. The force of correspondence makes her want to stick to the facts; the force of coherence wants to tell a good story.

How many more of our memories are a story to suit the self?

There can be no doubt that our current emotions and beliefs shape the memories that we create. It is hard to remember the beliefs of our pasts when so much has changed in the world and in ourselves. How many of us can accurately recall the euphoria at India winning the World Cup in 1983? When our present-day emotions change, so do our memories. Julian Barnes describes this beautifully in his Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending, when a shift in his protagonist Tony's feelings towards his former lover's parents unlocks new memories of their relationship. "But what if, even at a late stage, your emotions relating to those long-ago events and people change? … I don't know if there's a scientific explanation for this … All I can say is that it happened, and that it astonished me."

Of all the memories we cherish, those from childhood are possibly the most special. Few of us will have reliable memories from before three or four years of age, and recollections from before that time need to be treated with skepticism. When you think about the special cognitive tricks involved in autobiographical memory, it's perhaps no surprise that it takes a while for children to start doing it right. Many factors seem to be critical in children's emergence from childhood amnesia, including language and narrative abilities. When we are able to encode our experience in words, it becomes much easier to put it together into a memory. Intriguingly, though, the boundary of childhood amnesia shifts as you get closer to it. As a couple of recent studies have shown, if you ask children about what they remember from infancy, they remember quite a bit further back than they are likely to do as adults.

There are implications to the unreliability of childhood memories. One particular difficulty with early memories is their susceptibility to contamination by visual images, such as photographs and video. I'm sure that several of my childhood memories are actually memories of seeing myself in photos. When we look back into the past, we are always doing so through a prism of intervening selves. And yet these untrustworthy memories are among the most cherished we have.

Memories of childhood are often made out to have a particular kind of authenticity; we think they must be pure because we were cognitively so simple back then. We don't associate the slipperiness of memory with the guilelessness of youth. When you read descriptions of people's very early memories, you see that they often function as myths of creation. Your first memory is special because it represents the point when you started being who you are.

What should we do about this troublesome mental function?

For one thing, I don't think we should stop valuing it. Memory can lead us astray, but then it is a machine with many moving parts, and consequently many things that can go awry. Perhaps even that is the wrong way of looking at it. The great pioneer of memory research, Daniel Schacter, has argued that, even when it is failing, memory is doing exactly the thing it is supposed to do. And that purpose is as much about looking into the future as it is about looking into the past. There is only a limited evolutionary advantage in being able to reminisce about what happened to you, but there is a huge payoff in being able to use that information to work out what is going to happen next. Similar neural systems seem to underpin past-related and future-related thinking. Memory is endlessly creative, and at one level it functions just as imagination does.

Memory should be valued as a means for endlessly rewriting the self. When writers create imaginary memories for their characters, they do a similar kind of thing to what we all do when we make a memory. They weave together bits of their own personal experience, emotions and sensory impressions and the minutiae of specific contexts, and tailor them into a story by hanging them on to a framework of historical fact. They do all that while making them fit the needs of the narrative, serving the story as much they serve truth. To emphasize its narrative nature is not to undermine memory’s value. It is simply to be realistic about this everyday psychological miracle. If we can be more honest about memory’s quirks, we can get along with it better. When I think back to my first attempt at elocution, it doesn’t bother me that I have probably got some of the details wrong. It might be a fiction, but it’s my fiction, and I treasure it. Memory is like that. It makes storytellers of us all.

• Charles Fernyhough is a writer and psychologist, a reader in psychology at Durham University and a faculty member of the School of Life.