Remembering and Forgetting

REMEMBERING
AND
FORGETTING
AN INQUIRY INTO THE
NATURE OF MEMORY
EDMUND BLAIR
BOLLES
~Wlt-
3:e:E
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WALKER AND COMPANY
New York
Copyright 1988 by Edmund Blair Bolles

All rights reserved .
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system ,
without permission in writing from the Publisher.
First published in the United States of America
in 1988 by the Walker Publishing Company, Inc .
Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son
Canada, Limited, Markham, Ontario.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bolles, Edmund Blair, 1942Remembering and forgetting.
Includes index.
I. Memory . I. Title .
BF371.B59
1988
153. 1'2
87-14791
Printed in the United States of America

BOMC offers recordings and compact discs, cassettes
and records. For information and catalog write to
BOMR, Camp Hill, PA 17012.
Many of the important ideas in this book

were digested and improved by talking with my brother,
Harry Peck Bolles,
so even without all the other good reasons at hand,
that help would be enough to justify this dedication.
CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction: Memory and Imagination
PART ONE:
1:
2:
3:
4:
5:
6:
7:
8:
9:
10:
XI
Remembrance oJ Things Personal
Does Memory Matter?

Memory at Work
Emotional Memory
Factual Memory
Interpretive Memory
The Arts of Memory
PART Two:
IX
3
23
29
42
63
92
The Biology oj Memory
Newfound Surprises
The Organ of Memory
Memory Circuits
Memory Studies Today
PART THREE:
115
123
138
164
The Forgettery
11: Ordinary " Forgetting"

12: Forgotten Chunks: The Failure of
Interpretive Memory
13: Amnesia: The Failure of Factual Memory
14: Forgetting to Remember: The Failure of
Emotional Memory
15: Forgetting and Old Age
179
194
207
220
231
viii / Contents
PART FOUR:
16:
17:
18:
19:
The Experience of Memory
Memory and Life

The Emotional Memory of John Dean
The Factual Memory of S.
The Interpretive Memory of
Marcel Proust
241
246
264
Source Notes
Index
289
309
2%
FOREWORD
Excerpt from telephone conversation held three days before
submitting manuscript to publisher:
PHONE: Robert Penn Warren says that changing attitudes toward memory have changed the way we feel about things .
ME: Well, of course, that's the point of my book-telling people
what we have learned about memory and what those discoveries mean to us in our everyday lives.
PHONE: You should make that last sentence the foreword to
your book.
E.B.B.
/ ix
Introduction:
Memory and Imagination

Imagine ... that our minds contain a block of wax ... .
Let us call it the gift of the Muses' mother, Memory , and
say that whenever we wish to remember something . . .
we hold this wax under the perceptions or ideas and
imprint on them as we might stamp the impression of a
seal ring.
-Plato, Theaetetus , c. 368 B.C .
Remembering is an act of imagination. There, reduced

to a single sentence, is the principle that underlies this book.
For several thousand years people have believed that remembering retrieves information stored .somewhere in the mind.
The metaphors of memory have always been metaphors of
storage: We preserve images on wax; we carve them in stone;
we write memories as with a pencil on paper; we file memories
away; we have photographic memories; we retain facts so firmly
they seem held in a steel trap. Each of these images proposes a
memory warehouse where the past lies preserved like childhood
souvenirs in an attic. This book reports a revolution that has
overturned that vision of memory. Remembering is a creative,
constructive process. There is no storehouse of information
about the past anywhere in our brain.
At a stroke, this change in perspective has abolished many
of the paradoxes about memory that arose from the storage
metaphor. A popular enigma of late has been our seeming
knowledge of memory's supposed contents. If I ask you to name
the second president after Thomas Jefferson, you may reply that
you know the answer even before you can give it. "Wait, I know
/ xi
xii I REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING
that," says you, and a moment later comes, in triumphant

intonation, "James Monroe." We have long assumed that during
the pause between "wait" and the answer, the brain busily
rooted through its file cabinets to fetch the item.
The paradox comes from our foreknowledge that we
"know" the answer. How could we know that we knew it if we
had not already checked our memory and found the answer?
But if we had already found the answer, why didn't we give it
straight away? Puzzles like this one tum storage into an enigma.
We know what we have hidden in our attic boxes even before
we go into the attic for a look. We could improve computer
operations mightily if machines knew what information they had
tucked away in their data bases before they even searched the
bases.
If we think of memory as an act of construction instead of
retrieval, the paradox evaporates. Suppose I showed you a highjump bar resting four feet off the ground and asked you to jump
it. "I can do that," says you, while tossing your topcoat aside.
You back up a bit, start running, leap, and land safely beyond
the bar. Nobody would pretend that you said you could do it
because you mystically looked into the future and saw your
forthcoming success. Your claim was a judgment about your
abilities. Memory works the same way. When we say we know
something, we speak imprecisely. We judge that we can construct the answer. We may be wrong, just as the person who
thinks he can jump the high bar may be wrong. In both cases we
believe that we can do something and then try to do it.
This emphasis on judgment, belief, and imagination implies
a basic change in our understanding of people and the experiences of ordinary life. It makes us whole again. Our thoughts
and actions do not come simply from some little box stored in
the head. Retrieval metaphors suggested that memory was a
mechanical power and that our bodies were its passive beneficiaries. When we understand memory as a constructive power,
we also see how vitally and creatively we confront daily life with
our whole being.
Introduction: Memory and Imagination / xiii
Shortly before beginning to write this book, I traveled

through the American West and camped in the Grand Teton
National Park. The campsite was filled with people enjoying
themselves and the setting. I began talking with my father about
the numbers of people and how such a place brought home to
me just what the automobile had accomplished in making the
country so available. My father agreed but said the revolution
had been neither immediate nor automatic. He began to talk
about a car trip he had taken in 1924 from St. Louis, Missouri,
to Fish Creek, Wisconsin. He described the exhaustion, the flat
tires, and filth of the first day out, and how at that time he never
believed roads would be so smooth and cars so reliable that
people would gladly tour the country and make the drive the
main part of their holiday. His point was that the change had
depended on more than the mere existence of the automobile,
and he drew on his experience with that old trip to fuel his
argument. I had never heard this story before, but my father
told it easily, contrasting the experience of a thirteen-year-old
boy with the world he saw over sixty years later.
How can we explain the power of memory to freeze time
like that?
We can point to many inventions that preserve information-photographic film, videotape, audiotape, printed pagesand say that memory is one more device for recovering information stored sometime earlier. The metaphor leaves us with
the image of the brain as a library stack. In my father's story,
an old book that no one had consulted for years was taken
briefly from the shelf and then returned. This answer steers our
wonder away from the individual to a consideration of the
process. How does memory hold on to that material for so long?
How can memory contain so much? My own interest in memory
began with precisely those questions. Many years ago I even
began a project of tracking my memory lapses in the hopes of
discovering something about the filing system used to store
memories.
This book provides an alternate account for our ability to
remember times long past. It says that instead of storing an
xiv / REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING

infinite amount of information, we can remember/imagine an
infinite number of experiences. The answer redirects our wonder
away from the idea of some internal machine that could be
artificially simulated outside a breathing body. Memory is a
living product of desire, attention, insight, and consciousness.
We have not appreciated memory's active nature. Instead
of saying so-and-so has a great memory, implying the same
passive accomplishment of a person whose eyes are a beautiful
shade of green, we come closer to the mark in saying so-and-so
is a great rememberer. Remembering well is like running well or
playing well. It is not for the lazy and not for the fearful.
This book describes a new understanding of memory and
what it means to daily experience. It unites the work of several
distinct lines of scientific research and shows how the findings
of each line support one another as firmly as separate columns
support an arch. I have divided the book into four parts.
Part One, The Remembrance of Things Personal, surveys
the psychology of memory. It looks at what memory does . The
traditions that support this section are the oldest in the book.
The deliberate study of memory began in 1879 when a German
philosopher, Hermann Ebbinghaus, started a series of experiments designed to measure his own ability to learn lists of
meaningless syllables. Ebbinghaus began a tradition that continues to this day. The chief complaint about Ebbinghaus has
always focused on the artificiality of his experiments. Learning
lists is a trivial memory task, and learning meaningless lists is
even more trivial. The most articulate challenger of Ebbinghaus
was a psychologist at Cambridge University, Sir Frederick Bartlett. He studied the way we remember meaningful things , and
this book follows the line he founded. Bartlett was the first
explicitly to link memory and imagination. Besides these
schools of psychology that focused directly on memory, every
major experimental school of psychology-behaviorism, Pavlovian conditioning, and Gestalt psychology-has made important
contributions to our understanding of memory. Many of the
researchers in these separate schools were bitter opponents and
would never have believed that their findings could stand side by
Introduction: Memory and Imagination / xv
side in a unified psychology of memory. Such harmony has

become possible because memory works in different ways.
Distinct "levels" of memory associate different things. These
separate approaches to psychology explored different memory
levels. Now at last we can assemble the pieces into one large
chunk of knowledge and see how memory works as a whole.
Part Two, The Biology of Memory, justifies and explains
the arrangement of levels presented in the first part. This section
depends on extremely recent research. Anything that predates
the 1980s belongs to ancient history. During the past few years
we have made great strides in our understanding of the brain
and its most important cell, the neuron. Thanks to this work we
can see how it is possible to act on past experience without
preserving information about that experience. We also understand brain circuitry well enough to see the outlines and order
of construction. The circuits described in Part Two let the brain
construct a memory in a specific order, the same order described
in Part One. Most of the research into the brain and neurons
developed independently of the psychological tradition. The
convergence of these separate lines strengthens them both.
Part Three, The Forgettery, examines the many memory
failures that fill our lives. Some of these slips are routine aspects
of daily life; others are astonishing problems-like the inability
to remember even the most commonly seen faces or the incapacity to learn new facts. The research tradition behind this section
is more medical than psychological and only recently have
investigators learned many of the facts included in this discussion. In particular, during the past few years we have at last
acquired a good description of amnesia. Ten years ago amnesia
seemed among the most paradoxical problems imaginable, but
today we can see its developmental position far more clearly.
When we assumed that memories lay stored in the head,
forgetfulness always seemed puzzling. A failure to remember
might indicate a memory's disappearance from storage, but that
explanation could not hold if later we remembered what we had
forgotten. Why did we have trouble remembering? It proved
difficult to explain transient forgetting without imagining a
xvi / REMEMBERING AND FORGElTING

whimsical little man up in the head. Some explanations suggested that the storage files were askew and that the little man
could not find the right one. Others suggested that the little man
found the answer quickly enough but for reasons of his own
refused to pass memory's contents along to our awareness. Talk
of little men in the head has never sounded scientific, and
speculation has usually favored a variety of more technicalsounding terms. Some popular recent phrases have included
executive function and working memory, but the point remained
the same. We were thought to have some independently organized power up in our heads that pulled things from memory's
warehouse and passed them on to our awareness. Where the
power came from and how it got to be so smart without having
its own little man have been profound mysteries. The veil of
paradox disappears, however, if we think of forgetfulness as a
failure to create a memory instead of a failure to retrieve one.
Forgetting is like striking out at the plate. We were not up to the
occasion. Of course we want to know why we failed and what
we can do to strike out less often, but the issue becomes more
practical and less mystical. With good coaching and good effort
we might even improve.
The most exciting evidence supporting this section comes
from Parts One and Two. When we suffer from some organic
memory failure , the breakdown always disrupts our ability to
construct a memory. We never suffer from some random loss of
data in storage, and people's damaged memories match exactly
with the levels described in the first two parts. Research into
memory failure has generally proceeded independently of experiments into how memory works either psychologically or biologically. For many decades none of the fields seemed to have much
to contribute to the others. Now suddenly all have come together
to support each other's findings .
Part Four, The Experience of Memory, presents three historical cases of memory and its role in the lives of people outside
the psychological and neurological laboratories. The first three
parts report what science has learned. This fourth part asks the
basic question: "So what?" For all its scientific and philosophi-
Introduction: Memory and Imagination / xvii

cal importance, does the change from speaking of storage to
discussing imagination mean anything for our understanding of
people and their behavior? Of course it does; it shows our limits
and our potentials in a new way. The chapters in this part
explore imagination and desire as a means to understanding
memory and forgetfulness.
The interactions between personal imagination and desires
that are described in this final part should provoke the most
intense discussion. Scientists, of course, will continue to explore
the various memory traditions. I estimate science will make
more discoveries about memory in the next fifteen years than it
has in the past hundred. But for ordinary citizens the issue
should always be what these findings mean to their own lives
and cares. In a few years it will be commonplace to say that
remembering is an act of imagination, but what does that fact
tell us about ourselves and our potential? My own judgment is
that we have a much greater creative capacity that we ever
suspected, and that we should actively encourage the development of this capacity. But should is never a word of science, and
my opinion is only a judgment based on scientific knowledge; it
is not science itself. In any discussion of what science means to
people we always come back to questions of what we want from
society, what we will give back to it, and what it will tolerate in
us. In the ancient, medieval, and renaissance worlds people
often discussed the relation of memory and society. Then the
issue seemed to change and people began to consider the role of
the imagination (rational or artistic) in society. Now we find that
remembering and imagining are of a piece. I believe that the
issue of memory is about to return to the public arena with an
enduring vigor, and I offer this book in an effort toward encouraging its renewal.
REMEMBERING
AND
FORGETTING
PART
ONE
REMEMBRANCE OF
THINGS PERSONAL
DOES MEMORY
MATfER?
A great and beautiful invention is memory, always useful
both for learning and for life.
-The Dialexis fragment, 400 B.C.
Memory is a glorious and admirable gift of nature by
which we recall past things, we embrace present things,
and we contemplate future things through their likeness
to past things .
-Boncompagno da Signa, 1235
A.D.
In ancient and medieval times memory certainly drew

respect, but those people lived without printing presses, computers, or index cards. Their age put precious little in writing.
They had their classics and preserved the foundation documents
of their civilizations on scrolls and manuscripts, while the gruel
of everyday life survived in the head. As such, everyone understood memory's fragility. Memory mattered desperately to
those people because it preserved a rich crop of lore that
mattered. To the Greeks, memory was "the mother of the
muses," the source of art and learning. We enjoy different
circumstances. Our problem more often is the abundance of
documentation and the need to sort meat from stuffing. Inevitably, this change in our ability to keep records has changed our
view of memory.
/3
4I
REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING
People today commonly agree with the spirit of the Scottish

philosopher David Hume, who noted that, thanks to printed
books, "We scarcely ever hear a short memory given as a reason
for a man's failure in any undertaking." Ancient feats of memory now strike us as monuments to wasted time. Saint Augustine
spoke admiringly of a friend who could recite the whole of Virgil
backward. We spend our time mastering other things. An influential textbook on memory studies even begins by conceding
that the past 2500 years have seen little or no advance in the
general techniques for improving one's memory, but the author
then adds the consolation that "since the invention of printing,
this art [of remembering] is no longer of great value." Has the
filing cabinet abolished our need for memory?
Most people still do take memory seriously, of course, and
most of us wish that our memories worked better, faster, and
more precisely. It would be especially charming if our memory
for names could improve. Yet we no longer see memory as the
keystone in the arch of civilization. We still take many past
scholars seriously-ancients like Cicero, medieval schoolmen
like Thomas Aquinas, and heroes of the Renaissance like Petrarch-but we ignore their innovative writings on memory. We
focus on creative thought. Our civilization hangs by that string.
The ancients feared forgetting; we fear running out of ideas.
When forced to choose between developing memory or encouraging imagination, our society repeatedly favors imagination.
The choice seems perfectly reasonable. Imagination uncovers
the things we cannot already look up.
Contemporary science, however, has hit upon a shocker.
There is no firm psychological distinction between how we
remember and how we think. The mythological portrait of
memory as mother to all inspiration has gained renewed vigor.
During the past thirty years research into memory has begun to
harvest rich crops, and during the past fifteen years we have
begun to obtain a new and unexpected view of what memory
does and how it does it. These discoveries have toppled assumptions that guided Western thought for two and a half millennia.
Does Memory Matter? / 5
Basic beliefs, such as the notion that somehow we file

memories away, have come under question.
Primal distinctions, such as the one between thought and
memory, no longer seem so clear.
Elementary definitions, such as the one that says memory
is the faculty by which we retain knowledge of the past, now
sound beside the point.
In short, memory matters to us for reasons that have little
to do with the ancients' respect for the lore their memories
preserved. Our new understanding of memory's importance
carries with it a new understanding of our own minds, what
minds do, and how they do it.
The Artificial Use of Memory

Our traditional understanding of memory rests on a garbled
and largely forgotten system. We have forgotten, too, the role of
memory among the ancient Greeks and in the Roman empire.
Roman administration depended on a large bureaucracy, but by
our standards it used little paper. The Romans had some protopaper and some books, but these were expensive luxuries. They
could also scratch messages on wax-coated stones, but that
system was bulky. Yet the empire depended on "white-collar"
classes for its operation. Without paper, educated Romans had
to remember many of the things that we routinely write down.
The ancients, therefore, needed a disciplined, well-trained, and
constantly practiced memory. They understood how special this
memory was and they taught its development as a standard part
of education. They called this disciplined memory "artificial
memory" and distinguished it from the inborn "natural memory." Natural memory is the subject of this book, but the
ancients had little to say about it. They focused on the branch
we no longer feel we need.
6/
Artificial memory was not unnatural; it systematized and

trained innate powers. The powers, however, were concentrated
and developed to such an extent that the ancients' experience of
recalling was far removed from our own haphazard search for a
name or a line of verse. It misses the experience of that lost
world to think of these memories as just tricks to preserve
information. Artificial memory required so much imaginative
attention that its practitioners felt a relationship with the material that we, looking on printouts or scratch pads, simply never
feel. The ancients saw artificial memory as a way of making
themselves and whatever they wished to remember as one.
The standard surviving Roman text on memory is called Ad
Herennium. Its unknown author wrote the book in about 80 B.C.
as a textbook for rhetoric students. Rhetoric taught effective
means of communicating, particularly effective public speaking.
Since paper was scarce, rhetoric students had to learn techniques for remembering their speeches without referring to
notes. In this regard, the Ad Herennium's unknown expert
describes an astonishing system of recalling facts by arranging
scenes in an imaginary space.
First, a person imagined a space, commonly a quiet building
he already knew well. The space was never a purely abstract
grid or set of pigeon holes. Rhetoric students used to seek out
large architectural spaces and commit them to memory. After
selecting a space, one placed, mentally of course, associative
images in this space. Each person filled his space with privately
created pictures. Recall consisted of an imaginary stroll through
this space, looking at the images, and remembering their associations. Although the action was imaginary, the experience was
profoundly felt. An orator might imagine himself walking past a
stairwell. At the landing he sees, through memory's eyes, a large
image of a young man thrashing an older woman. Thus reminded, the orator says, "I will not linger over the occasion in
which this ruffian beat his mother-in-law," and-still in his
mind-he walks past the stairs and notices another image, this
time in an alcove.
This organization principle---called the method of locibecame such an established part of ancient thinking that our
own speech continues to reflect it. The word topic, as in "the
topic of this chapter is the utility of memory, " comes from the
Greek topoi for place. Under the Greek and Roman memory
system, a topic was a place in the imaginary space where a
memory image appeared. We shall see that other verbal holdovers also continue to influence us long after the disappearance
of the system they described.
The Ad Herennium gives an eminently practical example of
how to design a memory image. It says, suppose a defense
attorney has a client who has been accused of poisoning someone to gain an inheritance, and many witnesses are prepared to
speak against him. The lawyer preserves the details of the case
as a long series of images in an artificial space. To recall the
details, he will imagine himself walking through this space, but
before he even begins to look at the images, the lawyer encounters a striking introductory image at the portal, so to speak, of
the imaginary space. The unknown memory expert describes
this introductory image:
We shall imagine the man in question [the victim] as lying ill in
bed, if we know him personally. If we do not know him, we
shall yet take someone to be our invalid, but not a man of the
lowest class, so that he may come to mind at once. And we
shall place the defendant at the bedside, holding in his right
hand a cup [to represent the poison]; in his left, tablets [the
will], and on the fourth finger, a ram's testicles [the witnesses;
testes in Latin].
Our own age cannot fully grasp this image. We are not even sure
why the lawyer begins his stroll down memory lane with a
summary image. Probably it served as an imaginary label.
Remember, our lawyer's firm operates under a severe paper
shortage. (The will in the image was on a tablet, not on paper.)
A lawyer could not routinely keep extensive files on every client.
Instead, the details of each case lay in images, and access to the
8/
relevant images began by recalling the identifying label. Possibly

the system began with recognition. When the lawyer saw his
client, he recognized him as the man holding the ram's testicles.
This recognition evoked that first image, and the lawyer had
found his file. The ancients had memory skills we simply cannot
comprehend.
The Revolt Against Memory

Ancient experts sometimes used their artificial memory
skills to dazzle people with their knowledge of the classic texts,
but the classics had been written down and could be consulted.
More important was artificial memory's capacity to preserve
one's own work. A lawyer without paper still had clients to
serve. Politicians and preachers had people to address. After
Rome fell, that practical need faded and so, for many centuries,
did artificial memory. The late Middle Ages revived it as a way
to form a personal bond between one's mind and the doctrines
of religion. The techniques of devising personally meaningful
images of doctrine and then "walking" among them gave people
a means of private and deeply felt devotion. The experience in
imagination was similar to entering a gothic church and meditating on the many images in its niches and windows.
Toward the end of the Middle Ages, cheap paper began to
appear in western Europe. It had slowly crossed Asia, arriving
in Baghdad in time to serve the golden age of Islam. Barbarous
Europe was late to develop an interest in the product, but by the
1300s paper mills dotted Spain, France, Italy, and Germany.
The introduction of cheap paper made it possible to write notes
to oneself. Even before Gutenberg'S press, popular books for
lay people began to appear. Suddenly London citizens started
writing wills, conducting business, and sending personal communications on paper. The rise of a literate laity revived the old
interest in artificial memory. Lawyers and secular thinkers
reappeared, and they felt a need for the old learning traditions
described in their classic texts.
When the printing press appeared (around 1455), it soon
began helping to promote artificial memory. In 1491 an Italian,
Peter of Ravenna, published a book on how to improve one's
memory, titled The Phoenix. It was exceedingly popular, going
through many editions and translations, and making Peter of
Ravenna's name known to the whole of Europe's educated
public for a century. An observer of that era might have predicted that artificial memory was on the verge of a spectacular
comeback. It had left the monasteries and seemed ready to
regain the practical importance it had known in Roman days.
But the comeback did not happen. Even today publishers
bring out improve-your-memory books, yet most of us continue
to have bad memories. The availability of paper had ended the
need for those old techniques. Renaissance professionals found
they had not truly re-created the Roman world. A lawyer could
afford to maintain a small dossier on his client and thereby do
away with the pressing need to record the case in images.
Doubtless this new-style lawyer felt shamed and lazy by his
failure to remember everything, but there it was-he did not
really need that old tradition. And here we see a radical change
brought by the new order of paper. It permitted deliberate
breaks with the past. Literacy by itself urged a respect for
written memories, but literacy plus plenty of paper breeds a
certain contempt for what is written. The world was suddenly
full of books and handwritten notes-some good, some bad.
Writing no longer had the authority it once carried. Now all
readers could agree that some written things should be forgotten. Memory no longer mattered the way it had.
The humanism of Erasmus typified the new attitude. He
admired scholarship more than authority, and he preferred reasoned learning to remembered doctrine. Erasmus's attitude triumphed, but not without a struggle. The defenders of memory
could see as clearly as Erasmus that printed books had made it
easy to look things up, but they hesitated to surrender the sense
of personal involvement that comes with artificial memory.
10 I REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING
Memory's defenders could also see flaws in the wisdom of the

ancients and the medieval philosophers, but they hoped to find
a better wisdom that would replace the old errors. A new
wisdom held personally in memory would bring intellectual
communion with eternal truths.
The most radical opponents of artificial memory understood
that they opposed this personal excitement over knowledge.
They preferred impersonal rote memorization. The theory of
rote education became especially popular among English Puritans, who objected to the tendency of traditional memory techniques to excite the imagination. Under ordinary circumstances,
the Puritan assault probably would not have been as successful
as it became. Renaissance humanism was in trouble with the
Inquisition, but its joy in learning and its mystical sense of
symbolic truth were too powerful a tradition to fall before the
second-rate minds that embraced rote recitation. In the ferment
of the late 1500s and early 1600s, however, science was born.
Men like Descartes, Galileo, and Kepler knew all about the
excitement of learning, but they, like the Puritans, rejected the
vivid imagery, personal meanings, and arbitrary order of artificial memory. Old ways can survive attack from mediocrities.
They can also survive serious criticism from the best brains of
an age. But when both the best and the mediocre combine
against a tradition, that tradition is doomed. Artificial memory
died like a healthy old man who had lived so long people forgot
he was mortal, until one day he sneezed and was gone.
We today are the heirs of that revolt. Memorization, to us,
means learning by rote. The quality of mind our culture praises
most is scientific reasoning. So triumphant was the revolt that
we have forgotten it ever took place or that there could be any
other way to understand memory and thought.
Surviving Threads
One other important survivor of the revolt against artificial
memory was the ancient distinction between recall and recogni-
tion. Theories of artificial memory did not stress these elements,

but classical authors like Saint Augustine and Aristotle mentioned them. Augustine was especially important because Protestants and Catholics alike have read his Confessions during
the centuries since the end of the artificial memory tradition.
Augustine had an excellent talent for summing up the paradoxes
that baffled the ancient world, and on memory he wrote:
When, therefore, the memory loses something-and this is
what happens when we forget something and try to remember
it-where are we to look for it except in the memory itself?
And if the memory offers something else instead, as may
happen, we reject what this offers until the one thing we want
is presented. When it is presented to us we say "This is it,"
but we could not say this unless we recognised it, and we could
not recognise it unless we remembered it.
Augustine did not necessarily refer to artificial memory in this

passage, and he did not base his paradox on artificial memory's
distinction between the places and images of memory. He
looked instead at a troubled memory struggling over some
momentarily forgotten information, and" he distinguishes between memory's production of information (its recall) and memory's perception of the information (its recognition).
Recognition is always a judgment about present experience.
It can be a vague sense of familiarity-the judgment that I have
been here before-or a decision that answer (b) in a multiplechoice test is correct-the judgment that I have met information
in a similar context before. It can accompany a chance encounter with a friend in line at a supermarket-the judgment that this
person is known to me. Recognition can take many forms, but it
always uses past experience to judge the present.
Recall produces an association. Instead of feeling that a
place is familiar, recall puts a name to a place. During a school
examination, recall can fill in a blank. In a supermarket, it
enables us to greet people by name and ask appropriate questions. Like recognition, recall takes many guises, but the pro-
12 /
duction of associations formed in the past is always its defining

characteristic.
Part of Augustine's genius lay in his ability to find examples
that beautifully illustrate his puzzles. Often, we cannot sort out
the recall-recognition distinction so sharply. Augustine described a person having trouble with his memory and in that
situation the distinction between producing and jUdging information is clear. In ordinary life, however, these two elements
are so bound together we have no sense of them as separate
parts. Suppose I show someone a photo in his old high school
yearbook and ask, "Do you know that person?"
He replies, "Sure, it's Bob White." Was that recall or
recognition? It was both. Recognition judged the face as familiar
and recall produced the name. Without the judgment there
would have been no act of recall. If he had made the judgment,
he might still have found he could not recall the name.
Memory is best when recall and recognition work together.
An easy trick for improving one's understanding simply adds
recall to a task that would otherwise depend wholly on recognition. I think again of my time in the Grand Tetons. One afternoon
I went canoeing on Jackson Lake with two of my nephews. We
had already camped in this area for several days and easily
recognized the setting, but then I added something for us to
recall. As we approached a sandbar, I said to the five-year-old,
"That's Harry Tim Island," naming the place for the boy. From
the sandbar's top, we saw other bars and quickly named them
for others in our party. Then we hopped back into the canoe to
continue our journey. At once I saw that something had
changed. Whereas before I had been a tourist on a strange lake,
now I was a traveler who knew where he was. I simultaneously
recognized a sandbar and recalled its name as "Harry Tim
Island" or "Theophile Island." With that compound help from
memory I knew where all the other important points lay and
how to get where I wanted to go.
Augustine did not invent the recall-recognition distinction,
but he gave us a simple example from ordinary life that enabled
Does Memory Matter? I 13
us to maintain our sense of the distinction's reality. Memory

works like a water molecule. Usually we have no way of telling
the hydrogen from the oxygen atoms, but we cannot understand
water's chemistry without knowing its different elements. When
people again began to think about memory, they found they
already knew of two constituent elements.
Science Rediscovers Memory

Three hundred years after the disappearance of artificial
memory, science began a cautious return to the field. A dozen
generations had come and gone since the days when education
automatically included training in the techniques of remembering, so psychologists had no sense of returning to a tradition.
They saw themselves as pioneers, the first to bring memory
under scientific scrutiny. Their research has uncovered many
things the ancients never guessed, but we have also slowly and
painfully rediscovered facts about memory that were once commonplaces of learned opinion. The self-described pioneers began their work with a series of assumptions that seemed so
fundamental nobody knew they were assumptions. The theories
of artificial memory were forgotten, but many of the metaphors
and terms survived. The revolt against artificial memory had
also faded from scholarly memory, but the point of view that
had triumphed in revolt persisted. Slowly, although with gathering speed, researchers have come to see that their original
metaphors and viewpoints were wrong. None of the cliches that
memory's latter-day pioneers started with have survived the
journey.
Like many another revolution, this one began with conservative assumptions. In 1879, Hermann Ebbinghaus began the
first modern systematic study of memory. He had hit upon an
experimental technique, using himself as his subject. He pre-
14 / REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING
sented himself with lists of nonsense syllables (e.g., gek, nim),

and measured how long it took him to learn a list and how long
to forget it. Ebbinghaus accepted the metaphors of artificial
memory and simply assumed that memory stored items somewhere. He also took it for granted that the use of memory lay in
the reproduction of information, accurate recall. Although his
study probed the function of artificial memory, he specifically
refused to use any methods-tricks, he called them-that might
make recall easier. In this way, he hoped to study natural
memory. His scorn for tricks was a holdover from the revolt
against artificial memory. Memory experts had endured as carnival and stage performers, but intellectuals agreed with Sir
Francis Bacon's sneer, "I make no more estimation of repeating
a great number of names or words upon once hearing, than I do
of the tricks of tumblers, funamboloes, baladines: the one being
the same in the mind that the other is in the body, matters of
strangeness without worthiness." Ebbinghaus shared this attitude without knowing that Bacon had been scorning, not a
carnival show, but an ancient tradition of learning. Thus, when
Ebbinghaus began his research he combined two contradictory
inheritances. He understood memory's function in terms of the
metaphors developed during the age of artificial memory, but he
viewed recall with the contempt of the people who had scorned
its sterility. Ebbinghaus's work has inspired many followers and
their findings appear often in this book, but because they have
continued to test memory in meaningless and useless situations
the Ebbinghaus school has contributed little to determining why
memory matters to us.
New thoughts about memory's use appeared around the
turn of the century. The radical who broke this ground was
Sigmund Freud, Ebbinghaus's junior by six years. Freud, too,
accepted the degenerated artificial-memory theory and he assumed that the brain preserved all experience, but his angle of
approach made him a radical. Although he began as a scientist
doing pure research into the nervous system, financial considerations forced him to become a practicing doctor. Instead of
studying memory per se, he became interested in failures of

memory. He assumed that any failure of recall had a specific
cause. Since memory failure occurs every day, Freud had much
to explain. He thought about these failures for much of his life
and, when he was fifty, wrote:
There thus runs through my thoughts a continuous current of
"personal reference," of which generally I have no inkling,
but which betrays itself by . . . instances of my forgetting
names. It is as if I were obliged to compare everything I hear
about other people with myself; as if my personal complexes
were put on the alert whenever another person is brought to
my notice. This cannot possibly be an individual peculiarity of
my own: it must rather contain an indication of the way in
which we understand "something other than ourself" in general. I have reasons for supposing that other people are in this
respect very similar to me.
You do not have to be much of a Freudian to suspect that

the man is on to something here, even on to something new. The
two-thousand-year tradition of artificial memory never identified
the constraints on memory in quite this way. Freud is not talking
about unconscious mechanisms of repression, just the phenomenon of personal reference as something that limits and shapes
memory. We have already seen that the ancient system of
artificial memory created a sense of intimate connection to the
data. Time and again in this book we will find that Freud's
insight into the relation between oneself and one's thinking can
help clarify our understanding of memory. But Freud saw this
personal reference as a constraint, not a use for memory.
The 1930s brought a deliberate revolt against the Ebbinghaus school when Sir Frederick Bartlett sought to study meaningful memory. He managed to break away from many of
artificial memory's metaphors by arguing that memory is active
rather than serving as a passive file cabinet for things past. He
agreed with Freud that personal view affects our memory tremendously. But he continued to accept the artificial memory
16/
tradition that the function of memory is to recall the past as

accurately as possible.
During the 1950s, the view of memory as an active power
overwhelmed assumptions that it is merely a warehouse. Science did not readily abandon such a fundamental premise,
however, and first tried to mix the two views. Theorizers developed models with a storehouse where memories sit passively for
years or even decades before being retrieved. Retrieval transfers
stored data to a working area where memory suddenly acquires
the active characteristics that experimentation kept demonstrating. This active/passive model had much appeal for a while,
especially since computers do use both passive storage and
active processing. These hybrid models were blindsided, however, by brain studies that showed memory to be as active as
Bartlett insisted.
But active memory raises more questions about function
than passive memory could. Beginning with Bartlett, experiments have shown that we do not simply forget. We distort,
combine, and reorganize our memories. Further work has shown
that these transformations follow inevitably from memory's
active structure. So what good comes of that? The passive
storage in computers does a much better job at keeping the facts
straight. Indeed, the ancients invented artificial memory precisely because natural memory does so poorly at recalling facts
accurately and sequentially. If accurate recall is memory's chief
function, why are our memories so active?
Help in answering that question came only in the 1970s,
when the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget published a book titled
Memory and Intelligence. Piaget based his ideas on the study of
memory in children. As a young man Piaget helped standardize
some of the first IQ tests. During his labors he noticed that
children of certain ages consistently gave the same wrong answer to a particular question. From the test's perspective, a
wrong answer was just wrong, but Piaget wondered about the
children's reasons for giving the answers they did. He abandoned IQs and took up the study of qualitative changes in
growing children. Then, at the end of his life, he investigated

memory. During his research he made the startling observation
that children's memories for a particular event can improve over
time. A child may remember an experience poorly after one
week, but then remember it better half a year later. At last we
begin to see a benefit from having an active memory. If we
change the way we think about the world, we automatically
update memories to reflect our new understanding.
The Natural Use of Memory

Memory studies suggest forcefully that accurate recall is, at
best, an artificial function for memory, but evidence for memory's natural function has come from outside memory research.
Biology has made an unexpected run onto the stage and said,
"Look. Here is what memory accomplishes." Memory is our
reference guide to the world beyond ourselves.
During this century biology has investigated animal behavior, just as psychology studies human behavior. The two
branches most concerned with behavior are ethology, the study
of animal activity in the wild, and sociobiology, the study of
how animals interact. Both branches begin with the basic biological premise that animals behave in ways that adapt them to their
environment and help them survive. Their two fundamental
questions ask what does an animal do, and how does an animal
know what to do? To phrase that last question a little more
formally, we can ask: How can an animal act adaptively,
according to its circumstances?
The answer to this question turns on memory. Recall, or
productive memory, comes late in animal evolution; recognition,
or perceptive memory, comes much earlier. One classic study
of behavioral evolution, Edward Wilson's Sociobiology, includes a small gem of an essay about the evolution of the ability
to recognize one's fellows. Wilson found animals without such

a capacity, but he had to go pretty far down the evolutionary
tree to study them.
Ants, despite the complexity of their social organization
and the variety of their interactions, appear to have no capacity
for recognition. At least they have none based on the memory
of a past experience. They respond instinctively. The inborn
information that supports these instincts is similar to a program
in a computer. I am not suggesting that ants are machines, but
most of their actions do appear to be programmed. Instead of
memory, ants use chemical signals, smells of a sort, to identify
individuals according to their social status. These signals trigger
appropriate actions and show that it is possible to live a successful life entirely in the present tense. All ant societies take care
of their own young, and nearly every ant heap has workers who
sort eggs, larvae, and pupae into separate piles. Since eggs
develop into larvae and larvae into pupae, the workers must
routinely promote the young from one pile to the next. Recognition never enters into the task. Ants distinguish between eggs
and larvae by the chemicals, and respond to the signal rather
than to the object before them. Experimenters extracted an
identification chemical from some fire ant larvae and attached
the chemical to dummies that the ants had previously ignored.
With their new chemical disguises, the dummies passed as larvae
and the workers moved them from the egg pile to that for the
larvae.
The ant method of acting on predetermined information
obviously works well, and vertebrates too can use that system.
Wilson gives the example of a fish that carries unhatched eggs
in its mouth and then cares for its young by providing safe refuge
in its mouth. For that system to succeed, the mother must
somehow know her offspring and respond appropriately. Onlookers who assume that the mother recognizes her young
assume too much. Study shows that the mother depends purely
on the identification of smells. Fish respond to empty water that
retains the smell of the young in the same way they respond
when the young are really present. Recognition is irrelevant to

the process.
At the bird level of evolution, however, we finally see
recognition activity start to replace identification. Memory begins to take over, and inborn programming no longer controls all
behavior. Birds begin to adapt individually to their circumstances. Since birds of a feather do often flock together, they
must become adept at spotting important individuals in the
group. Birds are especially plentiful at certain seaside nesting
colonies. To us they all look and sound alike, yet the birds
themselves seem no more confused or lost than does a human
family relaxing on a beach packed with other people. For example, auks learn to recognize the call of their own parents during
the first few days of life, and the parents learn to recognize their
own young.
The survival value of memory lies in the flexibility it gives
to individuals. The ability to recognize one's own young or one's
own parents means families can reunite even after unexpected
separations. The use of recognition brings birds more sharply
into contact with reality. Now when experimenters play games
with them, the animals have some chance of acting appropriately. One researcher removed eggs from the nest of a royal tern
and placed them in an adjacent nest. The terns recognized their
own eggs and reclaimed them. This spontaneous behavior makes
it possible for terns to overcome problems that natural selection
never had to resolve.
The birds' appropriate response to the experimenter's removal of eggs highlights the adaptive difference between recognition based on memory and identification based on genetically
controlled signals. Animals with memory can adapt to local
peCUliarities. When a bird recognizes its own eggs and retrieves
them from a neighbor's nest, it solves a problem so rare that
evolution would never bother with it, and it has used memory to
do it. This is "primitive" memory, Piaget and Aristotle both
insist, but memory all the same. The bird's past experience
guides its present behavior.
20 /
Genes still control most bird behavior, but by the time we

reach the evolutionary level of, say, elephants we find that an
individual's past contributes plenty to its daily survival. Lately,
a continuing stream of zoologists has flowed into the wilds to
study elephants. The leader of this research was lain DouglasHamilton. In his account of the elephants found beside Lake
Manyara, in East Africa, he confirms that elephants do have a
strong ability to remember things. One particularly entertaining
section of his book describes the birth and early life of an
elephant calf he called N'Dume. From birth, elephant mothers
regularly fondle and nuzzle the calves, but they cannot lift a calf
and place it against a breast the way human mothers do. So
N'Dume had to locate a nipple. His first efforts were exploratory
and uncertain. Douglas-Hamilton reports, "It took him about
three days to learn that the proper place to suck was between
his mother's front legs." There we have an astonishing discovery. Newborn elephants need experience to find a nipple. Human survival does not require such early use of memory.
The adaptive value of the elephant's memory becomes clear
from an experience N'Dume had along the shores of Lake
Manyara. "Suddenly the ground gave way under him. He had
cracked through a thin crust of mud into thick glutinous mire.
The more he tried to pull out his legs the deeper he sank." His
mother gingerly sought out a sturdy path to N'Dume and retrieved him from the quicksand. N'Dume "gradually floundered
back to firm ground covered from head to tail with a sticky black
coating. I don't think he ever forgot that lesson. It was an
experience which might save his life later on."
Animals without memories cannot deliberately adapt their
behavior to environmental peculiarities like treacherous lake
shores, because they cannot recognize their setting. Their adaptation depends exclusively on natural selection. Elephants,
however, appear to have good memories, at least good powers
at remembering danger, and they can put experience to use.
Having survived his danger, N'Dume can adapt his behavior to
the Manyara setting and avoid future excursions out onto the
Does Memory Matter? I 21
dangerous lake bed. Elephants do probably sometimes forget,

but they remember enough to survive.
Such adaptive memory seems so simple that we seldom
give it much thought. Because even an elephant can do it, we
assume that the talent must be trivial, but most creatures cannot
do it, and we have no idea how to program a computer to do it.
As one computer scientist put it, "We can program computers
to perform sensory feature extraction, and we can program them
to play chess, but we have no idea how to program them to
recognize a chair as such, or to predict what a person will do in
a given situation. The smallest kitty-cat knows infinitely more
about coping with the world than the most powerful computer
program."
That final phrase reveals why biological memory matters:
Memory enables us to cope with the world as we find it. Memory
frees individuals from relying on genetic programming. The
portrait of N'Dume, filthy but wiser, summarizes the utility of
memory.
A contrasting image: Once in a game reserve I sat in a hotel
lounge overrun by flying insects of many species. It would have
been intolerable, but the manager had cleverly placed a bright
light off to one side, so the insects gathered around that light
and flew pointlessly in circles. One insect thus distracted was a
large dung beetle. The beetle was too big to manage the fancy
aerodynamics of flying in a tight circle, and when it tried it went
into a stall and fell to the floor. It lay on its back for some time
struggling to right itself, and finally it succeeded. Immediately,
it flew off and began once again to circle the light. It promptly
went into another stall and crashed to the floor again, again
landing on its back. Without memory, the beetle was doomed to
keep hurting itself.
Apparently genes program nearly all dung beetle behavior.
If the program has a flaw-I dare not speak of a "bug" in the
beetle's program-the dung beetle behaves as stupidly as a badly
programmed computer. Through natural selection, a species can
cope with a changing environment, but at the price of many
22 /
individuals. Memory changes the equation. Individuals can cope

with details that natural selection did not anticipate. We see
birds coping by retrieving eggs from a neighbor's nest. We see
elephants avoiding the invisible danger of Lake Manyara's dry
bed. And in humans, we see a species that lives and dies in a
world largely of its own making, a world that changes so fast
natural selection could not possibly handle it. Memory is our
substitute for genetic programming. It tells us where we are and
how to cope.
MEMORY AT WORK
I felt suddenly that all external obstacles had been eliminated . . . . And like an airman who hitherto has progressed laboriously along the ground, abruptly "taking
otT" I soared slowly towards the silent heights of memory.
-Proust, Time Regained. 1927
Lt's begin with some conclusions. Later we can see

how psychology reached them. Memory copes this way: Our
emotions (desires mainly) lead to attention; after paying attention and gaining experience with something, we experience a
moment of insight followed by a new understanding; this understanding makes it easy to remember and use the details of
experience for they have become part of us. The principles of
memory are linked together like pieces of a chain:
We remember what we understand;
we understand only what we pay attention to;
we pay attention to what we want.
This chain gives us memory. When memory fails, the problem
lies in some inability to move along the chain.
Although I have just described memory as a chain, other
metaphors can serve too. Usually I prefer the image of a staircase. Along with a sense of connection, this idea includes
dependence. A step on a staircase depends on the steps below.
Whatever metaphor we use, the basic fact is that there are
different kinds of memory, each with its own type of associations and uses.
We are not born with our memories or the associations they
use. As we gain experience and form the associations we con/23
24 /
struct the separate steps on a memory staircase. After building

one step, we can stand on it to build the next. In a famous
metaphor, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein spoke of constructing a ladder to climb to the truth and, after reaching the
truth, throwing the ladder away. Memory unfortunately is not
so ideal. Having constructed our staircase we must continually
rely on it and keep it in good repair.
We can consider the audience at an opera as an example.
Last night, a group was at the Met watching Der Rosenkavalier.
What do different people remember today of the performance?
The person who went reluctantly and was bored throughout
may remember only his discomfort. Even when played parts of
the score, he may not recognize anything beyond saying that all
opera music sounds pretty much alike and pretty awful. Meanwhile, the novice who never attended an opera before but loved
the evening has a different memory. This person too may not be
able to recall the music well enough to hum any of it, but he will
say, "Yes, yes," in recognition and perhaps add, "Oh, I want
to go again. "
It is not hard to predict which of these two people is going
to develop a better memory for opera. The reluctant goer associates opera with tedium and will make no further effort to learn.
His memory stops on the first step. The enthusiastic novice,
however, associates opera with pleasure and will respond with
desire and attention when offered another opportunity to go. So
far, the novice's memory for opera still contains only this first
step, but because the associations are positive, this person can
pay attention to further experiences and learn more.
Of course, most people at the Met last night were not' new
to the opera. They had been several times before and generally
they like opera. They were not bored, but neither were they
bowled over by the discovery of what opera could be. Their
memories use two steps, the emotional one that rouses them to
attention, and a second one filled with facts that they learned by
paying attention. The day after a performance these people can
discuss their evening out, recalling some of the music, recognizing much more, and comparing many aspects of the performance
Memory at Work / 25
with other operas they had seen. Their memories are good, but
a little helter-skelter. They have forgotten many of the evening's
moments as well, and they would be surprised by how much of
the music they can neither recall nor recognize. This level of
memory includes many ordinary memory failures. A person
might say, "Yes, I enjoyed last night. One scene in particular
reminded me of ... of ... oh, you know, what's the opera
where the hero is dragged off to hell?"
"Don Giovanni?" suggests the listener, and the speaker
blushes. How could I have forgotten that famous title?
This type of transitory forgetting often happens at the
second level of memory's staircase. We have many facts at the
tip of our tongue, but sometimes they do not come as quickly as
they should. We feel our frailty. Memory has caught us betwixt
and between. The bored opera-goer on memory's lower level
would not be embarrassed by a memory failure because he does
not care about the answer. The expert would not have forgotten
the name. But interested, inexpert humanity forgets; however,
those who remain interested and continue to go to the opera
may yet construct a third step of memory.
Perhaps also at last night's opera there was someone for
whom it all clicked together. This was a person whose love for
opera was established some time ago. He or, just as likely, she
has been to many operas since that original emotion and has
spotted many things and expressed many opinions. But somehow last night was different and she perceived the whole in a
new way. She understood the organization of the music and the
staging in a way previously unknown. Last night she heard bits
of music and felt that each note had its precise spot. This
morning she can recall and recognize huge sections of the score,
the set, and the action because she remembers the underlying
logic of th~ opera. As she recalls bits of music she remembers
its organization and that clue reminds her of still more music.
She can think creatively and imaginatively about opera, remembering so many details and ideas that it seems she is ready to
become an opera director. This person has constructed a complete staircase and may now use it repeatedly, discovering
emotional subtleties, learning more facts, and understanding

more as her experience grows richer.
Few people's memories of opera ever become so rich, and
yet all of us become adept at many things. We become so skilled
that our memories cease to be a problem. We remember, without
any sense of difficulty, what we need to know. One area where
most of us gain some success and climb to the top of memory ' s
staircase is in language. We are not all poets, but most of us can
say what needs to be said. We can speak appropriate, clever,
and expressive things when the occasion requires. We remember
the words and grammatical forms as needed, without conscious
effort.
Usually we learn language at so early an age that we cannot
remember what the learning was like. Recently, I heard a sevenyear-old boy say during a long car ride, "I am growing impatient. " I smiled and asked where he had learned the word
impatient. The question was offered as a means of diversion. I
knew full well the boy had learned the phrase to grow impatient
from his grandfather. The boy looked at me, "What do you
mean, where did I learn that word? I've used impatient a million
times." Already, at age seven, his memory of learning language
was gone. He just knew.
By good fortune, however, I do remember learning a language. Not English, of course. After I was finished with schooling I entered the Peace Corps and studied Swahili. The excitement and eagerness of a new Peace Corps trainee is hot enough
to boil water, and I paid close attention to the language classes.
It was a good thing I was eager, for we had five hours of language
class every day. Enthusiast though I was, I was unprepared for
how different Swahili was from Indo-European languages. By
the time I joined the Peace Corps I had at least a nodding
acquaintance with English, French, German, and Latin. Yet
Swahili sounded completely new. Its rhythms and the way it
organized sounds were unlike anything I had heard before. Most
of its syllables are unlike English syllables, and when three or
four such unusual sounds appeared one after the other I simply
became lost. I found I could not remember words.
Memory at Work / 27
There was a four-syllable word of humble greeting-Shikamoo-whose sound I much admired, but I could never remember it. In class, after class, I would pause to ask, "What's that
word again?" Despite my interest and attention, I could not
remember. This endless memory failure embarrassed me considerably. As a boy I had lived three years in Paris. On visits, my
grandmother had continuing troubles with French and would
often ask about a word she had asked about before. I took this
poor memory as evidence that my dear grandmother's brain had
turned to pabulum. Now, here I was, ink still wet on my master's
degree, having precisely the same difficulty remembering a
language's most basic words. Perhaps my grandmother's problem was more ordinary than I had realized.
And then one day-about a month into training-the problem ended. I had learned the basic sounds and the ways they
came together. I could not explain the Swahili sound system any
more than I can explain English phonetics, but Swahili no longer
seemed strange to me. Suddenly, when I learned a new word I
could remember the syllables I had just heard. I never again had
to ask about that humble greeting. Now, when I met a new
word, I could recall it and use it after only a single hearing. Its
sounds had become a part of me. I could speak and think in a
new language. I had constructed a new step on memory's ladder.
This staircase of memory repeats itself time and again. We
begin with desire. Why do we enjoy something? Those tastes
predate memory and, for our purposes, are simply the givens of
life. Our likes and talents distinguish us from one another at an
early age.
Desire leads to attention. Often attention wanes. I thought
I cared, many a person discovers, but I learned more than I
want to know. We quit paying attention; to use the psychologist's term, we habituate to an experience. Probably for most of
us, most of our memory for general knowledge lies at this middle
point on the staircase. The world interests us enough to rouse
some attention, but most things do not excite us so much that
we stay aroused and alert to subtle details.
Yet sometimes we become attentive enough to gain insights

into our experience. Insight does not mean that we can consciously articulate some rules. Most of us can speak English
better than we can explain its grammar. Insight means we have
somehow brought our experiences together into a useful chunk
that helps us understand any future experiences. We can recall
what was distinctive and important about a particular event.
Insight is not the end of memory. It is the power that lets
us construct the top of memory's staircase. Now we understand
details and remember anything distinctive about them much
more easily. Often people on this level forget many trivial events
that people lower down the staircase do notice and remember.
The opera-goer remembers the person who left during an aria,
but the opera expert concentrates so much on the music that the
audience goes unnoticed and unremembered. Yet, when it
comes to remembering the evening's performance, the understanding memory goes to the heart of the matter. Remembrance
begins to fly.
EMOTIONAL MEMORY
. . . once we have the knowledge of numbers we cease
trying to acquire it; but even though we have knowledge
of happiness, and love it for that reason, we wish to
continue to achieve it, so that we may be happy . Is
[happiness] then in the memory in the same way as the
art of public speaking is there? Here again the answer is
no.
-Saint Augustine, Confessions , 398 A. D.
I did not say in the preceding chapter that memory

copes by storing experiences. Instead, memory begins with an
emotional association. We meet something new. It pleases or
pains us and the next time we find something similar we come
closer or we quickly move away, depending on our associations.
The emotion can outlast all memory for details. We all tend
to become Maurice Chevaliers singing "I Remember It Well."
As we sing, it becomes increasingly clear that we have misremembered every detail of an evening, but our emotion persists.
I am the same way about restaurants. I can see one and say,
yes, I have eaten there, and I may well have a sense that it was
a pleasurable or disagreeable place. But what did I eat?
The most famous account of emotional memory has come
from the French writer Marcel Proust. His enormous work,
Remembrance of Things Past, is a daunting publication-seven
wordy novels-but it contains a brilliant portrait of memory. In
the work' s "overture," Proust recounts the strange event that
set him to writing. He describes sitting with his mother-bored,
tired, and depressed . Although stuck in routine, that day he
/29
30 /
broke with habit by drinking tea and mixing it with some pastry
known as a madeleine. "No sooner had the warm liquid mixed
with crumbs touched my palate," he reports, "than a shudder
ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary
thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had
invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. "
Proust has described pure emotional memory, the unexpected and unexplained welling of emotion in response to some
ordinary event. How can an experience evoke such emotions?
Proust was hardly alone in finding himself moved in ways that
defy objective explanation. I-and no doubt all of us-could
give many personal examples:
-
My mother turns to me and says something quite

ordinary. I feel happy at the recollection of my grandmother who used to say exactly the same thing.
The New York Yankees and Kansas City Royals are
playing a baseball game. The Yankees lead by one
run. George Brett comes to bat, and I suddenly feel
great excitement and anxiety about the game. I've
seen Brett before.
I am watching The Last Picture Show on television.
Ben Johnson talks about a woman he once loved. I
astound myself by bursting into tears. His words are
a perfect expression of my own attitude toward an
affair that recently ended.
Proustian Recognition
The effort to explain emotional memory has pivoted on the
issue of storage. Until this century almost everyone agreed that
memory is stored somewhere in the body. Plato suggested that
memory was like a wax impression held in the mind, and he was
Emotional Memory / 31
not challenged for centuries after. The most modem form of this
hypothesis has come from groups that try to describe human
memory in terms of computer "memories." If you examine a
silicon chip used in computers or calculators, you will quite
easily recognize the memory area. It is a place where information is stored. Workers in artificial intelligence believe so much
in the decisive role of stored information that they try to write
computer programs that will enable machines to duplicate human intelligence. In these theories, stored information is more
basic than emotion. In the early 1980s, for example, Roger
Schank, an important theorist in artificial intelligence, imagined
a dispute between an Arab and an Israeli. The Israeli asks why
the Arabs do not recognize the existence of Israel. Schank says,
"To formulate [his] response, the Arab had to look up Israel in
memory, [and] find out they were his enemy." One can hardly
imagine a more insistent theory of storage. We must tum to
memory's warehouse to discover even a hatred as robust as that
between an Arab and an Israeli.
My own hatreds and attractions are too visceral for me to
find Schank's theory convincing. Once, in the coffee shop at my
college, I spied a stranger across a crowded room and felt swept
over by a sense of loathing and anger. I hated the fellow, but
why? It took me several moments of concentrated effort to
identify the nature of my grudge, and then I was embarrassed.
Some months earlier I had seen this man in a campus play, and
he had villainously abused the heroine. When I recalled , the
play, my loathing evaporated. But my original Proustian recognition had evoked an immediate aversion.
Freudians too try to explain emotional responses in terms
of stored memories. Why is a young man afraid of his father?
Classical analytic theory holds that, as a preschooler, the boy
feared castration. He has no conscious recollection of that
childhood fear, but the symbolic meaning remains stored in
memory. When the man sees his father, his Unconscious discovers the symbol of castration and he feels afraid. Freud's mechanism of the Unconscious is less rigorous than the computer
program favored by Roger Schank, but in both cases emotion
32 /
depends on a stored symbol. Freudian therapy and artificial

intelligence both seek the symbol that will account for the
emotion.
A rival school of psychology, behaviorism, has argued that
storage is irrelevant. This group insists that memory begins and
ends with a behavioral association. This school dominated
American psychology from the end of the First World War until
the 1950s. Its most rigorous thinker has been B. F. Skinner. He
maintains that all behavior depends on objective factors in the
environment. Although he acknowledges that something must
change within an individual and that emotions might exist, he
insists that these details do not matter to a theory of learning. If
you know the environment and the response, you know everything necessary. Behaviorists like to experiment with animals
because we do not credit pigeons and mice with much symbolic
conceptualizing. We cannot attribute their learning to Freudian
or insightful motives. In a typical behaviorist experiment a
pigeon might learn to peck a certain color circle. During training
the pigeon sees the circle, pecks, and receives a food pellet.
According to behaviorist assumptions, the pigeon associates the
sight with the pecking action. The food reinforces the behavior,
strengthening the association between stimulus and response.
Many people have found this account of memory most
unsatisfactory. No matter what pigeons may understand, behaviorism does not explain why people recall certain events with
affection, fear, or longing. The approach has, therefore, always
found more favor with professional psychologists than with
ordinary people who want to understand themselves. During the
1950s and then with gathering speed in the 1960s many psychologists abandoned the behaviorist approach in favor of more
fertile fields; however, the decline in behaviorism's popularity
reflected its sterility more than its refutation. An important
objection to Skinner came in 1959 from a young linguist, Noam
Chomsky. Skinner had tried to explain human speech as a
response to environmental stimuli, but Chomsky wrote a devastating review in which he argued that language was too ambiguous for Skinner's definition of a stimulus to retain any scientific
precision. Language depends on cognitive factors rather than on
the objective qualities of the speech itself.
Yet Skinner had taught pigeons to do many new things, and
the growing field of cognitive psychology could not explain
pigeon learning. Trained psychologists began to tum from behaviorism because it could not explain the most complex feats
of memory. The complaint of the ordinary layman went unconsidered. Most people believe a pigeon will learn to do a trick
because it wants the food it receives as a reward. Skinner said
that such emotions were irrelevant because the pigeon merely
associated sensation and action. The new cognitive approaches
did not try to challenge him. It was only in the mid-1970s that
Americans learned of an ingenious Russian experiment designed
to test whether rabbits associate a stimulus with an act or with
an emotion.
Experimenters conditioned newborn rabbits to a smell. The
researchers released an odor into the air, then produced nipples
and the rabbits raised their heads to suck. The rabbit pups were
too young to move about, but eventually they learned to raise
their heads in response to the smell even without the nipple.
According to standard behaviorist theory the young rabbits
had learned to associate the action of raising their heads with
the odor. Food from the nipples reinforced the lesson. Opponents of behaviorism argued that the young rabbits had formed
an emotional association between the odor and the pleasure of
sucking. This second hypothesis suggests that rabbits can enjoy
Proustian memories. Although they do not tum their memories
into novels, they can respond to sensations with powerful emotions.
The ingenious aspect of the Russian experiment took advantage of the extreme youth of the rabbits. The training halted
when the rabbits were five days old, but the pups continued
growing. After five more days, the rabbits had developed their
normal ability to move about, so they could now act in ways
that had been impossible during their training. The behavioral
theory of memory insists, however, that this later development
will not matter.
The experimenters reintroduced the scent to the rabbits

after five more days. Instead of raising their heads, this time the
rabbits ran toward the source of the smell. Their action reveals
a memory (that smell is worth seeking out), but not a memory
that demanded a particular action (raise your head). As one
scholar commented about this new response, "Obviously what
had been learned was not a performance but an affective [emotional] association."
Often in memory studies an experiment resolves a dispute
by rejecting both sides. Question: Does memory associate actions or does it associate symbols? Answer: Neither, memory
associates emotions. The experiment with the newborn rabbits
proved they had not learned an action. At the same time, no one
supposes that newborn rabbits have developed a symbolic conception of the smell. Instead, they form a fundamental Proustian
link between experience and emotion.
Memory on this level is recognition in its rawest form, all
perception and no production of further information. The recognition leads straight to action. No sense of the past need enter
the association. We simply experience an antipathy or attraction
that seems instinctive. We need not imagine that the rabbits
recalled or identified the past odor. They could have merely felt
an attraction and acted. In Proust's story of the madeleine he
did not at first remember his childhood acquaintance with cake
and tea. The experience was isolated and yet powerfully attractive. Similar emotional associations are enough to steer an
animal through much of the wild. The formal name for this
memory is affective memory or affective association; however,
as affective is merely a learned synonym for emotional, I shall
speak of "emotional memory." That way I can remember what
I am talking about.
Learning What to Desire

I suspect that most people assume without question that
memory depends on emotions. The famous account of the boy
Mozart listening to music in the Vatican and then writing it all

down, note for note, duly impresses us. We assume, without
being told, that Mozart had an enormous appetite for this music,
that-to use the vernacular of my college days-"he ate it up."
If further inquiry revealed that Mozart had had no taste for
music, but was compelled by some internal power to memorize
what most disgusted and repelled him, we would discard our use
of the word genius for Mozart and take up the term monster.
When my brother describes movies of thirty years ago that
I have entirely forgotten, I ascribe it to his stronger appetite for
films-an appetite that has since put him in the movie business.
When the president of the United States cannot remember
his brief, but knows all the scenes in last weekend's entertainment, I draw conclusions about his appetite or, to use a more
common phrase, his interests. Don't we all?
Traditional stories have commonly assigned emotional
memories to animals. Ulysses returns from the war and is
recognized by his dog. We all understand the scene as an
expression of a dog's love for his master. Philosophers since
Descartes, however, have often denied the reality of animal
experience and insisted that animals are unconscious machines.
This analogy has grown less convincing now that we have
machines that use information. Is your kitty more like me or
more like my computer?
The experiment establishing that rabbits do form emotional
associations has restored to memory studies the enormous body
of research amassed during the heyday of behaviorism. By the
end of the 1950s the approach had taken on many names,
including learning theory and stimUlus-response theory, but
behaviorism by any other name smelled just as sterile. Behaviorism ignores too many things about ourselves, yet its research
can help us understand the emotional basis of memory. The
Russian experiment with newborn rabbits undercuts the theoretical explanation for what happens in a behaviorist experiment,
but it restores the relevance of the old data about what animals
learn.
36 /
Let us consider a basic behaviorist experiment with a

simple maze. We put a mouse in a box with two doors. The
mouse learns to go through the right-hand door to receive food.
How does a mouse remember to turn right? Behaviorists say
that the mouse learns to go to the right and that the food
reinforces the action. The rabbit experiment offers a simpler
explanation. The mouse associates the right door with food. The
mouse wants food; therefore, it wants the door associated with
food. This is the same connection as that used by the advertiser
who tries to make potential customers associate a toothpaste
with sexual delight. We want the latter, so we reach for the
former.
On this first level of memory's staircase, we store no remembered incidents. We simply form associations-fear this,
want that, ignore a third item. We base these associations on
subjective responses of pleasure and pain, satisfaction and revulsion. Behaviorists called these primal tastes "unconditioned," meaning they were not learned and did not depend on
memory. An example of unconditioned behavior comes from a
chicken raised in a henhouse and suddenly allowed to range
outside. It will squawk and run the first time it sees a hawk in
the sky, even though it never saw such a bird before. The
chicken's fear is instinctive.
Contrast this inborn emotion with the learning in a notorious experiment done by the founder of behaviorism, John Watson, in the early 1920s. He used an infant known as Little
Albert, who showed no instinctive fear of white mice. At first
Albert reached for mice out of curiosity. As he did so, Watson
and colleagues smashed a hammer against a metal bar behind
Little Albert's head. Soon, Little Albert began to cry whenever
he saw a mouse. The action was not instinctive, but depended
on Little Albert's emotional memory of his experiences with
mice.
All behaviorist learning builds on unconditioned instincts.
Part of the reason for the ferocity of the scare given Little Albert
lay in the difficulty of finding something that frightened the
baby. Behaviorism has never found a case of learning that did
not depend ultimately on a natural response. Thus, from the

beginning behaviorism has acknowledged that learning depends
on some inborn taste.
We build memory's first step with our natural inclinations.
We discover what can satisfy us and what to avoid. We need not
stop at this level, of course, and our world reflects far more than
Proustian recognition alone. At root, however, our memories
begin with emotional associations that depend on natural tastes
and inborn temperaments. Apparently the appetites of our species are often eccentric and unpredictable. A five-year-old's
behavior reflects a limited background. By age fourteen, however, we have tasted more of the world and discovered our
appetites. We have heard the music of Bach, and a few have
fallen in love with it. We have heard poetry, and a few have
fallen in love with that. We have helped people and hurt people
and discovered which action we prefer. These many individual
differences in taste guarantee that our emotional memories
become distinct and they aim each of us along individual paths.
Memorable Actions
Pleasure or relief can come either through the senses or
through one's actions. Birds and mammals can remember both
sensory and motor associations, but animals lower down the
evolutionary ladder can form only motor associations. Using
motor associations , even cockroaches and fruit flies can run
tricks of a simple kind. My first psychology professor used to
teach planaria (flatworms) to escape a light by swimming through
a simple maze. To flee the light, the planaria had to swim to the
right. If they did that, they found relief. If they turned left, the
light continued to plague them. After many trials, a planarian
could learn to always swim to the right. This behavior constitutes a simple motor association. The planarian instinctively
tries to flee the light, but successful escape depends on remembering how to flee.
Motor associations are the oldest form of memory in the
biological world, and even in people they remain as the most
basic form. It is often said that once learned one never forgets
how to ride a bicycle. Our knowledge is preverbal by several
eons, but even after years away from the saddle, motor memory
enables us to hop onto a bike and ride away.
An experiment reported in 1986 found an elaborate use of
motor memory by invertebrates. Experimenters observed the
cabbage butterfly. Individual butterflies visit flowers of only one
species, and as they do so, their motor memories make them
increasingly adept at obtaining nectar from the flower. Experienced butterflies work more quickly and can obtain more nectar
during a day's work. Even at this early stage of evolution, motor
memory contributes to survival.
Each flower has a slightly different arrangement for getting
at the nectar, so the cabbage butterfly's productivity requires
fidelity to a single species. The butterfly can recognize the
species it favors. We know the recognition depends on memory,
not instinct, because different cabbage butterflies favor different
species. Experiments have shown that, if they must, cabbage
butterflies will change and become faithful to a new species of
flower.
These findings make perfect evolutionary sense. Different
flowers bloom at different times and butterflies must feed on
whatever blossoms during their short life span. Memory lets
butterflies cope with the world as they find it. Yet, they remain
insects, dependent on instinct, and they show no hint of sensory
awareness. They seem to have an instinct to remember "their"
flower. It is more than motor memory, but less than sense
association.
Developing Emotional Memory

Normally, human memory is more complicated than simple
emotional memory, and the basic learning of a pigeon seldom
serves to explain our thoughts or actions. Yet we can see that

human memories do begin in this same way. Infant memory
uses only the emotional level. No wonder we have such a poor
memory for our first year. No images survive from that period,
yet the emotional associations can persist and affect our judgment.
The richest account of mental development during infancy
comes from Jean Piaget. His studies have confirmed that all
mental development begins with sensory and motor associations. Piaget's theory describes stages of development, the first
of which he called the sensory-motor stage. It lasts for the first
two years of life, and during this period children grow into active
toddlers filled with likes and dislikes, curiosities and fears.
Piaget called the infant's cycle of exploration and remembering
a "circular reaction," and these reactions develop exactly in
accordance with the development of emotional memory. They
begin with motor associations, go on to sensory associations,
and then elaborate even further.
The earliest circular reactions-Piaget calls them "primary" circular reactions-depend on motor memory, and first
appear in month-old babies. The best known of these primary
reactions is thumb sucking, a purely motor activity. A baby
happens to put its thumb in its mouth, enjoys a pleasing sensation, and repeats the activity. The repetition of the behavior
arises from a remembered motor association (hand motion associated with pleasure).
Secondary circular reactions depend on sensory memory
and begin to appear at age four months. A typical example of
this reaction is shaking a rattle. The pleasure of shaking a rattle
begins with a motor activity (shaking), but instead of leading
directly to body gratification, it produces an objective event
(rattling), which the senses must detect. The sound then leads
to pleasure.
Shaking a rattle elaborates on thumb sucking. As with
thumb sucking we have a remembered motor association (shake/
sound) plus a remembered sensory association (sound/pleasure).
At age four months a baby's memory already matches or sur-
40 /
/'
/
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r-------------------______~/
EMOTIONAL
MEMORY
/
/
CHARACTERSTICS
Emotional Memory: The most primitive form of organic behavior relies on genetic
information alone to produce reflex actions (sometimes called programmed or
mechanical behavior). Construction of the first step on memory's staircase begins
with an awareness of pleasure or pain, which is associated with a sensation. When
fully constructed, the sensory experience alone lifts an organism from reflexive
behavior to emotional memory.
Emotional Memory /41

passes that of most of the animal world, up through the bird
level.
Piaget's date of four months for sensory recognition agrees
with findings about the smile, the best-loved infant response to
sensory recognition. Sensory awareness comes first, and by four
or five weeks an infant will smile at the sound of clapped hands.
Sensory recognition, however, comes at about three-and-onehalf months when babies start to smile at a familiar face. Such
behavior unmistakably signals emotional memory, and soon
thereafter, as Piaget shows us, children begin to act on this
power of sensory recognition.
Memory at this level is simpler than many people once
believed possible, for it needs no storage of past experiences. A
child sees something and feels attracted to it. The same held
true for the middle-aged Proust. He tasted something and immediately felt an emotion. Memory at this basic level is also
more subjective than behaviorists once supposed. Emotional
association starts with feeling and leads to doing. Machines
cannot duplicate it. People cannot explain it. Yet a child grasps
for a ball in curious desire and begins to construct the next step
on memory's staircase.
FACTUAL MEMORY
This is the first thing: if you pay attention, the judgment
will better perceive the things going through it.
-The Dialexis fragment, 400 B.C.
When you get right down to it, the basic reason people
don't remember names is that they don't pay attention .
-Mort Herold, You Can Have a Near-Perfect Memory.
1982
F
or at least 2400 years advice about memory has
begun with the words, "Pay attention," and we have treated
attention as a moral duty instead of an emotional condition.
During those same centuries teachers have told more than a
hundred generations of parents, "I don't know what to do about
your child. He just won't pay attention," and parents have come
to lament, "What am I going to do with you?" The child squirms
and looks away. He wishes he were virtuous enough to be
attentive, but school bores him. Despite centuries of insistence,
learning does not start with attention. It begins earlier, with a
person's wish to know more. Attention lets a person construct
the second step of memory's staircase, but first the associations
of emotional memory must make a person want to pay attention.
At the factual level we associate things outside ourselves: a
name goes with a person, or memory links a tree with a particular building. This outward focus makes factual memory a poor
guide to understanding ourselves. We do not learn personal facts
on this level, but factual memory's specific associations do give
us a sense of continuity and connection with our lives. We see
42/
Factual Memory / 43
something and it reminds us of something else. We hear a piece

of music and remember where we heard it before. Often that
sense of connection to one's life is a valued gift of memory,
although it can be a curse as well. Memories can haunt and hurt
long after the source of pain has gone.
Factual memory leads us to expect that if we find one thing,
we will find the other. The links of memory get longer: We find
pleasure in, say, Louis Armstrong's music; we then form a
factual association between Rocky's Record Store and Louis
Armstrong records. So the sight of the record store reminds us
of Louis, whose memory evokes a happy emotion. The next
thing we know, we feel happy just seeing Rocky's shop.
We can most readily see how factual memory evokes expectations and emotions by observing infants whose development
has not yet carried them beyond this point. A fifteen-month-old
baby hears his mother's voice over the telephone and he looks
around in confusion. He knows the voice. Where is the face he
associates with it? Normally we see a baby tum toward its
mother's voice and we think nothing of it. But when the voice
comes over a telephone we suddenly see that infants do have
expectations based on associations.
We can sometimes see the same type of memory-one thing
associated with another-in other mammals. (At this level we
may have left bird abilities behind.) Zebras approach a water
hole and come to a halt. The water looks fine, but the zebras
have sometimes met lions at this hole. If they relied only on
emotional memory, they might avoid that water hole altogether,
associating it with pain. But they have a mix of emotions: thirst
and fear. The desire balances their fear, so the zebras wait to
see if their unhappy association matters this afternoon. After a
few minutes, a less alert species trots casually up to the hole
and drinks without mishap, so the zebras come in and drink.
Memory of this type is not creative, but marvelously adaptive. It uses the present to remind us of the absent, enabling us
to react to things the senses cannot detect. The infant turns
toward its mother's face, the zebra shies from the unseen lion,
44 /
and one person calls another by name-all because of the

associations of factual memory.
Recognition and Recall

Factual memory can be either generalized or specific, depending on whether the memory places itself in a context. Words
are the most familiar of generalized associations. The term
beach ball evokes a clear image of an inflated multicolored ball,
but I have no idea where I learned the term. I have heard it too
often, in too many contexts, and any original associations with
the source have broken, if they ever existed.
On the other harid, some memories have strong contexts.
For many people, smells make especially powerful contextual
reminders, perhaps because they are so rich and unusual that
fewer of them become routine. No matter where I am, when I
smell roasting chestnuts, I recall an image from my boyhood in
Paris. I see traffic in twilight, I recognize the setting as the Place
de l'Etoile. This memory too ends with a generalized fact. I
simply know the location but do not remember how I know it.
However, the memory for that aroma is specific because of its
several steps:
recognize smell
recall image of street

scene
Factual Memory / 45
recognize scene
recall scene's name
Compare those steps with the ones remembering the meaning of

beach ball:
recognize term
recall image of ball
Generalized factual memories are a closed loop. If the image of

the beach ball reminds me of anything, it reminds me of the term
beach ball that began the memory process. Specific memories
lead somewhere new. Generalized memories keep us attentive
to the present; specific ones send us off on tangents. When I
smell chestnuts, I must rouse myself to return my attention to
the present setting. When I read about beach balls, I understand
but am not distracted. As a practical matter, then, a generalized
memory might seem best. It keeps us focused on the here and
now, and perhaps most animals with factual memories do stick
with a generalized memory. But for people, specific memories
46 /
are practical too. They keep us from falling into repetitive

circles. A friend told me of a tragic conversation with his father
whose memory was badly damaged.
"When is the baby arriving?" asked the father.
"1\vo weeks," came the answer.
A minute later the father asked the same question, got the
same response , and replied in surprise, "Still two weeks?"
The father's emotional memory remained good and he
eagerly awaited the arrival of his first grandchild, so he asked
about his desire. But the answer did not establish a specific
context. It became part of his generalized knowledge. When he
heard the answer a second time, he recognized it but felt
surprised because he could not place his knowledge in any
context. Normally people can use longer chains of associations:
feel desire for

grandchild
recognize desire
recall hearing
"two weeks"
recognize the
information
Factual Memory / 47
recall just
obtaining it
If we cannot complete these steps, we cannot ease our emotion

personally and must turn to the outside world for satisfaction.
Specific memories provide a measure of emotional self-reliance
that cannot come from a world of generalizations. A person
whose memory works properly might ask about a grandchild
and a minute later feel the same desire for its arrival, but instead
of repeating the question, might say, "Oh, I can't wait for that
baby. "
All these strings of factual memory show the alternating
powers of recall and recognition as two separate steps in a
sequence. Recognition understands. Recall is a productive response, although the response might be subjective, as in the
recall of an imaginary perception, like the sight of chestnut
vendors in Paris.
Recognition is outward looking; it perceives the circumstances and context of an experience. In the laboratory, the
most effective way to confuse recognition is to teach a person
something in one context and then test it in a different context.
Recall is the internal, automatic power of memory to produce an association. Its images come without logic or calculation. We smell something and recall an image. The association
is the automatic fruit of experience. In laboratory research, we
can best interfere with recall by teaching a subject several lists
and then demanding he recall items from only on~ list. The task
demands that a person recall not only an association, but the
context of that association. The subjects find they cannot limit
recall to context. When they work together, of course, recall
and recognition provide both the contents and context of a
factual memory.
Most people assume that recognition is always easier than
recall, but research has refuted that. Although it may generally
be easier to recognize a fact than to recall one, if a person knows
many facts about something, it takes longer to recognize any

single one. A person who knows only one thing about memory
theory, for example, can quickly determine if he recognizes a
statement or not. But if he knows fifty facts, he will take longer
to recognize the same statement. This slowdown is known as
the "fan effect. "
Recall can also come to the aid of recognition. A typical
failure might involve flipping through old vacation photos taken
a few years back. Normally, this task relies heavily on recognition. We see a place or person and immediately recognize it. But
often enough a picture or two makes us say, "Now who on earth
is this?" Recognition breaks down. The solution may turn up by
resorting to recall. You say, "Let's see, at the Grand Canyon
we went down the trail to that plateau. Remember? And then we
rested in a small hut beside some tables, and there were hikers
from Australia who were going around the world." Another look
at the photo, and you recognize the Australian tourists grinning
into your lens. Recall has prompted recognition by restoring the
context of the photo.
Whenever factual memory works successfully, recall and
recognition function together.
Memory and Arousal

The original formation of factual associations follows from
attention. The father of American psychology, William James,
made this point a century ago. "Whatever future conclusions
we may reach as to [the effects of attention], we cannot deny an
object once attended to will remain in the memory, whilst one
inattentively allowed to pass will leave no trace behind." (Emphasis his.) James also gave us a definition of attention that
continues to serve as a starting point for any discussion. Attention, he wrote, "is the taking of possession of the mind in clear
and vivid form of one of what seem several simultaneously
Factual Memory / 49
possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration

of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from
some things in order to deal more effectively with others." A
century later the definition still stands, although today we have
a more explicit sense that attention follows arousal.
Arousal is the emotion of learning. We don't remember
much if something evokes fear. Action usually puts an end to
learning, and the same holds true for anger. An angry person
shouts, sees red, and perhaps turns to physical violence. Later,
the person remembers the anger, but not many details of what
happened. These well-known problems have led some to praise
the cool, unemotional observer, but the truly emotionless observer also has a poor memory. It takes emotion to carry a
person up memory's staircase and to pay attention.
The cool person pays attention to the wrong thing. Often it
is himself that he studies. We are often cool cucumbers when
exchanging names, but we soon forget the other person's name.
We may have imagined we paid attention during an introduction,
but more often we attend to presenting ourselves as best we can,
smiling and pronouncing our own name clearly. On those occasions when we feel a desire to learn someone's name, we can do
it.
Instead of dispassion, arousal depends on courage. Emotional associations bring us to attention, but attention can
quickly change to anger or fear. Courage lets us stand and
maintain our attention long enough to find a better response than
blind flight or equally blind aggression. Not surprisingly, then,
learning favors the stronger species. Predators tend to be
shrewder than the prey. Hunters can hesitate 'a bit'longer than a
prudent grazer would dare. People can afford to be the most
courageous species on earth, and we are. We can come to
attention, stand our ground, take note of what we see, and live
to make use of the experience.
Laboratory studies have shown the importance of arousal
to the formation of associations. Many laboratory experiments
show how poorly memory serves us when an item provokes no
emotions. A favorite technique in memory study experiments
50 /
presents people with pairs of words, or sometimes a word

matched with a digit. A psychologist might pair, for example,
tooth with estimate and then ask the subject to recall the word
that went with tooth. Although subjects want to cooperate, they
find the experiments tedious and soon forget the associations.
"Tooth," thinks the subject. "Yeah, it went with something but
what?" The subject had believed himself attentive, but he was
not aroused and has forgotten the association.
One experiment, however, included words like rape. This
emotionally charged word brought the subjects to attention, and
they remembered the item paired with it. A week after the
presentation, the subjects could still remember a third of the
high-arousal associations, but they had forgotten almost all of
the pairs that began with less charged words like tooth.
Arousal in that experiment depended on established emotional associations, but factual memory cannot work merely
with things that are already familiar. Life holds too many surprises for that. When confronted with something new, we spring
to attention. Biologists and psychologists call this sudden
arousal the orientation reaction. The great Russian physiologist
Ivan Pavlov first described it. Pavlov's assistants trained dogs to
behave in various simple ways, like the rabbit pups in the
previous chapter who raised their heads on cue. After the
training Pavlov would enter the laboratory to see the latest
experiment, but instead of behaving properly, the dogs would
come to attention, tum toward Pavlov, and prick up their ears.
The dogs cared more about checking out the newcomer (Pavlov)
than displaying their learning. Pavlov called this behavior the
"investigating" or "what-is-it?" reaction and commented:
The biological significance of this reflex is obvious. If the
animal were not provided with such a reflex, its life would
hang at any moment by a thread. In man this reflex has been
greatly developed with far-reaching results, being represented
in its highest form by inquisitiveness.
Arousal usually changes to fear, aggression, or indifference,

especially the latter. Most often we judge a situation as not
Factual Memory / 51
personally important, and we go back to whatever we were

doing. The technical term for this last response is habituation,
meaning (on the level of factual memory) we no longer judge the
stimulus as worth attending to. We can see examples on the
sidewalk of any large city whenever an ambulance passes with
its siren going. Children watch with interest; most adults do not
even glance toward the sound. They know it means nothing to
them.
Animals too can habituate to unexpected events. I once
drove around a bend and found an adult male lion dozing beside
the remains of a buffalo. He began his orientation reaction and
stared directly into my eyes. Almost at once he took on a glazed
look of boredom. "Tourists," he knew, and went back to sleep.
Only memory permits animals to act so calmly.
Of course, sometimes we become aroused only after the
fact. Something happens and we pay it no mind, but a moment
later comes a surprise that arouses us. To form a useful association we must promptly recall what we had previously ignored.
The symbol of the orientation reaction is. the fixed gaze. The
symbol of after-the-fact arousal is the double take. Consider this
familiar scene: 1\vo people are riding quietly in a car when one
breaks the silence with a question. The second person replies,
"Hunh?" and then gives an answer before the first speaker can
repeat the question. "Hunh?" is the verbal indicator of the
double take and at its heart lies the capacity for the prompt
recall of something that happened during a time of inattention.
Prompt recall is among the rare aspects of memory that help
eyewitness testimony. A witness can see something, like a man
running, and pay it no mind, then discover a woman's purse was
just snatched, and suddenly remember the running man and
what he looked like.
During the past twenty-five years, psychology has discovered the basis of our ability to learn from overlooked experiences: Recall is best for the most recent experiences. This
principle, known as the recency effect, matches common sense.
Most of us know that if somebody calls out a list of names, we
can most easily recall the last few names on the list. This effect
52 /
enables us to remember and think about experiences that have

just passed.
More surprising than the recency effect itself is its stability.
Usually in memory studies, researchers quickly devise techniques that produce memory failures, but the recency effect is
nearly disrupt-proof. Ordinary verbal recall, for example, becomes confused by a variety of similarities. Suppose, for example, we have a list of fifteen words that begin with the letter L
and read them aloud to subjects in a memory experiment:
lynx
lout
loafer
lamp
lexical
leader
lable
lamp
luster
lamb
light
lewd
limber
legislate
lamp
Almost nobody can recall the entire list after one hearing.
Chances are good, however, a person will recall lamp, the last
word on the list. In fact, lamp appears on the list three times,
but people are unlikely to recite the word three times. Equally,
having recalled lamp, they probably will not recall a word that it
sounds like (lamb) or a word with a similar meaning (light). If
we change the order of words on the list, however, so that it
ends
Factual Memory / 53
lamp
lamp
lamp
people do remember and say that lamp appears three times.
Similarly, if the list ends with
lamb
light
lamp
people will remember them all. The confusions of ordinary recall
do not impede the recency effect.
When they could not damage it, researchers wondered if
they could improve the recency effect. Normally, the recency
effect works for a maximum of only four items. Perhaps it could
be improved to recall five or six items if subjects had the specific
intention of remembering. Subjects participated in an experiment during which they picked up some peripheral information.
Although experimenters warned some subjects that they would
have to recall this incidental information, these subjects showed
no better memory for the recent data. Paying attention neither
helped nor harmed the recency effect.
Prompt recall in daily life liberates us, a bit, from the here
and now. "Where'd I put my pen?" somebody asks.
"I just saw it," another replies and, almost instinctively,
looks and reaches toward the spot where it lies. It comes so
easily we do not give the matter a second thought. It is just
prompt recall, helping us overcome the limits of our wandering
attention.
In the animal world, the best-known example of an afterthe-fact association comes, again, from Pavlov. His most famous
work trained dogs to associate the sound of a bell with the
arrival of food. The dogs would begin to salivate after they heard
the bell, even if no food were present. This behavior typifies
factual associations. One thing reminds a person or animal of a
second thing and the creature responds as though to the second
54 /
thing. With inherent associations we take the behavior for

granted, as when a baby turns toward its mother's voice or a
zebra shies from a water hole. Pavlov showed that dogs can also
remember arbitrary associations and can form the associations
after the fact. At first the dogs ignored Pavlov's bell. Only after
associating the sound with food did the bell produce a response.
But how did the dogs remember that a bell preceded the arrival
of food? Such memory cannot have begun with attention because, at first, the dogs did not pay attention to the bell. Instead,
they formed the association after the food aroused them.
Pavlovian conditioning, or learning, strikes many people as
pointless. Salivating at a bell seems like a mistake, but when
considered in the light of memory we can see that the phenomenon challenges assumptions that dogs are unconscious bundles
of reflexes. The bells began as in-lab signals to feed the dogs.
They were not part of the original experimental design. Pavlov
grew interested in them only after he noticed that the dogs had
discovered the bell's importance. Pavlov simply assumed that
animals behave reflexively toward the world, but Pavlovian
conditioning depends on memory. A bell becomes associated
with food; the memory of food evokes an emotional response
and salivation.
Flashbulb Memories
Sometimes an incident can arouse an entire society. Most
adult Americans can remember where they were when they
heard the news of President Kennedy's assassination. Most
older Americans can still remember where they were when they
learned Pearl Harbor had come under attack. Most adult black
Americans can remember where they were when they heard
Martin Luther King give his "I have a dream" speech.
Factual Memory / 55
./
./
1./
I'
/
1/
EMOTIONAL
MEMORY
1/
/
~'<.,"
/ .s
~~
INNATE
CHARACTERSTICS
OV
cJ?-
Factual Memory: Construction of a second memory step begins when an experience

produces an emotional arousal that focuses attention on something present
(orientation reaction) or something that has just happened (prompt recall). The
attention produces an association between the object of arousal and something else.
When fully constructed, attention alone lifts an organism from the level of operant
behavior to factual memory.
56 /
Why should this be so? Where we were is irrelevant to the

objective importance of these events. When Kennedy was shot I
was in my college dormitory skipping a class because it was
raining so heavily I did not feel like trudging all the way back to
campus. So what? Why should that fact, and many others
connected with it, remain nearly a quarter-century after the
event? Would it not serve just as well to remember only that
Kennedy was murdered and Lyndon Johnson became president?
But memory makes use of experiences. Emotionally charged
bolts from the blue bring immediate arousal. Like Pavlov's
curious dogs, we come to attention and focus on the situation.
Normally, this union of emotion and circumstance works
pretty well, enabling us to learn about the places where we have
strong emotional experiences. Today, however, thanks to the
broadcast media, we learn about many remote or abstract things.
Because of broadcasting, we can suddenly have news that
arouses us intensely, yet has nothing to do with our personal
situation. Normally, when we come to attention, we focus on
the relevant part of the environment, just as the startled laboratory dogs oriented on Pavlov. But when news such as Kennedy's
murder comes, the environment offers nothing to focus on. How
can we turn our eyes and ears toward an abstraction? Instead,
we take in all the concrete details. The image stays with us so
clearly it is as though we had taken a flash photo of our
circumstances.
An event like Kennedy's murder arouses the whole country
for days, and many adults can still recall the events that followed
the assassination: the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, the return
of the president's body to Washington, the murder of Oswald,
and the funeral. Mixed in with these public scenes are many
personal details of candles lit and comments made. Memory for
the incident usually begins with a so-called flashbulb memory:
the detailed image of where you were when the news first
arrived. Then come many other memories associated with that
first arousal.
The string of associations typifies how factual memory
works. The unusual feature of flashbulb memories lies in the
FactuaL Memory / 57
way they begin with an abstraction. To come to attention a

person had to understand the meaning of the words, "The
president has been shot." Factual memory normally associates
sensory impressions-sights, sounds, and smells-and one sensation evokes another. Flashbulb memories begin higher up
memory's ladder and kick us back down a step. If we could not
remember meaningful expressions, we would forget the purely
abstract part of a flashbulb experience-the news of Kennedy's
death or of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Yet we might well
remember the flashbulb part of the memory, and twenty-plus
years later 1 would occasionally wonder why 1 had such a clear
memory of my dormitory room.
Toddlers have not yet developed memories above the factual
level, leaving them with no memory for the meaning of profoundly moving but abstract events, like a death in the family.
As 1 worked on this book one man said to me, "I hope in your
book you'll explain my oldest memory. 1 couldn't have been
more than two years old because we moved shortly after my
second birthday. We lived in Atlanta, and 1 can still see the
bricks of the cobblestone sidewalk. Why should that scene have
stayed with me all those years?" Of course, the sure explanation
for why brick paving so impressed him is beyond discovery, but
the presence of a strong image is a typical component of factual
memory. Usually, however, factual memory is paired-one item
evoking another. 1 asked if the bricks were coupled with anything else in the man's mind. "Well, yes," came the answer, "in
a way." It had been in Atlanta, before he was two, that the man
came down with polio. "But 1 have no memory of that." A twoyear-old's memory is not equipped to handle something so
complex and imageless as poliomyelitis, but emotionally the
shock of catastrophic illness is real and alarming. The man's
earliest memory could be a flashbulb memory of the moment
when the depth of his illness first struck home. The image
persists, but its association does not.
An alternate explanation comes from Sigmund Freud. He
called these early memories "screen memories" and suggested
that an apparently trivial memory hid a more painful truth as
58 /
part of a deliberate repression. Freud would have explained that

the paving stones were a screen memory hiding the painful
memory of contracting polio; however, Freud had no clear
theory of levels of memory or of the operation of infant memory.
Of course his observation still stands: The earliest memories
consist of images. The meaning of the images comes later.
Self-serving Memories
Factual memory associates things in the world beyond our
skin. It tells us that butter goes with bread and balls go with
bats. We learn what things we can find inside the corner drugstore and the name of the druggist. Factual memory does not
help us learn about ourselves. It takes us as we are and judges
the world in our terms.
Emotional memory pays some attention to oneself and
teaches how to find pleasure or avoid pain. Factual memory,
however, ignores oneself to focus on the outside world. Arousal
begins by halting attention to one's own activities. During an
orientation reaction people and animals alike interrupt their
activities to investigate the world. Only when they lose interest
in the source of arousal do they return to their old concerns.
Similarly, prompt recall studies the outside world, not one's
own actions. The most familiar problem arising from this behavior occurs when people misspeak. They have a terrible time
catching themselves. Some people grow angry when they are
corrected. "You said x," says a listener. The speaker grows
indignant. "No, I didn't. I said y." Other people are less
contentious, but equally unaware of their error. They look about
and ask, "What did I say?" We do not seem to have much
prompt recall for our own speech.
Experimental study of the recency effect has shown how
thoroughly factual memory ignores one's own behavior. Normally the easiest way to disrupt a particular memory is to add a
Factual Memory / 59
few more items to an experimental list. A person can remember

a short string of numbers-say, 4562-but will forget part of the
string if we lengthen it to 45627128. But if a person hears 4562
and then says 7128 himself, the sound of his own voice does not
disturb the memory for the early numbers. Other experiments
confirm this focus on external events. One particularly diligent
study presented subjects with words, one at a time. Between
each word, subjects had to count backward for twenty seconds.
Yet recall of the words showed a marked recency effect.
The cost of this external focus is an inability to associate
our own behavior with things outside ourselves. At this level,
memory does not gain any insights into the actions of things or
the feelings of others. For example, if we speak without thinking
and another person becomes angry, we truly may not be able to
remember what we said and make the association between our
action and the other person's anger. "What did I say?" we
plead, while others look on and shake their heads.
Although this external focus meets practical needs, something unhealthy festers in this inattention to the world within
one's skin. It might help if once in a while when somebody
asked, "What did I do?" he could remember. Learning about
ourselves is not trivial, and not easy, yet factual memory gives
us pitifully little help in the matter. Indeed, factual memory
seems to view ourselves as innocent in all things.
Beyond the Facts

Anyone old enough to read this book must travel up and
down memory's staircase many times a day. Emotional, sensory, and symbolic associations appear mixed into a unified bag
of thought and memory. In children, however, we see the limits
and powers of particular levels of achievement. In the previous
chapter we saw that children's emotional memory has developed
by their fourth month. Factual memory does not come until
60 /
later. Half-year-old infants do not have the powers of attention

needed to form factual associations. Piaget reports that two- and
three-month-old babies will attend to a toy as it passes through
their field of vision, but once the toy disappears they show no
hint of continuing interest. Their attention is purely sensory. At
four months, their attention becomes exploratory and they will
reach for a toy in their field of vision, although they pay it no
further mind once it disappears from view. Meanwhile, of
course, a child's powers of recognition improve. By age seven
months, an object that interests a child must disappear completely before attention ends. At about ten months of age we see
a real breakthrough in attention. A child will look for something
it saw disappear. Desire at this point no longer depends on
sensory stimulation. By the first birthday, children pay good
attention to their wants.
Piaget's research into infant behavior has flip-flopped our
traditional understanding of the relation between memory and
attention. We have long known that to remember we must pay
attention. Now we can also see that to pay attention we must
remember. The child's ability to look where an object disappeared indicates the presence of some factual memory. He can
associate a place with the absent object.
As children grow older, interpreting their mental state becomes increasingly uncertain, and Piaget's theories grow increasingly controversial. After the first birthday, the clearest
indication of children's memories comes from their own speech.
At this age they begin to speak single words, a sure sign of
factual memory. They have associated a sound with a thing, and
say cat, dada, and big bir[d].
Often two years pass before children's language reflects
more than factual memory. They do begin lumping two words
together at about eighteen months of age, forming primitive
sentences, and as more time passes these sentences grow longer,
as they begin stringing three or four words together. These
primitive sentences show a child's increasing capacity for complex factual association, but the structure of symbolic expression remains ungrammatical. The longer a child's sentences
Factual Memory / 61
grow, the less they sound like English. They lack prepositions,
proper word order, and coherent verb structures.
The most English-sounding part of a toddler's speech
comes from the recurring phrases that fill their talk. A child may
say "Can 1 have it?" when he sees something he wants. Grammatically, the phrase seems quite elaborate. It uses an auxiliary
verb and an inverted interrogative word order; however, the
child does not know all that grammar. He learned and speaks
the phrase as a unit. Psychologists usually call these phrases
automatic routines, but I prefer to call them cliches because,
like cliches, they are unanalyzed chunks of language. Among
adults, a cliche like "spick-and-span" never breaks down into
parts, such as "spick-and-shiny," never collapses to a single
part, as in, "I want you to make this room spick." Adults
remember much language in these unanalyzed cliches. One
study found that when it comes to recalling famous speeches or
poems, parts survive as unanalyzed units-"to be or not to be,"
"when in the course of human events," "t'was the night before
Christmas," and many others are familiar units of adult expression. These undigested cliches are all bits of our tradition that
we have never thought about enough to make personal and
meaningful. Children, of course, have gained insights into almost
none of their cultural heritage, and their speech includes many
cliches that adult speakers can break into smaller units. A child
whose father often says, "Where's mommy?" can develop the
habit of saying "Where mommy?" without ever thinking to say
"Where daddy?" or "Where kitty?" For this child, "Where
mommy" is as much of a unit as "spick-and-span" is for adults.
The great breakthrough that sends a child's mind up the
stairs and beyond factual memory comes when the child has an
insight into a cliche. He breaks down the old associations into
something new. A classic example from the study of child
language tells of a boy called Adam. He had a habit of saying
"Wait for it to cool" whenever his mother brought a hot meal to
the table. Adam spoke the phrase as a cliche, quoting an admonition of his mother's, but after several weeks of using the cliche
62 /
he hung up a wet diaper and said, "Wait for it to dry." Adam

did something he had not done before. He understood the
meaning behind the association of sound and circumstance.
Suddenly he reached beyond the limits of factual memory.
INTERPRETIVE MEMORY
Throughout our life. we reorganize our memories and
ideas of the past. conserving more or less the same
material. but adding other elements capable of changing
its significance and. above all. of changing our viewpoint.
-Jean Piaget. Memory and Intelligence. 1973
People often remember for years a moment of insight

that carries them to memory's third level. It can be so arousing
and unexpected that the insight takes on the characteristic of a
flashbulb memory. We remember its setting as clearly as we
remember the insight itself. Sometimes an insight can even be
about the setting. After all, we can use factual memory to find
our way along previously explored routes; and anything learned
at the factual level is fodder for further development. Factual
associations combine experiences in whatever random way they
occurred, whereas insight discovers meaningful associations.
A simple example comes from one of my own oldest memories. When I was four years old my mother took me to the local
zoo. After our usual stroll from the elephant house to the lions,
we went for a walk through a surrounding park that fills a long
narrow ravine. A creek runs through the gorge, and in those
days the park road forded the creek at places where the bank
narrowed. I suppose there had been a small drought, because
instead of turning back at the first fording point we picked our
way along the boulders and crossed the creek. It was a typical
adventure for four-year-olds. I was some place new, with no
thought of other places I had been. If asked to map the route, I
probably would have drawn a series of images, one after the
/63
other, devoid of any larger context. In the area of the fords the
ravine began to twist, and after awhile we saw a huge bridge
spanning the ravine high above us. When we got a bit beyond
that bridge we saw a second even more impressive span across
the ravine. "Oh, I know what that is," said my mother. "It's
the Taft Bridge." We crossed the Taft Bridge every time we
drove downtown to where my father worked.
I knew immediately my mother was right. In my mind's eye
I saw the entrance to the Taft Bridge and a crossroad leading left
to the Calvert Street Bridge, the other bridge we had passed
under. That single remembered image explained exactly where
I was. Perhaps nothing in my life ever surprised me more. It had
never occurred to me that the many separate spaces I had
explored might somehow twist in ways that brought them together.
The incident is my oldest surviving interpretive memory. I
have some images that predate this insight, but none more clear
or more powerful. It stays with me despite its triviality because
I discovered that the world of space could make sense. We think
of insights in grander terms-Newton looking at a fallen apple
and discovering gravity. More often the insights are less magnificent, although perhaps even more useful. Insight combines two
sets of factual associations into one understanding.
The memory that follows an insight is qualitatively different
from factual memory. The associations of factual memory are
sensory, evoking images and sounds. The associations of interpretive memory are symbolic, evoking meanings. One illustration of the difference comes from an experience I had when
watching the movie The Killing FieLds on television. I had seen
it before and liked it very much. It tells the story of a man
trapped in Cambodia after it fell under the control of the Khmer
Rouge. One scene I remembered particularly showed a French
embassy official report that the film's hero could not escape
from Cambodia with foreign journalists. ''I'm very sorry," said
the man. I remembered those words precisely, and was surprised to discover the words were spoken in French. True, the
words meant I'm very sorry, but I had remembered them in
Interpretive Memory I 65
English. Interpretive memory remembers meanings instead of

the objective experience.
This transformation of memory from fact to meaning may
sound a bit magical. The qualitative change of something always
does seem that way; however, such changes happen only when
components come together to form a new system. Factual
memory's elements, we saw, are recall and recognition. Interpretive memory uses these same elements, but organizes them
into a system. Factual memory keeps them in a string of causes
and effects. Recall and recognition often follow quickly one after
the other during factual memory, but the order remains sharp.
Moments of ins~ght are not so easily analyzed. Consider the
case of Adam when he first broke the cliche wait-for-it-to-cool
into wait-for-it-to-/dry. Adam recognized the waiting context
and recalled the word dry. Or did he recognize the drying
context and recall the wait-for-it cliche? In either case, he had
no past factual associations that linked the two memories.
In the ravine I recognized the relationship between the two
bridges and I recalled the crossroad where they met, or did I
recall the image of the crossroad and recognize the relation
between the bridges?
In these moments it is impossible to say with certainty what
part of memory came first, and as in all chicken-and-egg questions there is no point in plumping for one element as the cause
and another as the effect. We have a system in which both parts
depend on the other. In factual memory, recall and recognition
remain separate, but with interpretive memory the two elements
work together to produce a compound expression. In the ravine
below the Taft Bridge, past memory and present experience
supported each other like two sides of a single arch. The change
in memory is a change in the ability to use its levels. Before
recall and recognition come together, we cannot use memory's
top levels no matter how much energy and attention we bring to
our efforts. Afterward, we can use them, although we will see in
later chapters that such use is not automatic. Insight brings the
possibility of remembering meaning, but does not guarantee we
will always remember.
66 /
The power to fuse recall and recognition into one mutually

dependent system may be limited to humans. Some other animals do have wonderful factual memories , but even chimpanzees
that can use hand signs have never been seen to combine recall
with recognition and construct the third step of memory's staircase.
Organized Memories
Although they did not associate insight with memory, nineteenth-century psychologists knew enough to hesitate before
studying memory. It seemed too personal, too bound up in
individual meanings and private associations to permit scientific
investigation. Memory is so subjective that two people can sit
side by side through an event and produce widely differing
accounts of what happened. Everybody sometimes finds himself
arguing with another person about what both of them saw.
People interpret events, and they remember their interpretation
rather than some more objective account. How can we possibly
hope to explain human memory when it depends on subjective
experience? If a man does not remember a stimulus, has he
forgotten it or did he never perceive it? If a woman describes a
stimulus incorrectly, has her memory changed or did she misperceive it originally?
Faced with these problems, psychologists shied away from
even trying to study the so-called higher intellectual powers.
Their attitude changed only after Hermann Ebbinghaus developed his technique for shedding memory of all sense and emotion by testing a person's ability to learn and retain meaningless
lists. Many psychology laboratories still use his basic method of
testing memory for lists. With hindsight we can see that Ebbinghaus studied factual memory for events that have no emotional
importance. Rote learning without arousal makes for a slow
construction of memory' s second step, so naturally Ebbinghaus
Interpretive Memory / 67
and his followers have found that memory neither works especially well nor endures for particularly long times.
Ebbinghaus developed his technique as a way of overcoming the many difficulties memory studies faced, but inevitably
the technique implied a particular view of memory. Ebbinghaus
assumed that memory functioned as a passive storehouse of
objective items that people either do or do not retain. This
approach anticipated the behaviorist ideas that came to the
foreground during the twentieth century. Ebbinghaus tried to
describe memory purely in terms of the objective environment.
Eventually, however, some psychologists began to insist that
subjective factors are crucial to memory. This dispute over
whether subjective factors are legitimate issues of study affects
every aspect of memory studies. We will see it again when we
look at the brain's role in memory and meet it yet again when
we examine forgetting.
The most important prophet in this rebellion against considering only objective factors was Frederick Bartlett. His 1932
book Remembering, boldly proclaims:
[My] theory brings remembering into line with imagining, an
expression of the same activities .. . it gives to consciousness
a definite function other than the mere fact of being aware.
Bartlett developed a new technique of his own. Instead of

testing for memories of meaningless lists, he told stories and
sought to learn how well people remembered them. His most
famous experiment told an American Indian folk tale about a
battle. The story included unusual details, such as the protagonist's discovery that his fellow warriors are ghosts. Fifteen minutes after listening to the story, subjects retold it. Then four and
six months later they told it again. As time passed, the tale grew
progressively shorter and its Indian point of view faded. Instead
of showing a passive memory that either remembers or forgets,
Bartlett's technique gives us something else-a memory that
preserves, omits, and distorts, depending on one's prejUdices.
Bartlett's subjects remember meanings. His technique showed
68 I REMEMBERING AND FORGETIING
that we can study the meaningful memory that Ebbinghaus

avoided. In the example of the Indian folk tale we can study the
way people transform a baffling yet moving story into something
comprehensible but dull. We can ask why they do that and how.
Bartlett explained the changes by supposing we rely on
some underlying organizing principle, which he called the
schema. In his theory, memory changes the Indian folk tale to
make it conform to some preexisting schema. The idea that
memory depends on subjective organization continues to characterize the followers of Bartlett, and in the years since World
War II that principle has gradually conquered memory studies.
One important contributor to this tradition has been an
American psychologist named George Miller. Miller continues
to work and is himself an interesting bird who has introduced
psychologists to many promising ideas drawn from other fields,
including linguistics,' information processing, and structured
programming. Scientists ordinarily pursue established theories,
but Miller takes ideas that seem unrelated and shows how to
associate them. One of his first unusual pairings came in 1950
when he joined the study of grammatical order with the study of
memory. Miller developed a concept of "order of approximation," or the relationship between a list of words and a prose
text. The technique was a typical bit of Miller ingenuity. By
studying lists, he looked like a faithful heir to Ebbinghaus, but
by introducing order he slipped in Bartlett's concerns. Miller
proved that as a list's organization approaches English word
order, subjects recall the lists with increasing facility. That
finding can hardly surprise anyone who has ever tried to learn a
poem. It is easier if we understand the words. Consider the list:
I
didn't
learn
my
ABCs
until
after
I
flunked
the
third
grade
Even if we count "ABCs" as one word, this list holds more
words than rote learning can quickly permit, yet English speakers can learn it easily because it makes sense. If we organize the
list alphabetically,
ABCs
after
didn't
flunked
grade
I
I
learn
my
the
third
until
it becomes harder to remember. Language is the most elaborate
and universal organization of symbols, and the organizing principles of languages are their grammars. Grammars are neither
logical nor consistent, and they are ambiguous, depending on
context to determine meaning. Since the organization of other
memories have these same anti-mathematical characteristics, we
can call the organizing principle of any interpretive memory,
linguistic or not, its grammar.
In the years following Miller's original work, repeated experiments have tested and expanded on Miller's observation.
This research has confirmed a basic tenet of the Bartlett tradition: Meaningful order aids in recall. We can recall something in
greater detail and with greater accuracy if it was organized
originally according to a familiar grammar.
70 /
During the later 1960s and early 1970s the importance of

organization turned up in the study of recognition as well. The
original techniques of Ebbinghaus, Bartlett, and Miller tested
for recall. They asked subjects to produce details from memory.
Recognition can be tested by showing a subject a word and
asking whether he remembers having seen it earlier in the
experiment. For a long time the primary difference between this
recognition test and recall experiments seemed to be that subjects did better in recognition studies.
The pioneer who brought recognition research into line with
the Bartlett tradition was George Mandler, an Austrian-born
psychologist now living in Canada. Mandler began his upheaval
in recognition studies in the late 1960s by trying to clear up a
few loose threads. Research had shown that recognition becomes confused when confronted with paired or categorically
associated words. For example, if I present a list that includes
the word salt and then, as part of a recognition test, show a
subject the word pepper, he may say that he recognizes the
second word as having appeared on the list.
Similar errors occur in recall tests. A person trying to
remember a list may say salt when the list includes pepper. But
Mandler found that confused recognition declines as the context
of the words grows more orderly. We do not mistakenly recognize the word pepper if, instead of learning meaningless lists of
words, we read the words in the context of a sentence like, "He
sprinkled salt on his french fries." Meaningful organization
makes confused recognition unlikely. Mandler also showed that
if a subject fails to recall an item from a meaningful list, he will
probably be uncertain about that same item in a recognition test.
Furthermore, subjects sometimes recall certain items that were
not on a meaningful list. For instance, if a subject were to read a
list of George Washington's virtues and then asked to recite the
list, the subject might say the word courageous even though it
had not appeared. Mandler found that if he showed people
meaningful lists and then tested for recognition, they were just
as likely to recognize an intrusion like courageous as a word
that had been on the list. Mandler established-and much re-
Interpretive Memory 171
search has confirmed-that the effects of meaning on memory

are equal, whether tested by recall or by recognition methods.
The work of Bartlett, Miller, and Mandler all pointed to the
existence of an interpretive memory that is distinct from the
more passive forms that psychology had originally studied. The
cap on this work came in 1973 when Jean Piaget weighed into
the field. Piaget was already widely admired for his research on
child development, work that went back to the 1920s. His
memory research had certain things in common with those
studies. He used children as subjects, and his experiments asked
children to work with various bits of physical apparatus. But
Piaget's memory experiments did not focus on stages of development. Instead Piaget hoped to gain some understanding of
what memory was and how it worked. He used children in these
experiments because their different levels of development let
him control for the role of understanding in memory.
The most important of Piaget's experiments tested children's memory for causes and effects. In one experiment children manipulated levers attached to matchboxes . Although the
arrangement of the levers looked similar, the effects of manipulating them differed. In one case, if children pushed a lever, the
matchbox went up. In the other case, when they pushed a lever,
the box went down. Five-year-olds saw and mentioned the
different motions, but they did not wonder about them. Mter
six months they had a poor memory for the experiment. Sevenyear-olds did wonder why the motions differed, but they could
not find an answer. Six months later, they too had only vague
memories of the experiments. Ten-year-olds, however, could
understand the experiment at once, and six months later they
could recall at least the general principle of the experiment.
Many could describe the experiment in good detail. The major
point Piaget uncovered is that memory is not simply descriptive.
If it were, there would be no clear reason for five-year-olds to
forget so much when ten-year-olds remember so well. After all,
five-year-olds do remember many things for more than six
months. Instead, memory depends on a capacity to interpret the
72 / REMEMBERING AND FORGElTING
experience. It is not enough simply to see a peculiarity. To

remember we must have some explanation for the peculiarity.
In discussing his findings, Piaget made a remark that can
stand as the first principle of interpretive memory: "The organization of mental activity presides over memory. " Piaget did not
say that the objective organization of events presides over memory. We remember things according to our understanding of
what happened, not according to the way something really
occurred.
Active Memory
Piaget's principle articulated a point that followers of the
Ebbinghaus tradition had seen with growing clarity in their own
studies. Even the crudest memory experiments show that we
tend to impose a subjective order on recall. The simplest experiment uses a list of words or syllables. One presentation is
seldom enough to learn a list, so subjects read the list many
times before learning it. Repeated presentation, however, carries
a technical problem. If subjects see the list in the same order
every time, the order itself becomes a reminder and provides a
grammar for the experience. One item leads inevitably to the
next. So experimenters mix up the list after each presentation.
This way, the arrangement of words stays random, and the
experience contains no objective order to help remind the subject of what comes next. Yet memory invents an order. Subjects
lump parts of such lists together, even though the lumped words
may never have really appeared together. Lumps are groups of
words that subjects continue to remember in the same order.
Studies show that at first, chance alone accounts for these
lumps, but we preserve old lumps as we try to remember the list
and we form new lumps with each recital. Soon subjects lump
many of the words together, giving the lists a consistent order
that far outdistances chance. A person will see a list, perhaps
car soon laugh open

and recall it as:
open soon car laugh.
It is a small change, but it foretells greater ones that memory
imposes. Some lumps are practically inevitable because nearly

everybody associates certain words: black-white, knife-fork,
boy-girl, and so forth. If both words from such a pair appear on
a list, people tend to recall them together, no matter how they
originally appeared on a list.
Although these findings are hardly startling, they have
subverted Ebbinghaus's ambition-and that of twentieth-century psychology in general-to account for human behavior by
referring only to objective things. Skinner hoped to show that all
of these objective things existed in the environment. When he
failed, cognitive psychologists tried to show that a combination
of objective features of the environment and the information
stored in the brain could account for memory. The tendency for
memories to acquire a subjective order raises problems for this
faith in objective factors. Why does memory reflect sUbjective
characteristics?
Further studies showed that shared associations rather than
objective features increase the capacity for recall. One classic
study of associated recall presented subjects with lists of fifteen
words. Some lists used words with no history of association,
words like mouse, winter, and government. Subjects remembered an average of only 5.5 words from these lists. Other lists
used words associated with some secret word not included on
the list. A list of words associated with butterfly might include
moth, net, and cocoon. Recall for these lists averaged 7.35
words. The unmentioned associate improved recall by almost
two words, or nearly 40 percent.
Intriguingly, better order confuses recognition. Recognition
research began in 1904. The laboratory work of that era reported
that when asked to recall items from a presentation, subjects
74 /
could recall an average x items, but when tested for recognition,

subjects could recognize an average x + y items. This finding
matched the popular notion that recognition is easier than recall
and that idea endured for over half a century. (Even people with
amnesia do better at recognition tests than in recall tests.)
During the 1960s, researchers began discovering effective ways
to foil laboratory recognition. Originally, recognition tests
showed a word like hippopotamus and then presented subjects
with a pair like hippopotamus/bicycle. With such different
words, recognition is easy, but suppose we show subjects a pair
like hippopotamus/rhinoceros. Unless you are an experienced
safari hand, these words seem pretty similar in their associations, and recognition becomes more difficult. By the middle
196Os, psychologists had grown so skilled at selecting confusing
"filler" items in recognition tests that they had turned the old
finding on its head. They could do experiments in which subjects
recalled an average x correct items, whereas subjects using
recognition averaged x - y correct items.
Recognition becomes especially confused when researchers
change the context of a study. The first work that showed how
to confuse recognition was so complicated it seemed almost
comic, but soon researchers refined their techniques. If experimenters present material in one context and test it in another,
recognition always stumbles. This type of confusion eventually
led George Mandler to break with the Ebbinghaus tradition and
bring the study of recognition into Bartlett's side of the field.
All this research confirms what we saw in the previous
chapter. Recall uses order; recognition uses context. It also
shows us something about subjectivity. Subjective features apparently depend on context to help people find order. Although
the importance of context is well known, it again subverts the
notion that only objective factors effect learning. A science of
memory must acknowledge the private constructions of the
individual mind. At every level of memory we have found this
same point. On the first step, emotions motivate even rabbit
pups. On the second, reminders recall imaginary perceptions.
On the third, interpretation organizes behavior.
Meanwhile, other research found that subjective factors

effect perception. An important figure in this research has been
Herbert Simon. Based at Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon Institute,
Simon is a man of broad interests who has won a Nobel Prize in
economics and coauthored the first computer program in artificial intelligence. His other interests include memory and chess.
Combining these last two, he began a series of experiments to
discover how the memory of a chess master differs from the
memory of ordinary chess players.
Chess masters like to astonish amateurs by playing several
games simultaneously, while blindfolded. During the mid-1960s,
research into the memory of chess masters and that of ordinary
chess players found that the differences between them arose
from their perceptions. Ordinary players look at a chess board
and see mostly individual pieces. They make sense of the
situation as they study it, noticing threats and possibilities as
they go. Master players perceive groups of pieces as units. For
example, they might see three pawns together and think of them
as one thing. They understand implicitly many of the unit's
dangers and possibilities. When they think about moves, masters
think of using these larger units rather than of moving individual
pieces. Chess masters can be compared to writer;s who think in
sentences, whereas ordinary chess players are like writers who
think one word at a time.
Simon's research into chess-board memory found that
when chess masters remember a board they first remember the
units and then derive the positions of the individual pieces that
comprise the unit. More recent research has established that
experts perceive and remember less complicated games like the
board game Othello in the same way. It seems likely that
experience with almost anything that requires judgment leads to
organized perceptions. If we break up units so that the parts are
no longer organized in meaningful ways, our capacity to perceive
them breaks down. Chess masters are no better than anyone
else at remembering positions in which pieces appear randomly
placed on the chess board.
76 /
To non-chess masters, this perception can sound a little

mystical; however, we all perceive some things as units. If I
present you with a list of eleven letters for recall
CATMOUSEDOG
you can probably immediately repeat the letters. A non-English
speaker, however, would find the task more difficult. Success
depends on previous knowledge. Yet anyone who knows the
secret of combining the eleven letters does so well that three
words probably popped out at him. This quality is a peculiarity
of meaningful units. Those in the know perceive them whole. It
takes an effort to break them down into their elements. We
perceive much of our daily life this way. If we set a table, for
example, we do not have to count every utensil to see if each is
in place. We look and see it. If a spoon is missing, we simply
perceive its absence and know to fetch one. But a person not
raised in a knife-and-fork culture could not do so. The perception of these units depends on memory, not on nature. Interpretive memory organizes the present as well as the past, a surprising finding in anybody's book.
Most of these findings about active memory came as a
surprise to their discoverers as well. Lumping and reorganizing
lists, confused recognition, and perceptual units were uncovered
by researchers who were originally wedded more closely to the
Ebbinghaus than to the Bartlett tradition of memory. They
found consistently that a passive storehouse model of memory
cannot explain experimental results that stress the role of grammar and context.
Piaget, of course, was less surprised than others by this
research. He is not immune to criticism, but Piaget never mistook the mind for something passive. He summarized this group
of findings in interpretive memory's second great principle:
"Memory depends on a person's capacity to construct an experience. " There is no storehouse or file cabinet where memories
are preserved. We construct a memory and remember the construction rather than the original event. When we recall items
Interpretive Memory I 77
grouped together, we reorganize them because we have constructed the list in our own way. Some readers might feel more
comfortable if the principle said we reconstruct an experience
instead of saying construct. The difference is not quite a quibble.
Reconstruct preserves the traditional notion that memory follows an objective blueprint hauled out from the files to guide our
actions. If we do use a blueprint, however, it is often one that
has undergone some heavy tinkering, for what we build usually
differs from what we found before. The word construct emphasizes the point that memory is an imaginative act that assembles
parts into a whole.
One of Piaget's memory experiments showed this construction process particularly clearly. He tested children's recall for
a demonstration in which one rolling ball transferred its energy
to a second ball, but the second rolling ball could not transfer its
energy to a third. The age at which children correctly explained
this experiment varied greatly, but most children could think of
some explanation for what happened, and they continued to
remember something of the experiment, recalling it in ways that
emphasized their own explanation. In the demonstration, balls
rolled down slopes. One girl mistakenly explained the experiment by saying the third ball did not begin to roll because the
slopes grew flatter. The slopes did not flatten as she said, but
the girl's drawings depicted a flattening anyway.
Two eight-year-olds in the experiment were puzzled at first
by the demonstration, but eventually they figured out the reason
for the failure of the energy transfer. The second ball comes to
a sudden halt just before it hits the third ball. The early drawings
by these two children did not portray the experiment correctly,
but after six months they realized the balls must not have
touched and they drew the experiment correctly, showing a gap
between the second and third balls. Understanding had made
their memories better.
This important finding accords with Piaget's second principle, that memory depends on a capacity to construct an experience. Theories that try to explain memory as retrieval from
storage deny that such improvement can happen. Of course, it
misses the point completely to reply that the children do not

remember what they saw, but rely on their better comprehension. Piaget's work shows the interdependence of memory and
understanding; the capacity to learn about the present implies a
capacity to learn about the past as well. We realize the importance ofthings we had ignored and suddenly we say to ourselves,
"Oh, that is why such-and-such happened," or, "Ah-ha, that is
what so-and-so meant. "
Memory Chunks
1\vo decades before Piaget's book, in the early 1950s,
George Miller developed a model of memory that accounts
exactly for Piaget's principles of interpretive memory. In a small
masterpiece of modern psychology titled "The Magical Number
Seven, Plus or Minus 1\vo," Miller studied the act of interpreting
experience as it occurs and then recalling its details correctly.
He called this action "chunking" because subjects grasp chunks
of experience. His essay quickly became standard reading in
undergraduate psychology classes, and memory scholars commonly include Miller's discovery among the most important in
the field of memory studies of the past forty years. Yet, for all
the excitement it inspired, the work may have been "premature." Chunking, at first, seemed to many psychologists like a
stage act.
To understand chunking, consider an experiment Miller
described in which subjects learn to hear and repeat forty binary
digits. A binary digit is either a 0 or a I. Forty binary digits look
like
0110010000110101110110000110100110001110.
If you try reading these digits aloud, I think you will see what a
baffling experience the numbers present. Yet people can learn to
recite them after one hearing.
The subjects of the experiment were not memory freaks or
mathematical wonders, but they had received special training in
their task. At first, most of them had been able to remember a
string of no more than seven digits. Then they learned how to
recognize groups of digits. Among mathematicians binary digits
form a special number system and have meaning. For example,
the pair of digits 01 is equivalent to the single number 1. The
subjects in the chunking experiment learned these values for
pairs of binary numbers, and remembered their meanings. Thus,
in the forty-digit list above, they would remember the first pair
not as two digits, but as the number 1. The second pair, 10,
could be called by the number two; 00 is read as zero and 11 as
3. These groups of digits are what Miller called a chunk. Each is
a meaningful unit that organizes a precise experience. Most
people would hear the digits 0 and 1 and treat them as isolated
items. But the experimental subjects remembered them as members of a small chunk.
Take another look at the first six digits in that forty-digit
string. They are: 011001. Even this small string is intimidating.
Some people cannot recite it correctly after one hearing and
those who do remember it correctly usually feel they are coming
to the end of their rope. But people trained in chunking hear
them in groups: 01 10 01. Had you noticed before that the last
pair matched the first? If you remember these chunks by their
meanings, they are 1-2-1.
Now, 121 is an easy string to remember. Almost everybody
can recite it after just one hearing and feel he or she could have
done more. If you know the secret of chunking, you quickly can
reduce the pressure on yourself. Yet forty digits separated into
chunk pairs still leave a formidable-sounding string of numbers:
12100311311012212032
None of the subjects in the experiment could remember such a
long string of chunks, so they learned how to organize these
small chunks into fewer but larger chunks.
80 /
This system of forming and combining chunks keeps enlarging the number of digits implicit in a single chunk. The idea is
similar to learning to spell long words. If we see the word CAT,
we perceive it as a unit. If we see the longer, word, CATER, we
see it too is a unit. (Because the a in this second word has a
different pronunciation, it may even take a moment for a person
to notice that it contains a familiar smaller word.) The word
CATERPILLAR expands the chunk even further. In fact, this
one word contains as many letters as the CATMOUSEDOG
string we saw earlier, only that string contained three chunks
instead of one.
We could expand the DOG part of that string as well-to
DOGMA and then DOGMATICALLY. MOUSE expands to
MOUSETRAP. If we put these three words side by side
CATERPILLARMOUSETRAPDOGMATICALLY,
they do not leap out at most people with the same force as the
CATMOUSEDOG chunks, but a single scanning of the line
serves to discover them. And an adequate speller could immediately repeat a string of thirty-two letters simply by remembering three chunks. If we were to add one eight-letter word to our
list, as in
CATERPILLARMOUSETRAPDOGMATICALLYAQUARIUM,
the good spellers among us could recite forty letters after one
reading.
By learning to organize binary digits into the equivalent of
long words, the subjects Miller described acquired a skill most
people had never encountered before, but the idea was the same
as reading. We convert strings of meaningless units into meaningful wholes. It is bargain day at the memory market; one
memory gets you a bundle.
Eventually subjects using these chunking procedures could
derive eight binary digits by remembering one symbol. At this
stage a person needed to remember only five chunks to derive
forty binary digits. It sounds like a skill that takes more practice
and training than it is worth, but the experiment made its point:
People with ordinary powers of memory can learn to do things
that sound impossible. Furthermore, the training and practice
included no effort to improve the subject's storage capacity.
Instead, it taught ways to construct what one remembers.
Sometimes people denounce memory skills like these as
"tricks" or even "mere tricks." The complaint confounds me.
A "trick" is an action that creates the illusion of having done
something one has not done. When a pigeon flies from a top hat,
we call it a trick because it looks as though the bird materialized
from thin air. But what is illusory about recalling those forty
digits? Nobody secretly wrote them down. The person really
has heard the numbers and repeated them from memory. There
is nothing fake or illusory about chunking. It is a common
method of interpreting and recalling experience.
"Trick" is also sometimes used as an unflattering synonym
for "technique." But chunking is not a typical memory-improving technique either. Chunking is standardized rather than inventive. When chunking binary digits, for example, 01 always
means 1. A person does not invent spontaneous and imaginative
images or associations to impose meaning on something, like
calling 01 "winking eyes."
I suspect that behind this "trick" objection is the old
subjectivity-objectivity struggle. Chunking is unabashedly subjective, and anyone who does not call it by a sneering name has
to acknowledge the importance of sUbjective factors to memory.
Lurking behind that dispute is the nature of memory itself. If it
is objective, it must use stored information; if it is subjective,
then every memory can be imaginatively constructed.
Miller's work on chunks provides a formalized specific way
to think about the poor memory Bartlett observed in the retelling
of stories from alien cultures. An English speaker has no clear
way to break the story into established chunks, and soon forgets
the original organization and point. Research has clearly established that we remember conventionally organized stories better
82 /
than unconventionally organized ones, and this tendency does

not change with age.
A chunk is a unit of associations whose constituent elements can be derived simply by recalling the chunk. For example, if 1 say, "I boarded a bus," the single word boarded can
imply: approached the door, stepped up, paid fare, moved back.
But none of those associates need be expressed unless there was
some deviation, as in, " I boarded the bus and saw the driver
was so busy cursing a trucker that 1 slipped by without paying a
fare ." Similarly, if a bore tells you , "To get home from work
today 1 joined a line of riders, waited my turn, stepped up onto
the bus, paid my fare , and then went on toward the back, " you
are likely to recall all of this as simply: He boarded a bus. This
chunking is a routine way of understanding and recalling experience.
Chunking is a flexible concept because the constituent
elements may themselves be chunks. 1 might just say, "I rode
the bus home today." That chunk of "rode the bus" includes
the "boarded the bus" chunk plus a "disembarked" chunk and
is ambiguous about a "found a seat" or "had to stand" chunk.
Thus, if 1 recall riding a bus, 1 automatically know 1 boarded it
and, if need be, can try to recall any details of the experience
that might be important. Chunking memories leads to automatic
reminders of what else may have happened in an experience.
These reminders let us construct a detailed memory.
Notice how chunking uses two separate acts of memory:
First, the subject must recognize the chunk-he perceives an experience in chunks.
Second, the subject must recall the contents of the
chunk-he derives their contents.
Memory for a chunk requires the cooperation of both recognition and recall. Recognition interprets experience as we perceive
it. Recall produces the details of the experience. Every chunk
depends on perceptual associations that let us recognize it as a
whole and grammatical associations that let us recall its details.
Forever Fallible
Many people find the implications of chunked memory
profoundly disturbing. We believe in and want to know the truth.
We are used to abundant documentation, to tape recordings and
to filmed images. We have many tools for preserving the past,
but chunks imply that, at best, our memories can be no better
than our insights. When we remember something, our minds do
not consult some file cabinet to check a dossier containing a
fixed truth. We imagine what happened in the past and then we
believe our own construction. As a consequence, we remember
things that never happened; we combine memories so that the
details of separate incidents become hopelessly intertwined; we
remember words, but change their tone; we consistently forget
the way we saw things in the past, remembering ourselves as
being much the way we are now.
The principle that mental organization presides over memory guarantees that often we will remember the order of events
incorrectly. Eyewitnesses may have the details of a crime right
but still have the chronology wrong. The police may ask, Are
you sure he mentioned X only after Y mentioned it?" But being
sure does not mean a person is right. When describing events,
many a person says, "The first thing that happened was _ _ ."
Chances are good that something else happened first.
Other people build toward a climax, saying first there was
trivial event A, then ordinary event B, followed by interesting
event C, and lastly came astounding development D. But in
objective reality, matters seldom progress so neatly. These
people are not liars, nor do they deliberately use narrative
technique to embellish their tales. It is simply that memory is
not a tape recorder. People recall experiences in the way they
themselves interpret them and are at least as likely to recall their
prejudices as their real experiences. This finding impedes the
point of memory, which is to cope with the world as it really is
instead of accepting old assumptions that may be valid no
longer. This principle guarantees that even the best of us will
84 /
REMEMBERING AND FORGEITING
remember many points falsely, and the worst of us will go about

smugly claiming fictitious memories that prove our prejudices.
We become impervious both to logic and experience, because
no matter how the issues fall out, memory recalls them as
confirming expectations.
Many people recognize the power of prejudice, and an
honest observer may hesitate to insist on a detail that supports
a notorious bias, but even if we avoid the big injustices, chunking
promises a tendency to recall creations rather than the reality of
a thousand details . I have personally experienced this tendency
ever since my college days. I introduce myself as "Blair" and
am remembered as "Brian." A woman who had forgotten my
name recently said to me, "Now, I know your name isn't
Brian," but more often people approach and say confidently,
"Oh, Brian." I suspect the confusion arises in the first phoneme.
Both land rare liquid.consonants , and many languages confuse
the sounds. Bl occurs in English phonology, but Br is more
common; so people who need to remember my strange name
can become hopelessly lost if, instead of knowing my name as a
single chunk, they try to construct it. How, after that first wrong
turn, they arrive unerringly at Brian, I cannot say. I'm just glad
they don't recollect me as "Br'er B'ar."
Besides causing us to honestly remember complete fabrications , memory' s tendency to lump things together encourages
us to invent associations that exist only in the mind and to
preserve old associations that no longer exist in reality. Even
with the best of intentions, therefore, gossip will often get a
story wrong. If someone tries to recall the guests at a party, he
is likely to recall customary pairs together even if they were not
together, and to invent other couples who have been lumped
together only in memory. The careless observer recalls that
John and his wife Martha were both at the party, without
noticing that he never saw the two speaking to one another.
Meanwhile, the same observer concludes that Bill and Jane have
become an item, because he saw them talking at some other
party. He once lumped them together in memory , and now,
come to think of it, saw them both at this latest party. So gossip
is perpetually astonished by divorces that "arose from nowhere" and continually believes in secret romances that never
become public.
Naturally these confusions make people angry and suspicious. If we pulled dossiers from storage, we could look up a
detail and see what happened. But construction depends heavily
on interpretation and can lead to bitter self-righteous disputes.
One person says, "You said x''' The other indignantly replies,
"I never said anything like that." Although this dispute sounds
like a simple fight about memory, it is complicated by the
reliance on two functions of memory. One person recalls X; the
other person fails to recognize X. Each feels injured, one thinking, "I never," and the other wondering, "How can he
deny ... ?" Perhaps if the two could work out the context of the
remarks, they could develop a memory they both agreed on and
in which neither person felt injured. But passions intrude, and
instead of helping matters, fractured memory only convinces
both sides they are in the right.
Creative Memory
Yet, for all its fallibility, chunked memories give us an
adaptability and flexibility not common to bureaucrats who trust
only their files. Interpretive memory matters for exactly the
same reason that emotional and factual memory matters. It
enables us to cope with the present. It provides a way of growing
wiser from experience. Even though it leads to many errors
about what happened in the past, interpretive memory is powerful when it comes to figuring out the here and now. Chunking
permits us to put our expectations to use. If we know the
grammar of an experience, we can interpret an event as it
happens, becoming drawn in personally as well as intellectually.
The sports fan finds a moment more exciting than the novice,
even though the fan can remember one hundred similar incidents
86 /
while the novice never saw the situation before. Instead of

habituating to the familiar scene, the fan is alert to all the
possibilities and waits to see what will happen.
Most remarkable of all is interpretive memory's ability to
form associations we have never experienced. When applied to
the past, this ability can lead to error, but the same capacity
allows us to confront the present with a splendid creativity. The
most thoroughly studied example of this freedom is in language.
It lets us speak things never said before. The simplest examples,
however, come from spatial chunking.
Spatial memory begins at the factual level as we learn a
sequence of places. Evidence suggests, reasonably enough, that
a mammal's spatial memory depends on its foraging requirements. Our own elaborate memory may have first begun to
evolve because our ancestors had to remember a complicated
three-dimensional space in the treetops of a vast forest.
Insights into spatial memory come when two separate
strings of spatial associations merge to form one larger chunk,
as happened for me below the Taft Bridge. As with any other
chunk, spatial chunks permit creative action. For example, once
you have learned a path that leads from tree to hill to home, you
could also learn about a separate trail that passes a cave before
coming to the hill on the first path. Having learned this second
path, you do not only remember two ways to get home. You can
also remember how to get from the tree on one path to the cave
on the other path.
Here we see the special power that comes from chunking.
Emotional and factual memory depend on specific experiences.
The context of the experience may go forgotten, leaving only
emotional or factual associations, but the memories derive from
the episodes of one's life. Chunking permits something new. I
have an experience-traveling from tree to home. Even though
I may never have had the specific experience of traveling from
tree to cave, my spatial chunk lets me know how to get there.
At this interpretive level, I can "remember" something I have
never done. In normal speech, we do not call this memory
"remembering." We feel more comfortable saying a person can
"figure out" or "imagine" how to get from the tree to the cave.
But chunked associations make the distinction between memory
and imagination a vague and uncertain one. From memory's
perspective, the distinction is also trivial. Memory needs to cope
with the present, and chunked associations permit that.
This finding is probably the greatest surprise of memory
research. The difference between memory and thought, a difference that once seemed so clear, has become elusive and obscure. It has become an issue of semantics. When we speak of
our knowledge about the past, we shall presumably continue to
speak of our memories. When we speak of finding new solutions
to problems, we will speak about our imagination. But these
different words refer to the nature of the problem, not to the
qualities and powe'rs of mind we use. Memory unites with
thought at every level of the staircase. The immediate interests
and attractions we feel are part of emotional memory. Factual
memory gives us the generalized competence that gets us
through the routines of the day, and the imaginative figuring that
finds new solutions comes from interpretive memory.
Conscious Memory
Having reached the top of the staircase, we perceive the
world differently, and we express these changes through our
symbols. Language, art, music, and prayer are part of every
culture and, given the interpretive nature of our memory, it
could not be otherwise. Most of these expressions follow an
established grammar and stay with the familiar chunks of the
art, but sometimes expressions go beyond tradition and seem to
cut more deeply into reality than had previously seemed possible. Piaget's memory research showed the basis for such enrichment. With this final experiment we can see how memory works
on the new level it has raised us to.
88 /
Piaget showed some children two V-shaped tubes, each

containing a fluid. One tube was open at both ends and its fluid
rested normally, level in the tube. The second tube, however,
had a cork in one end. Air pressure in the open end pushed the
liquid against the cork, so the levels of liquid were uneven. In
this experiment, Piaget showed the children something they
could not understand. Even the twelve-year-olds could not explain the odd water levels in the second tube, but the apparatus
was so simple that all the children could easily describe it.
He told the children they would see the apparatus for a
short time and then have to draw it from memory. As the
children looked at the V-tubes, none of them remarked on the
peculiarity of the fluid levels in the cork-stopped tube. Only
when they considered their own drawings did they begin to
wonder about the disparity between the levels in the tubes. One
eleven-year-old said, "This level [in the cork-stuffed tube] bothers me because it isn't the same as the other one." Then came a
creative association: "It must be the cork." A week later he
drew the apparatus again, remembering to show the cork and
uneven levels. He said, "I still don't understand it." Interestingly, the boy's explanation was wrong (or at least incomplete),
yet his memory was right. Explanations do not have to be right
to help memory; they just have to put an experience into a
context.
Another boy behaved a bit differently. He first drew the Vtubes with even water ,levels in the corked tube. Then he felt
something was wrong and changed the drawing, correctly showing the levels as uneven. But he had no insight about the cork's
role. Most of the children were like this boy. They did not
remark on the oddity of the water levels until they made their
own drawings. Then they saw that something unusual was afoot
and corrected their work to show that peculiarity. Of course,
without some insight to preside over their memory, they forgot
the details of the experience. Vnlike the boy who said, "It must
be the cork," most of the children's memories faded. After six
months they had forgotten the cork, forgotten the V-tubes, and
remembered only the curious difference in liquid levels. Chil-
dren tended to draw bottles instead of tubes. One bottle contained a normal flat liquid; one held a liquid resting on an odd
angle.
In discussing his findings, Piaget articulated a third principle
of interpretive memory: "Improvement in memory results from
a conflict between recall and recognition." This third experiment
shows what he meant. There is a tension between what we
perceive and what we construct. With the boy who corrected
his original drawing, grammar first misled him. He recalled the
second tube as normal, then recognized the error when he
looked at his drawing, and made a correction. The recall-recognition discrepancy helped him discover a difference between
expectation and experience.
The other boy remembered the equipment correctly, but
when he saw his drawing he felt bothered. He recognized the
drawing as historically correct and yet failed to recognize it as
grammatically possible. He could have reacted dogmatically,
saying that his memory must be wrong and "correcting" his
drawing to suit his prejudices. Instead, he stood by his drawing,
and tried to correct his grammar. The boy did not have enough
of an insight to create a new chunk, but his grammar for water
levels became irregular. He knew that water usually seeks its
own level, but he found that the rule did not hold true in the
presence of a cork. The other subjects did not respond so deeply
to the conflict that they revised their understanding. They did
not associate a context with the irregularity they observed. They
underwent the same type of memory decline Bartlett described
over fifty years ago. As in the memory for an Indian folk tale,
the children's memory for the water levels grew simpler and
more banal. Only the crudest hint of the original oddity survived. But when the tension between recall and recognition
provokes a new association, memory works well, even though
confused.
In interpretive memory, recall and recognition normally
support and enrich one another. After insight, for example,
recognition of facts suddenly overcomes the fan effect, the
tendency of recognition to slow down as we learn more and
,/
/'
./
"
INTERPRETIVE
MEMORY
\/
"
/
/
.~
/ I
I
1/
/
"
EMOTIONAL
MEMORY
INNATE
CHARACTERSTICS
Interpretive Memory: Construction of memory's third step begins when an insight

combines a perception and its grammar (the connections between parts) into one
chunk. When the step is fully constructed, understanding lifts an organism to the
level of conscious behavior. Behavior on this level is called by various other names
as well- e.g. , purposeful, deliberate, creative.
Interpretive Memory /91
more facts. Once people interpret facts as part of a larger insight,

the effect disappears. Recognition comes more quickly than
ever. At this level of expertise, too, people begin saying they
recognize many statements that they have never before seen,
and they suddenly stop recognizing meaningful statements that
they have met before. The new factor is plausibility . If a person's
insight makes a supposed fact plausible, that person tends to
recognize the "fact" as familiar. For example, a person who
discovers a connection between two paths will find that a proposed route between two points on the paths will sound familiar
even though he has never traveled that particular route. It
sounds plausible to him. We usually recognize facts that outright
contradict an insight (although such facts are hard to recall). We
would remember the problem if, for some mysterious reason,
the route between the path points did not work. But often we
cannot recall or recognize a fact that is simply irrelevant to the
insight. We see this problem often enough when people discover
they have forgotten a short cut. They understand the long route,
but that understanding is irrelevant to the short cut, and even
though they have gone the short way before, they get lost.
Operation on this third level distinguishes the effects of
human memory from those of other creatures. The tension
between the recognition of experience and the recall of grammatical organization can lead to consciously formed associations . These irregularities can elaborate on and perhaps ultimately overthrow earlier insights. They have filled the world
with tools, art, and meaning. When formalized, this testing
between particular experience and general expectation is the
scientific method. Artistic tension is less rigorously defined, but
more open to surprising and telling associations. The tensions of
interpretive memory lie at the center of the artful world we have
made for ourselves. Through memory's staircase we have
brought ourselves to a new place indeed.
6
THE ARTS OF
MEMORY
Though I do not deny that memory can be helped by
places and images, yet the best memory is based on three
most important things, namely study, order, and care.
-Erasmus, De ratione studii, 1512
he ancient distinction between the natural memory

we are born with and artificial memory dependent on practiced
skills no longer seems quite so sharp. Every memory has a
history behind it. We create our memories and we create the
ability to use them. The ancient system of artificial memory
deliberately created a memory chunk, but each of us builds and
uses memory chunks all the time. On the other hand, we can
distinguish between the natural and artificial uses of memory.
Natural memory has a long evolutionary history, and serves to
steer us through the present. It is not concerned with what
happened in the past, only with using the past so that we can
face the present as expertly as possible. Useful as this ability is,
there are times , when people want to know exactly what happened. Because nature did not give us the power to preserve old
information, people have had to invent it.
We usually think of inventions as visible things, but the
artificial memory of the ancients was more like the invention of
the curve ball. Nature has given us the ability to throw things,
but nature never had to strike out Babe Ruth. It takes discipline,
92/
The Arts of Memory / 93

training, and practice to become a pitcher. It also takes more
than one pitch. Along with the curve ball a successful pitcher
should include in his repertoire a fastball, slider, or perhaps a
knuckleball. Similarly, the accurate recall of old information is
a special skill that requires more than one technique. The
ancients spoke of their method as though it were the only
deliberate skill in memory, but there are many arts of memory.
Each redirects natural talents toward new purposes, but they
rely on different steps in a memory staircase. Each requires
discipline as well. Good artificial memories always require hard
work.
Civilization builds on details. The more complex the society, the more it must remember. If American society lost its
technology for preserving details, it would begin to dissolve
within minutes. Today's hottest technology encodes, stores,
retrieves, and organizes information, but the need to aid memory
predates electronic technology, predates even literacy. Oral
traditions tell long stories in verse instead of prose, almost
certainly because the rhythm makes verse easier to remember.
It may have also helped preliterate poets with their composition.
The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges said, "Blindness made
me take up the writing of poetry again. Since rough drafts were
denied me, I had to fall back on memory. It is obviously easier
to remember verse than prose and to remember regular verse
forms rather than free ones." Word processors are only the
latest refinement in a many-millennia-long drive to find ways to
preserve the labors of imagination.
As powerful as the technology of retrieval has become,
however, it cannot take over all the details of surviving. In daily
experience the most common and annoying memory failure is
the forgetting of names. We recognize a face and can almost
recall the name that goes with it. But the name does not come.
Psychologists call this confusion the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon. Often as you try to recall the name, you can tell what
it begins with, but then do not know how to get from that first
phoneme to the next. The grammar of the sounds comprising
the name is too arbitrary for ready construction. This problem
)
94 /
haunts presidential aspirants every four years as they desperately seek ways of making voters remember their names. They
traipse through New England snow and Midwestern rain, shrieking like Marley to Scrooge, "Remember me." Then they turn
up for thirty seconds on the evening news, speaking of dire
matters. "Who's that?" asks one viewer, slightly moved by
what he heard. "Oh," says a friend, "you know. That's, uh, oh,
ooh, I've got his name on the tip of my tongue," and somebody
else goes on to win his party's nomination.
Even recognition can fill us with uncertainty. We commonly
meet this problem in restaurants as we try to identify our waiter.
Most notorious of all is the tendency to confuse faces of people
who belong to racial or ethnic groups different from one's own.
A glance that judges "Jew," or "black," or "Mexican" separates a person from the anonymous mass without adding anything meaningful to the. observation.
Adding to the confusion, memory refuses to be silent. If we
do not know, we do not know, but memory often makes us think
we do remember something, even when we do not. If we see a
person and sometime later somebody asks, 'What color tie did
he wear?" we may reply, "Green," and believe ourselves correct, but we may be wrong. Our inventions seldom come out of
whole cloth, but with the details that emotion bypasses, the
material we habituate to, and the expectations that memory
imagines, human narrative memory is distressingly suspect. So
we tum to deliberate techniques for improving memory.
Hypnotism
Most artificial systems begin with attention. They use techniques for learning, but sometimes we want to remember what
has already happened. The ways of recovering the details of
some bygone 'experience have always tended to be a little
spooky, favoring divination, oracles, and omens. And one fur-
ther mysterious technique has survived. Hypnotism tries to use

the power of suggestion to make us remember particular events.
When it works, the hypnotist suggests a context for recalling
associations.
The nature of hypnosis remains so mysterious that usually
we define it in terms of the techniques used to induce it. A
hypnotist tells people to relax, to concentrate on some small
detail, and to rely on the hypnotist's voice for other details about
their experience. The hypnotist begins suggesting experiences
to the subject. Usually the first suggestions are real-perhaps
pointing out the feel of the watch on one's wrist. But soon the
hypnotist suggests experiences that do not exist-perhaps claiming that the room is hot and stuffy-yet the subject responds as
though the suggestions were real. A truly hypnotized person
does experience the suggestions, hallucinating perceptions as
the hypnotist calls them forth. Part of the mystery of hypnosis
is the simplicity of the technique used to induce it. A highly
hypnotizable person can enter the state quickly and easily, yet
the hallucinatory condition that follows seems difficult and profound. One feels that drugs, starvation, or religious ecstasy
ought to precede such a thing.
Some sensational police cases have used hypnotism to solve
crimes. In the Boston Strangler case of the 196Os, hypnosis
provided information that led to physical evidence. In a kidnapping case in Chowchilla, California, a hypnotized witness recalled a license plate number that led to rescue and arrest.
Events like these received plenty of pUblicity and raised public
confidence in the use of hypnosis as a desirable police tool. One
survey of college students found a nearly unanimous (96 percent) belief that hypnosis could enable people to remember
things that would otherwise stay forgotten. But no matter how
mysterious the power or sensitive the technique, we cannot
break into a mental file cabinet and retrieve a memory. We must
construct what we remember.
Two Maryland appeals court rulings bracket the golden age
of police hypnosis. In 1968 the court ruled that witnesses could
give "hypnotically refreshed" testimony. In 1982 the court
96 /
reversed itself and forbade such testimony. Between those years

the police in many states, not only Maryland, used hypnosis.
Sometimes witnesses were even asked to recall events beyond
their powers of perception. A witness could be asked to remember a scene through imaginary binoculars and describe people
who were too far away for clear vision. An even more radical
approach used hypnosis to see the unseeable. A hypnotized
witness in a case where robbers wore ski masks might be asked
to (imaginatively) rip off the mask and describe the thief's face.
Questions like these call for more than refreshed memory. They
are attempts to turn witnesses into Clark Kents and ask them to
use the perceptual powers found only on the planet Krypton.
Interestingly, the witnesses did not reply, "Give me a break."
They provided the requested descriptions. The practice of hypnotizing witnesses has not yet completely disappeared, but
because of doubts held by most courts, today's use is more
cautious. A 1987 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court left it to
individual judges to allow or forbid testimony based on hypnosis.
Piaget said that memory improvements arise from a conflict
between recall and recognition. His principle challenges hypnosis at its heart, for hypnosis removes this conflict altogether by
replacing recognition with suggestion. A hypnotic state is an
increased willingness to perceive suggestions as real. Normally,
when recall and recognition work together, the two continually
reinforce each other and a person feels by their continued
agreement that his memory is correct. When the two no longer
agree, a person becomes bothered and either remembers better
or says he is not sure. Under hypnosis a person receives continual reinforcement from the hypnotist, who constantly says
things like, "Good" or "You're doing fine." When a hypnotist
stops saying these things, the subject becomes bothered and
begins to elaborate on a memory.
Not surprisingly then, hypnotized memory works best when
the hypnotist himself already knows the context and the answer
to a question. The hypnotist actively assists in the construction
of a memory. One older experiment that reported astonishing
memory feats dates back to 1949. A hypnotist found that 93

percent of his subjects could remember what day of the week
their tenth birthday had fallen on. Can you do that? Sixty-nine
percent of the subjects could even recall the day their fourth
birthday fell on. This latter is particularly astonishing since
follow-up studies have established that on any given day bright
four-year-olds do not know the day of the week. It turns out,
however, that the hypnotist knew the answer to his own question
before he asked it, and he did not ask, "What day of the week
was it?" Instead, he asked, "Was it Monday? . . . Was it
Thesday? ... " and so on until the subject stopped him. Current
opinion holds that the hypnotist unconsciously communicated
the answers to subjects, and got those very answers back. Many
hypnosis experiments show the same results we often see in
experiments into extrasensory perception. As controls grow
tighter and the hypnotist himself does not know the answer, the
results grow less impressive. Since hypnotism uses suggestion,
no one should be startled to learn that when we impede a
hypnotist's power to suggest accurately, the subject's ability to
recall accurately declines.
When the hypnotist knows many details of an experience,
he can ask specific questions and get correct answers. In one
experiment subjects saw a movie and were asked detailed questions like, "Immediately after the title of the film was shown, a
young man carrying some books was shown walking along in
front of several billboards. What was the color of his sports
jacket?" Highly hypnotizable subjects got an unusual number of
answers right, but the question helped them. All the question's
details about the young man, books, and billboards are correct.
The question suggests a specific and accurate context.
In real life it is extremely hard to devise detailed questions
with sure accuracy. Correct details can establish a specific
context and help the subject recall a correct answer, but erroneous details lead subjects to an incorrect context, and that
produces error. Experiments indicate that hypnosis ceases to
help when subjects must give answers to interviewers who do
not know the correct details. Ordinarily, people with bothered
98 /
memories will say, "I'm not sure," but hypnosis radically alters
a person's willingness to express a memory. The subject confabulates, inventing and believing a memory. One classic example
tells of a subject who, before entering hypnosis, had been unable
to recall the second stanza of Longfellow's poem about the
village blacksmith. When hypnotized , however, he rattled off:
The smithy whistles at his forge
As he shapes the iron band;
The smith is very happy
As he owes not any man.
This sounds plausible, and pretty well captures the quality I

expect from Longfellow; however, the actual stanza reads:
His hair.is crisp and black, and long,
His face is like the tan:
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns what e'er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.
Hypnosis had not improved the man's memory, only made

him more willing to try something. He did get much of the last
line right, yet even there he missed the lead word, and that
uncertainty could well be enough to make a normal person
hesitant about claiming even to recall the last line. Confabulations like these are the great plague of hypnosis. They make it
possible for witnesses to provide an answer when asked to view
an incident through imaginary binoculars or to imagine ripping
off the mask of a thief. But the answer compounds invention
with accurate memory, and no one can hope to sort them out.
Hypnosis has been a hot research topic in memory studies
of the 1980s. Generally we find that hypnosis does not work
better than the old police technique of going over and over an
experience. In the late 1970s experimenters showed that repeated attempts to re~all an event eventually lead to much
improved memory for an experience.
One notable experiment first used repeated recall to aid

subjects in remembering a series of pictures they had seen. Then
subjects were hypnotized to try to make them remember still
more, but most of the newly recalled pictures were confabulations, especially for highly hypnotizable subjects. Hypnosis, it
seems, is no substitute for hard work.
Hypnosis has another serious drawback. People are much
more certain about their memory when it is based on hypnosis.
The doubts and hesitations that normally trouble a person trying
to recall events disappear after one's memory has been "hypnotically refreshed." The issue is particularly important in
courtroom testimony, where jurors often pay close attention to
how confident a witness seems. Were I a trial lawyer, I would
want to hypnotize all my witnesses before facing a jury. Crossexamination will not shake them. But if I were a judge, I would
never allow such a witness in my courtroom. The witness's
testimony has become tampered evidence and must be considered as suspect as a reconstructed fingerprint. Experiments also
show that we can tell a hypnotized person that something
imaginary happened in the past, and then, after the hypnotic
state, the person will claim to remember such an experience. So
if I were an unscrupulous trial lawyer, I could really manipulate
my witnesses.
Reminders
Techniques like hypnotism stumble because memory uses
the past, but does not preserve it. Over fifty years ago Bartlett
concluded that, "Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of
our attitude towards a whole mass of organized past reactions
or experience." Everything we have learned since then has
confirmed this principle. Successful memory techniques start
tOO /
with this fact of construction and go on from there. Every

important memory system begins with factual association. One
thing automatically reminds us of another.
Artificial memory systems begin with something easily recalled that reminds us of something harder to recall. This technique is the paradox of memory systems, or mnemonics. They
all give us more to remember. People who already feel that their
memories are besieged sometimes respond with dismay when
they discover that memory systems begin by increasing rather
than decreasing what they have to remember. This commonsense criticism always makes skeptics hesitant about bothering
to learn a memory system. As one Chinese student said when a
sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary tried to teach him artificial
memory, "Though the precepts are the true rules of memory,
one has to have a remarkably fine memory to make any use of
them." But reminders "form the basis of all artificial memory.
The simplest reminder uses the cartoon solution of tying a
string around one's finger. Remembering to do something at an
appointed time is among memory's most difficult challenges.
Although memory helps us answer the question of what we must
do now, it uses the past to answer the question. Unusual
appointments that break with routine have no established associations to help guide our actions, so we often resort to physical
reminders. A person can shift his watch to the other arm, thus
reminding himself of the appointment whenever he checks the
time. Other systems, such as putting something by the door, are
even more common.
Another reminder uses mental imagery. Suppose you have
to go to a certain store the next day. It is easy to forget that sort
of chore. You hop in your car and follow a routine that is so
automatic the store never enters your head. To remind yourself,
you can imagine the next day's scene, beginning with getting
into the car. Conjure up the image as clearly as possible of the
dashboard and steering wheel. Imagine placing the key in the
ignition and make that action the reminder. Tell yourself: "As I
place the key in the ignition I must remember to stop off at the
shoe store and pick up my boots." Now imagine the scene again
and, as you imagine placing the key in the ignition, think of the
boots. It sounds a little mystical, but the system works for many
people. It uses two elements of factual memory-reminders and
perception.
Modern society emphasizes symbolic thinking , especially
thinking in words, but factual memory relives perceptions. I
have always thought in words, but since beginning research into
memory I have made deliberate use of perceptual associations.
Remembering names, for example, has always been a nightmare
for me, but I find I can sometimes remember a name by remembering the introduction. I hear a third party's voice say the name
aloud and I see the person's face. Of course, this system works
only after a formal introduction, a fact that makes me wonder if
the widespread problem of learning names partially arises from
society's increasing informality.
Although remembering an introduction may sound miraculous, it is in keeping with a common experience of factual
memory-the little tune that keeps running through the head. If
you can remember the sound of music, you can probably remember the sound of a friend saying, "Albert, I'd like you to
meet Victoria."
Remembering an image clearly enough to use it as a reminder may also sound impossible. My own mental imagery has
always seemed appallingly bad and many people claim they
never think with images. A good test for doubters is to ask them
to describe aloud the Taj Mahal. Usually the person interrupts
his own description to say, "What do you know. I do think with
images. "
When artificial memory collapsed as a standard tool of
education, the prestige of mental imagery also collapsed. Many
people, of course, have continued to think in images and sounds,
but it has no cultural endorsement as the way to think or even
as an important way to think. Good memories, however, depend
on an ability to use perceptions (real or imaginary) as reminders.
102 /
Rote Memory
Memory systems that require long strings of associations
work best when we organize reminders into chunks; however,
we can also organize them as a long string in which each item
reminds a person of the next one. This system is called rote
memorization. School children commonly use it when they must
recite a poem or famous piece of oratory:
"Four score . . ."
automatically reminds a person to say
"and seven years ago ... "
which reminds him to say
"our fathers . . ."
reminding him of
"brought forth on this continent. ... "
During the classical age of artificial memory, rote memory had
little serious standing, but then artificial memory came under
attack from several directions. One group objected that artificial
memory was too emotional. The English Puritan William Perkins
denounced the system in 1592 saying,
The artificial memory which consists in places and images will
teach how to retain notions in memory easily and without
labour. But it is not to be approved [because:] The animation
of the images which is the key of memory is impious: because
it calls up absurd thoughts, insolent, prodigious and the like
which stimulate and light up depraved carnal affections.
Perkins favored rote learning. Rote memorization uses the reminders of factual memory but skips their emotional basis.
Because rote learning depends on repetition instead of arousal,
rote memorization is slow and impeded by wandering interest.
For centuries, teachers have justified memorization tasks as a
way to improve the students' memories. William James seems
to have had such a teacher, and plainly he hated those tasks, for
he denounced them with great vigor in his adult life . His classic
text, PsychoLogy , devotes five pages to castigating the theory
that rote memorizing leads to better powers of memory. He even
did some experiments that supported his belief that rote memorizing of one thing does not make it easier to learn the next
thing. James overstated his case. It is possible to improve one's
memory , but none of the techniques used in rote learning help.
Rote reminders are too simple and specific to permit much
generalized memory improvement.
Generations of rote learning have led to some entrenched
ideas about memory. Like the metaphors from the classic system of artificial memory, rote memory's assumptions have been
generalized beyond the specific situation that provoked them.
Because rote memorization can use only a few items at a time,
many people assume we have a fixed memory span, and because
memorization requires frequent repetition , much opinion holds
that all memory requires rehearsal.
Belief in a memory span acquired support during the very
first days of scientific memory study. Ebbinghaus discovered
that if he tried to learn a list of seven or fewer syllables, one
reading served to do the trick. But if the list grew longer, even
one item longer, he needed several readings to learn the list.
This seemed like pretty good evidence that the brain might have
a limited storage capacity; however, we have seen that several
factors affect factual memory. Prompt recall enables us to
remember up to four items. If an experience arouses us, we can
form many associations, but in this unpredictable system a
person may suddenly habituate to an experience and cease
learning. The uncertainties of habituation confound attempts to
measure the supposed memory span. If we habituate at once,
we pay attention to only one item. Adding the four items
available through prompt recall gives us a five-item memory
span, and this bottom-of-the-memory-span value turns up in
many studies. Unless a list has some special structure or unless
experimental subjects use some memory-improving technique ,
people usually recall between five and six items from a list. On
104 /
the other hand, if we never habituate to an experience there is

no reason to assume any upper limit on the memory span.
One means for postponing habituation imposes meaning on
an otherwise random experience. Experiments have shown repeatedly that we remember meaningful associations best of all.
One careful study investigated several ways of meaningful pairing. Experimenters asked subjects to learn word pairs. They
told one group simply to learn them by paying attention. This
group's recall average was the standard, bottom-of-the-memoryspan value: 5.57.
A second group read the pairs, and then read a sentence
linking the two words. For example, a sentence joining a pair
like hat/bucket might say: "Her hat fell in the bucket." Average
recall for these pairs showed a significant improvement: 8.17
items.
A third group of subjects read the word pairs, and then
made up their own sentences to link the words. This method
added personal reference since, presumably, one's own sentences catch one's spirit better than the sentences made up by
an experimenter. Average recall for these subjects was 11.5
items, double the rate for those who tried rote learning.
A final group read the word pairs and formed their own
visual images linking the words. To link hat/bucket, for example,
a person might imagine somebody pouring water from a hat into
a bucket. Average recall for this group was 13.1 items. This
amount of recall well exceeds normal measures of memory span.
Even arbitrary meaning helps memory more than no meaning.
Inevitably, artificial memory systems that give meaning to something work better than the reminder strings of rote memory.
Because one experience seldom permits learning every item
in a string, rote memorization usually requires rehearsal-the
deliberate, continuous repetition of material. Rehearsal forces
the creation of a chunk of reminders, and its effects can last a
lifetime. Even older people, when asked to recite the alphabet,
still say "L-M-N-O" as almost a single word because they
learned the letters that way when they were schoolchildren.
Rote memory requires grouping reminders into chunks. If we

want to remember a credit card number, for example, it will do
us no good to read the whole thing and then try to rehearse it.
We must read only a few items and rehearse them before going
on. An unfamiliar telephone number is just short enough to
permit a unified rehearsal. The seven digits are perfectly dull
and meaningless, so habituation comes fast, but with determination we can recall all seven digits while moving from phone
book to telephone. Usually we remember such a list through the
forced attention of reciting the phone number over and over.
The next time we want to call that number, however, we will
probably have to look it up again.
Rehearsal has an unfortunate side effect. It alienates a
person from the memory. The memory persists but it has been
drained of emotion and meaning. Sometimes this power can be
therapeutic, as in the terrible case of a friend who saw a man
leap to his death in front of an oncoming subway train. For
twenty-four hours the scene repeated itself in my friend's mind.
It was all he could talk about, all he could think about. His
colleagues at work reported he was worthless that day as he sat
helplessly with his one memory; however, this incessant rehearsal had a healing quality. By the end of the second day, my
friend reported that he had experienced the scene so many times
it had lost all meaning and emotion for him.
His experience contains a warning. If rehearsal can have
this dissociative effect on something as emotional as the sight of
a suicide, we should not be surprised that students using rote
rehearsal end by remembering only their alienation. For centuries schools have wasted their pupils' time with a technique that
does not improve their general powers of memory. Worse, the
technique fosters hatred for its subject matter. It is not right that
thirty years after leaving the eighth grade I should still shudder
with boredom whenever anyone threatens to recite the Gettysburg Address. Of course, sometimes we do have to learn strings
of numbers or lists of names. For small tasks, rote memory can
serve, but large assignments need better techniques.
Mnemonics
Instead of practlcmg meaningless strings of reminders,
memory systems work better when we organize the reminders
into an easily understood chunk. Memory systems of this type
artificially carry us to the level of interpretive memory, but
instead of following from an insight, artificial memory imposes
an arbitrary grammar on the reminders. This technique is the
great secret of artificial memory, discovered, it is said, twentyfive centuries ago by a poet, Simonides of Ceos. He had just left
a party when his host's palace collapsed, crushing all the revelers. They did not have dental records in those days, and the
bodies were too mangled for ready identification. Simonides,
however, remembered where everyone had been sitting, and so
could identify each body for burial in the proper family plot.
Impressed by his achievement, Simonides then analyzed his
memory into two parts-places and images. Using the vocabulary of today's memory studies, we would say that Simonides
discovered that memory chunks use grammar and perceptions.
The space (or grammar) in an artificial memory system can
use any set of associations that automatically leads from one
reminder to the next. In a familiar house, for example, one room
automatically connects to another room. An imaginary space
can be indefinitely large and, therefore, can contain as many
reminders as we need; however, we have more paper than the
ancients enjoyed and seldom need to recall such long lists. For
short lists, we can use acronyms instead of spaces. HOMES, for
example, is a popular acronym for recalling the names of the
Great Lakes. (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior.)
The grammar of an acronym uses spelling rules. If we remember
the chunk HOMES, we quickly recall the letters and the associated lakes. We can also use simple sentences to hold reminders.
To this day I can still recall the first four hydrocarbons: methane,
ethane, propane, and butane. They come to mind at once
because a high school classmate tipped me to the sentence:
Mary eats peanut butter. The first letter of each word in the
sentence matches the letter that starts the appropriate chemical

name. So if I remember the sentence, I can reconstruct the list.
The peanut-butter sentence links my limited knowledge of carbon rings to my better knowledge of English grammar and
spelling. From that sure ground I can make associations, confident that I have listed these chemicals in the proper order.
Each of these mnemonic systems works by creating an
artificial memory chunk. A chunk always organizes details into
a grammatical arrangement. The details are what Simonides
called images, but any system of reminders will serve. The
chunk's grammar automatically moves a person from one reminder to the next. Once you know this technique, it becomes
trivially easy to invent artificial chunks. A woman from my
neighborhood tells me she had trouble recalling the arrangement
of three main north-south avenues-Columbus, Amsterdam,
and Broadway. She needed to find some simple grammar that
would automatically remind her of the names in the proper
order. Her solution used an acronym. The word cab organizes
the avenues' initials correctly. She could have picked some other
grammatical organization, perhaps a sentence (Come along, Bill)
or even historical chronology (Columbus's voyage led to the
founding of New Amsterdam, which gave 'us Broadway).
At some point it becomes difficult to remember one's memory aids. It is easy if you have one or two, but if a person has
many, it gets harder. This problem led to one of the most famous
of the classic rules for artificial memory: Make your aids so
bizarre that there is no confusing them. As the Ad Herennium
put it:
Now nature herself teaches us what we should do [in selecting
reminders]. When we see in every day life things that are
petty, ordinary , and banal, we generally fail to remember
them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel
or marvelous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally
base, dishonorable, unusual, great, unbelievable, or ridiculous,
that we are likely to remember for a long time .... Nor could
this be so for any other reason than that ordinary things easily
108 I
slip from the memory while the striking and novel stay longer
in the mind . ... We ought then to set up images of a kind that
can adhere longest in memory. And we shall do so . . . if we
set up images that are not many or vague but active; if we
assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we
ornament some of them, as with crowns or purple cloaks ...
or if we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained
with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint, so
that its form is more striking, or by assigning certain comic
effects to our images, for that, too, will ensure our remembering them more readily.
We can take this advice to heart. For example, if the HOMES

acronym is too boring for easy recall you can reorganize the
letters into the pseudo-Yiddish insult SHMOE, meaning a jerk,
drip, or naive twit. What sort of SHMOE thinks the Great Lakes
are filled with lemonade? A bizarre association like that is easier
to remember than the ordinary word HOMES. But centuries ago
people rebelled against the emptiness of these random associations. If you find yourself creating so many artificial systems
that keeping them straight has become a challenge, it is time to
regroup. At some point in life we need insightful memory systems.
Cartesian Memory
During the 1930s Gestalt psychologists looked for a better
method of learning than rote memory. Their research showed
the power of insight. Subjects in one experiment studied the
following list for three minutes:
293 3 364 0 4 3 4 7
5 8 1 2 1 5 192 226
Half the subjects learned the numbers by rote, and they performed routinely. One-third of these rote learners could repro-
duce the list perfectly immediately after the three minutes, but
recall suffered badly after three weeks and no one could give the
whole thing. Another half of the subjects studied the numbers
and hunted for some organizing rule. At the end of three minutes, 38 percent of this second group could give the numbers, a
slight improvement over the rote learning. Even better, 23
percent of the group could still remember the list perfectly after
three weeks. The discovery of a rule is easier than rote learning,
and the effect lasts longer. I
A rule is an automatic procedure for getting from one
reminder to another; however, unlike the artificial memory of
the ancients, the grammar is not arbitrarily imposed on the
reminders. Memory on this level begins with an insight into a
chunk's grammar. A person who knows the grammar of a chunk
can automatically derive the reminders. At this point we can
even "remember" parts of the chunk we have never encountered. We can derive a third line for the Gestalt experimental list
5 0 5 4 5 761 646 8
even though we did not see the line. At this level, memory
systems have acquired the creative power"s of interpretive memory.
1 call this system of recall Cartesian memory because the
philosopher Rene Descartes first described it as an alternative
to the classical artificial memory system. "I thought," wrote
the philosopher, "of an easy way of making myself master of all
1 discovered through the imagination. This would be done
through the reduction of things to their causes. Since all can be
reduced to one, it is obviously not necessary to remember all
the sciences. When one understands the causes all vanished
images can easily be found again in the brain through the
impression of the cause. This is the true art of memory."
Cartesian memory works by defining the grammar of associations so precisely that we do not need many reminders. We
'The rule: begin at lower left digit, add 3, add 4, then repeat the addition cycle.
This procedure yields 5, 8, 12, 15 ...
can derive the whole system simply by following the grammar

from its starting place. In the Gestalt experiment, if you remember the rule that leads from point to point, you need only to
remember to start at 5. Even that final point collapses into part
of the rule: Add 3 and 4 and begin at 5. The 3-4-5 sequence is a
natural grammar.
Deriving rules, no matter how absurd, is a useful memory
system. "I'm at the hotel," says a visitor, "room 680." You
reply, "That will be easy to remember because I'm going to
arrive at 6 o'clock. There are two other digits in the number,
which gives 8, leaving the final number with nothing, or O. 680."
It sounds mad, but it works.
Insight of a more serious kind can also help actors learn
their lines without rote memorization. From a performer's perspective, a play has many characteristics of a mnemonic chunk.
Things follow in fixed- sequence, giving the playa grammar.
Each speaking place in a play begins with a reminder, some
specific word or action that cues the arrival of a line. The easiest
way to learn the words that follow the reminder comes through
insight into the emotion and situation of the moment in the play.
The cue reminds a performer of the emotion and situation, and
the words associated with the cue flow almost naturally. Of
course, for this method to work, performers need to understand
how their words mesh with the movement of the play. It is
axiomatic that a performer who has not yet learned a line has
not yet figured out what that line means. To learn his lines, an
actor should concentrate on understanding why they are said,
not concentrate on rote learning.
Cartesian memory has served us well during the past few
centuries and is certain to remain important, but computers can
now beat people at Cartesian memory. We can program a
computer to follow a rule through a chunk. A simple home
computer could derive and print twenty lines of the Gestalt
experiment's list while we were writing out just the third line. If
Cartesian memory were the apex of all possible memory arts,
the invention of the computer would guarantee eventual unemployment for most human thinkers. Computers are simply better
than us at preserving information and following rules. Our

powers of recall cannot compete forever with their precision and
tirelessness, but interpretive memory beats computer operations
in two ways. We recognize a chunk's context and we use insight
to form new chunks. In the future, the cutting edge of artificial
memory will lie in building new chunks and recognizing new
contexts for their application.
Technological advances in storing information have always
enlarged the demands made on artificial memory. Preliterate
societies worked hard just to preserve their own classics. Ancient literate societies wrote down the classics, so people used
artificial memory to preserve their own ideas and needs. Cheap
paper made the preservation of one's own thoughts easy, so
people turned to Cartesian memory to explore the implications
of their thoughts more deeply. Now we have computers that can
tirelessly and rapidly explore chunks, so today's artificial memory will have to excel at creating new chunks.
PART
TWO
THE BIOLOGY OF
MEMORY
NEWFOUND SURPRISES
Unanticipated novelty , the new discovery, can emerge
only to the extent that [someone's] anticipations about
nature and his instruments [for study] prove wrong.
-Thomas Kuhn , The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions. 1962
Science has studied memory for over a century, yet

this book could not have appeared even five years ago. Yes,
researchers acquired most of the data about memory's functioning before the 1980s began, but facts make sense only after they
come together in a chunk. The memory chunk came together in
the mid-1980s when research into the nervous system gained
momentum, and the result has not turned out as researchers had
anticipated. The upheaval has overturned a consensus that had
developed in neuroscience laboratories around the nation. Individual scientists, of course, always hold differing theoretical
views, and it may seem to a working scientist that he spends
much of his time disputing ideas, but to an outsider the agreement between scientists is always more striking than their areas
of contention. We see the same thing in ordinary life. Politically
concerned Americans often feel they are in bitter opposition to
other political groups, but a foreign visitor is usually struck by
the enormous agreement between Americans about the importance of private enterprise, public information, and personal
opportunity. To an outside observer, America's political disputes always seem like arguments over points within a consensus. A long-standing consensus also prevailed in the study of the
/ 115
116 /
nervous system; however, in the past few years that agreement

has broken.
The Old Consensus

The old consensus held that when the breakthrough in
memory studies came, it would explain how the brain files away
our memories. By 1980 the storage idea no longer helped explain
much of the psychology of memory, but all the metaphors we
had about the workings of memory-be they metaphors of wax
impressions, art galleries, books, dossiers, phonographs, or
computers-all insisted that memories must be stored. So scientists expected the breakthrough to tell them how the brain stores
memories. Instead, they have discovered how it is possible to
remember without storing any information about the past.
A second expectation took it for granted that a breakthrough would resolve which of the various psychological "approaches" to memory studies was right, or at least nearest to
the mark. Skinner, Ebbinghaus, and Bartlett began their research with different axioms. They disagreed bitterly about the
nature of learning, behavior, and the mind. Other sciences have
distinct branches and issues, but none of them has such basic
disputes over what to study, what to ask, and how to explain
what you observe. Skinner denied the existence of memory.
Ebbinghaus said memory existed and was passive. Bartlett said
it was active. A real breakthrough, people imagined, would settle
the matter about which approach was right. Instead of naming a
winning side, however, the breakthrough in neuroscience's
memory research has transformed the separate psychological
approaches into branches of one larger field.
We live today at the great sunrise of brain knowledge.
Centuries of research into the obscurity of brain anatomy and
function can at last give other fields of study a context for what
they observe. Psychologists have long understood that the
Newfound Surprises / 117
causes of their observations lay in the brain, yet most psychologists paid no attention to the question of how the brain works.
They knew so little about the brain's operation that there seemed
no point in saddling themselves with a series of uncertain and
vague propositions. The reverse was also true: Neuroscientists
did not linger over psychology even though they understood that
psychologists study the effects of brain activity. The grand
effects of learning, perceiving, and feeling were too complex for
analysis into distinct brain operations. So the two studies went
their own ways, until recently. In this section, we shall consider
work that has brought the two fields together. The successful
combination of psychology and neuroscience promises to become as important to the history of science as Kepler's union of
physics and astronomy, Darwin and Wallace's marriage of geology to natural history, or Watson and Crick's fusion of chemistry with genetics.
The dream of a coherent neuropsychology seemed distant
for most of this century. A pioneering researcher eager to link
the studies was Karl Lashley. He wondered how the brain made
learning possible, and he investigated the question from the
1920s through the 1950s. In the end, he. offered a despairing
joke: "I sometimes feel, in reviewing the evidence on the localization of the memory trace, that the necessary conclusion is
that learning just is not possible." Lashley's search for memory's "localization," of course, reflected the assumption taken
from artificial memory's method of loci that memory sits in a
place.
When Lashley began his research he took it for granted that
the brain stored its memories somewhere, and he asked where
exactly that somewhere lay. He taught rats to run mazes, and
then began systematically destroying different sites in the brain
to see where the memory was stored. To his surprise, he found
that no single place contained the maze. Instead, a rat's ability
to run the maze declined in proportion to the total amount of
brain destroyed. If a rat suffered much brain damage, the rat
retained little maze-running ability; little brain damage left much
better performance.
118 /
The Lashley experiments proved the falsity of the old

portrait of memory as a warehouse, but people hesitated to
dismiss the whole memory-storage metaphor. If it is not storage,
what is it? Experimental studies of memory's storage grew
increasingly like the nineteenth century' s study of the aether
that supposedly surrounded the earth. Test results became ever
more ambiguous and confusing, but physicists could not imagine
that the aether did not exist. Today, of course, hardly anybody
remembers the aether or what logic required that it be out there
in space.
The insistent search for a place of storage has not come
simply from a stubborn clinging to assumptions about memory.
Everybody could see there was a problem, but beyond the issue
of storage lies a conviction that science studies passive things.
Most nonscientific societies believe that everything is alive.
Rocks, rivers, and the sky, they say, are active living participants in the world. The ancient Greeks thought, for example,
that falling rocks accelerate because they are in a hurry to reach
a natural resting place on the ground. The scientific revolution
changed that attitude. Newton explained the world in terms of
an environment that manipulates dead things. His laws of motion
describe the motions of the dead-motion based on inertia and
external forces. His explanation for the acceleration of a falling
rock relies on gravity , an external force that affects the quick
and the dead with equal authority. In the centuries since Newton, passive laws have done so well that many people have come
to assume that a scientific explanation for something must
inevitably describe only the objective environment and never
cite any subjective properties. In brain studies this assumption
requires that, prior to its being remembered , a memory must
already exist in the environment, just waiting to be retrieved.
Instead, we find that each memory is a construction, something
newly created each time it appears. Memory is actively produced by living things; it is not something passive that a machine
can retrieve.
The problems facing the study of memory and the brain in
the 1950s matched the difficulties that faced the study of mem-
ory and behavior. In behavioral studies, the view of passive

memory was giving way to a view of an active constructive
memory. Scientists like Miller and Mandler could express this
new view without seeming mystical because they assumed that
eventually brain studies would show that the brain works like a
computer. They expected to learn that what looks like creativity
really uses stored memories. Brain research, however, was not
having the anticipated success at finding the stored information.
Neuroscience had come to a crisis, perhaps the most important
of its history.
Searching for a Memory ~rehouse

In the late 1960s a psychiatrist at the New York Medical
College, Dr. E. Roy John , published a pivotal book entitled The
Mechanisms of Memory. In it he tried to state the best argument
possible for the view that passive, external realities could explain the behavior of the living brain.. John suggested that
memory is stored, but stored statistically throughout most of the
brain. Statistical storage means that the information emerges
from the operation of many neurons, as in a democratic vote.
John proposed that neurons cast votes and that remembering is
a process of discovering how the neurons voted. Changes in a
neuron effect its vote and learning is a process of changing the
way individual neurons vote. It works like a political campaign.
Changing one voter's mind does not matter. A candidate needs
a ground swell that changes many votes.
As John knew, the biggest challenge to his position lay in
the rising belief that particular brain functions were localized. In
the 1950s, as confidence in the notion of stored memories
declined, neuroscientists began to suspect that functions of
memory were localized. This idea gained strength after 1953,
when surgeons performed an experimental brain operation on a
patient called H. M. It ended catastrophically, leaving H. M. in
120 /
a permanent state of amnesia. He no longer learned any new

facts. We will examine H. M. in more detail later on. At this
point in our story we need only understand that H. M. 's surgery
was accepted as conclusive evidence that the destruction of
small parts of the brain can have enduring consequences for
memory.
This notion of localized functions suggests an active brain
that creates its own behavior. Instead of working like a oneneuron one-vote election, the brain becomes a team. Imagine a
baseball game in which a ball is hit against the centerfield fence.
An outfielder grabs the ball and throws it toward the infield. The
second baseman catches the ball and throws it on toward home
plate. The shortstop intercepts the ball in midftight and throws
toward third, letting a run score, but the third baseman tags out
a runner. In this situation too, the result emerges from the
activity of a group, but the action is cooperative rather than
statistical. Each player has constructed a part of the outcome,
and each acted on his own experience, ability, and relation to
the situation. If any player had botched his part in the play, the
whole system would have failed.
For twenty years now, the basic questions about brain and
memory have been the ones John raised. Does the brain's
information emerge statistically from the working of its neurons?
Or must we understand the brain's activity in terms of localized
functions? John's idea of statistically defined information has
caused a great stir among mathematicians. By the mid 1980s
mathematical conferences regularly included papers about
"neural nets" and the statistical information that can emerge
from them. This work may show the way to a radical new design
for computers. Neuroscience, however, has been less able to
absorb John's ideas, largely because of the growing identification of brain areas with specialized functions. The continuing
success of this identification has made it increasingly difficult to
believe that the brain stores information statistically. It would
be an odd baseball game in which a team kept voting about the
action of individual players.
The failure to discover a statistical storage system returned

the old consensus to the crisis it has faced ever since Lashley
proved that the brain has no storage area of the sort found in
information-processing machines. In the context of traditional
neuroscience, rejecting the storage idea would be as radical as it
would be for an American politician to announce that he had
concluded that citizens should never gain any information about
public affairs. Thus, the continued failure to discover a means
of storage is not taken as easy evidence that there is no storage.
According to the old consensus, the means of storage simply
has not been found yet; however, there is no longer much
agreement on the likely nature of the storage.
One popular idea suggests that the information is distributed
among the different functional brain areas that neuroscience
keeps identifying. In this view memory for different parts of an
activity lies scattered about the brain, like bread crumbs through
Hansel and Gretel's forest. Each crumb has a specific location,
but only the destruction of many crumbs destroys the full
memory for the behavior.
Another suggestion proposes that the brain stores every
memory everywhere in the brain. The fayored metaphor for this
omnipresence comes from Karl Pribram, a distinguished neuropsychologist, and former student of Lashley's who likens memory to a hologram. A hologram is a photographic image that
stores all its information at every point in the hologram. If part
of a hologram is damaged, therefore, the entire image can still
be recovered. Although most neuroscientists remain unconvinced, this proposal suggests that some of the finest thinkers in
the field believe that only a very bold hypothesis can point the
way to the means of storage.
Until recently, surveys of memory usually halted their story
at this point. They acknowledged that scientists still do not
know how memory is stored, and there ended their brief consideration of memory's biological basis. nme in for more insight
after the missing store is discovered.
Some speculative authors did try to describe in a general
way how this storage must work. The most widely discussed
122 /
such model was one proposed in 1968 by two cognitive psychologists, Richard Atkinson and Richard Schiffrin. They proposed
three storage areas: a long-term area where memories can lie for
many years before retrieval, a short-term storage area where
memories are held briefly before passing on to the long-term
store, and a vestibule storage point where sensory data first
arrives in the brain. The model's greatest strength is that it
suggests a reason for the poor accuracy of our recall-much
information is lost before reaching long-term storage. Its greatest weakness is that nothing in the brain comes close to looking
as if it could support such a system. Models like the AtkinsonSchiffrin design appeal more to mathematicians than biologists.
The embarrassing truth is that what we do know about the brain
and its functional areas in no way supports our logical expectations about the storage areas that must be there.
The crisis in the biology of memory continued through the
1970s. In the middle 1980s, however, it suddenly seemed over.
A new consensus had emerged around two principles, and
Lashley's assumption of localized memories no longer seemed
so inevitable. In the final chapter of this section we will discuss
those principles and where inquiries into the biological basis of
memory stand today. But first we will examine the work of two
different researchers whose work illustrates the thinking behind
an emerging new consensus.
8
THE ORGAN OF
MEMORY
We need a new vocabulary term to identify such errorsa nasty word like "mechanomorphism," for example-or
some other way of referring to our thoughtless and superstitious habit of attributing mechanical traits to organisms.
-Vicki Hearne, Adam's Task, 1986
T
his chapter reports a key discovery about the biology of memory: The basic nerve cell, the neuron, can make
different responses to identical inputs. One time a chemical from
a neighboring neuron will inhibit an action. Later, the same
chemical will not inhibit the action. It is as though the neuron
itself has learned something. This unexpected finding startled
almost every expert. They had assumed that the neuron worked,
essentially, like a mechanical part in a machine. As recently as
1982, C. D. Woody's authoritative book about memory at the
cellular and chemical level (Memory, Learning, and Higher
Function) listed the changes in a neuron that could conceivably
affect memory. The list considered a variety of structural
changes, but it never anticipated the discovery that a neuron
might simply change its responses.
If an automobile control, say the gas pedal, changed its
behavior and began to act like a brake, drivers would complain
and mechanics would scratch their heads. Machinery does not
/ 123
124 /
work that way, and if it did cars would be too dangerous to use.
The neuron, however, does work like that: sometimes responding to the world in one way, sometimes another. Its behavior,
therefore, does not depend solely on present inputs-the causes
that control mechanical behavior-but on past experience as
well. It was axiomatic in the old consensus that the neuron is
the tool, or perhaps a component, of memory, and that when
many neurons work together, learning somehow emerges. Instead it seems the neuron itself is the organ of memory.
No one predicted the astonishing simplicity of these findings. Biologists had confidently expected that something as
grand and mysterious as memory would be complicated and
intricate. The storage alone would be enormously difficult-all
that encoding, preservation, and retrieval. But as we shall see
memory uses no storage; the neuron merely begins to behave in
a new way. The neuron does not learn in the way that we have
always understood learning. It gets no feedback about its behavior and does not seek to enhance its own pleasure or avoid pain.
But the neuron does change its actions in response to its history,
and of course, if the organ of memory acts as though it were
learning, the whole organism will also act as though it has
learned.
The Neuron
The neuron is not the only cell type in the human nervous
system, nor even the most plentiful type, but it is the primal
nerve cell. Sea anemones and sea snails, for example, have
nervous systems composed purely of neurons. The neuron first
appeared at that evolutionary level, giving a new adaptive power
to animal life. The neuron's most obvious specialized characteristic is its use of an electric charge. When properly stimulated,
an electric pulse moves across the length of the neuron. The
pulse triggers the neuron to emit chemicals, and the great speed
The Organ of Memory / 125
of electricity lets the neuron act much more rapidly than it could
through ordinary cellular chemical communications.
The discovery of the neuron's electric charge led many to
assume that the nervous system was a form of electric wiring
and that the body was an electrical machine. The nervous
system, however, is not completely electric. The electric charges
remain within an individual neuron. A small gap, called a synapse, lies between two neurons, and chemicals, not electricity,
cross this gap. Scientists once speculated that electricity arced
its way across the synapse, just as it leaps across the gap in an
automobile's spark plug. Research in the 1940s led by the British
neuroscientist John Eccles refuted this notion. Chemicals, a few
molecules at a time, cross the synapse. Chemicals constitute the
basic input and output of a neuron. It is the individual neuron,
not the brain, that is an electrical device.
Instead of thinking of the nervous system as electrical
wiring, we come closer when we use the analogy of a network
of computers. Imagine a room like the space launch headquarters at Cape Canaveral, a room filled with computers. Between
two computers sits a shared in/out box. The out box of one
computer serves as the in box of its n~ighbor. The computer
takes its input, processes it electrically, and then drops its
output into the box. The neighbor then takes that output, processes it, and puts any further output into its own box. For
rocket launches, it seems practical to have a gaggle of experts,
each with his own computer, monitoring and presiding over a
rocket lift-off; however, it seems like one hell of a way to design
a doorbell.
Indeed, writers often compare the most basic neuron system to a doorbell. If you touch a single neuron at the sea
anemone's mouth, it fires, stimulating a muscle. As with a
doorbell, when you touch one end of the neuron, the other end
fires. It is not quite a doorbell, of course; if you continue poking
the neuron, it eventually habituates to the action and stops
responding. Doorbells never habituate to being rung. If a pesky
salesman keeps pressing a doorbell, the bell will not grow tired
126 /
and ignore the man's finger. But a sea anemone will do exactly
that. It ignores the touch.
With the hindsight of further knowledge about neuron function, we can see that habituation is a telling and remarkable
power. Habituation means that the anemone's neuron no longer
responds to the same stimulus in the same way. It is a standard
part of every level of memory's staircase, so common that we
pay it little thought or wonder, especially when it occurs on the
neuron level.
The difference comes from the synapse. The all-electric
doorbell has no synapse. A charge flows from button to bell
without interruption. The sea anemone is different. Press the
neuron and you may continue to get electric pulses, but the
output into the synapse changes. To return to the analogy of the
computer network, the neuron acts like a computer with a
changed program.
Imagine a NASA-controlled doorbell. Even at the space
program, we need only one computer to run a doorbell. A
qualified engineer sits at the computer watching its monitor. The
screen shows an input
BUTTON
PUSHED
and then an output

BELL
RUNG.
As he works for NASA, the engineer might have confirmation

over a loudspeaker: "Doorbell control speaking. We have bell
ring. Repeat, we have achieved bell ring."
As time passes, however, the console keeps showing the
same BUTION PUSHED input and BELL RING output. A
salesman has come to vend his wares, and he won't take " Nobody's home" for an answer. Eventually the engineer makes a
decision. He changes the ring-bell program for a no-ring program. The console continues to show the BUTION PUSHED
input, but now there is no output.
This space-age doorbell is as automatic as the more familiar

variety. The expert monitoring the screen never adds some input
of his own, but by changing the program he has altered the
system's behavior. The neuron's special powers all reflect this
one peculiar ability to change its own programming. Of course a
neuron has no NASA-trained expert monitoring its operation.
Experience changes its programming.
Freud's Expectations
We had not imagined that neurons could program themselves. For at least a century, the best scientific opinion held
that experience does not change the functional part of the
nervous system. In a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, Freud
specifically stated that the neurons themselves "retain no trace
of what has happened." And Freud's early colleague, Joseph
Breuer, elaborated on Freud's point in a joint volume he wrote
with Freud about hysteria. He argued that the perceptual apparatus must return to its original condition "with the greatest
possible rapidity." Yet memory, he noted, depends on change.
No single organ can both change and stay the same, so memory
must lie outside the functional system. In this view, experience
is something to be gotten over. We use it, but we should not be
changed by it.
The organization described by the founders of psychoanalysis has become a commonplace of modern technology's information-processing systems. In the 1890s the new phonograph
machine~ offered the best example of such devices. The functional mechanisms in record players are the needle, the loudspeaker, and the wiring that connects the two. This equipment
should respond as accurately as possible to its input, but not be
permanently changed by that input. We want phonographs that
can play Beethoven and then play Chuck Berry without manifesting any lingering effects of Beethoven's music. So we store
128 /
the music on records and keep them separate from the soundmaking part of the system.
This same principle applies even to the most modem computers. We store all data outside the processing system. Processing changes the data; the processor itself never changes. This
difference is the source of all those confusing distinctions computer experts make between hardware and software. The hardware does not change; the software does. Manufacturers of hightechnology hardware put their electric circuits in silicon chips
because of the need for physical stability. Silicon is an element
commonly found in sand. It can change its electric charge
extremely quickly, showing no undesired long-term effects from
its experience with previous electric charges. Silicon does what
Breuer assumed the neuron must do, changing its state in
fractions of a second.
The logic of these metaphors led Lashley to assume that
the brain had a single and separate storage area outside the
functional circuits that lead from perception to action. When he
proved that .no such area existed, he assumed that memory must
somehow cache data about experiences throughout the brain.
The old consensus agreed that memory is stored somewhere,
but not in the neuron. So where is it stored? If you susPtft that
storage is generally distributed, the most obvious candidate for
a storehouse is the synapse. Synapses lie outside the neuron,
and yet can influence the neuron's activity. A synapse could
make lasting changes in the input received by a neuron, and yet
the neuron itself could remain as stable as a switch on a silicon
chip.
Logical as the hypothesis of synaptic storage is, it ran into
a problem. During the 1970s evidence mounted in many laboratories that neurons change frequently. Surprise over the neuron's puzzling instability was matched by wonder over a strange
stability at the synapse. It turns out that the synapse is the most
stable part of the neuron network. Synapses do change, but all
observed changes are short-lived. Yet the neurons in the human
brain change continuously and never return to some "normal"
state.
This research was summarized in 1982 in a book titled The

Chemistry of Behavior. Its authors, Stanislav Reinis and Jerome
Goldman, included a remark that showed how far mainstream
thinking had strayed from the old consensus:
In the central nervous system, each of the component neurons
... differs from all the others by its . .. function, and in
particular, previous history ....
The old consensus had had no room for talk of a neuron's

history, just as today there is no need to discuss the history of a
particular location on a computer chip unless we are talking
about wear and tear. Previously, any author would have said
that neurons differ through their information. This time, however, there could be no differentiation on that point because the
authors also wrote, "No such thing as a single locus for each bit
of memory exists. "
The team metaphor on neuron action was gaining respectability. The brain really might be a team with billions of players,
each with its own function and experience. Memory might result
from the interactions of team members, but before the mightbes could become likelihoods, somebody somewhere was going
to have to show what such teamwork was like.
Alkon's Research
The neuron networks in the human brain are much too
complicated for anyone yet to study in detail. We do not know ,
and probably never can know, the complete neuron-to-neuron
activity behind the simplest brain-controlled action. To overcome these difficulties, it is easier to study the simpler nervous
systems of sea snails. Their neurons are large and few, and their
nervous system does not vary from one individual to another.
Yet sea snails are more complicated than sea anemones. Instead
130 /
of working like an on/off switch, sea-snail neurons can both

excite and inhibit action. Some sea snail neurons also synapse
with other neurons. In humans, of course, most neurons
(99.9997 percent) synapse with other neurons. Several investigators have studied a sea snail's ability to learn. The snails, as
you may imagine, have poor memories. At best, they can form
short-term sensory associations. Yet sea-snail studies, especially the work of Daniel Alkon at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Wood's Hole on Cape Cod, have proven surprisingly
useful for exposing some general principles that underlie the
biology of memory.
Normally, sea snails of the species hermissenda crassicornis orient themselves toward the light, but if the water becomes
too rough they grab on to something to avoid the danger of
thrashing seas. This behavior requires two senses, one for light
and one to detect water motion. The simplest way to control this
behavior would use a two-neuron system. One neuron would be
an "eye" that responds to light by triggering an action. The
other neuron could veto the motor action whenever the water
became too rough. As we are considering a sea creature, we can
call this second neuron the admiral. The admiral would sense
motion and whenever it did so, it would send inhibitory signals
to the eye neuron, preventing it from firing. This two-neuron
system would lead to beautifully consistent behavior. Light by
itself leads to action; water motion inhibits action. The twoneuron system has no place for memory, and the sea snail's
behavior would be purely reflexive. Figure 8-1 illustrates the
simple logic behind this two-cell system.
It turns out, however, that the sea snail uses three neurons.
It has an "eye" neuron that works exactly as expected. When it
detects light, it stimulates a motor action. The sea snail also has
a second neuron, which, as expected, can veto the "eye's"
signal and inhibit its firing; however, instead of sensing water
motion, this second neuron also senses light. When the second
neuron detects light, it fires, inhibiting the action of the first
neuron.
No
Act
Fig. 8-1. A Two-neuron Reflex: The "admiral" inhibits the "eye" if there is water
motion.
It seems peculiar. 1\\10 neurons, both sensitive to the same

light, both fire when they see light, but one neuron inhibits the
other. What is the point? Would it not be easier to stay still
without any neurons and without so much effort?
The solution to this puzzle comes from the third neuron in
132 /
REMEMBERING AND FORGEITING
the system, the predicted admiral neuron. It also works as

expected, but in reverse. When the admiral fires, the snail can
move. The admiral synapses with the override neuron and
continually inhibits its firing. This three-neuron mechanism has
a bit of the Rube Goldberg touch to it, but it works. Light
appears and the eye neuron begins to fire. The admiral inhibits
the override neuron, so the eye neuron does fire and the snail
moves toward the light. Only when the admiral detects water
motion does it permit the override neuron to fire and veto action.
On those occasions, the snail stays still and rides out the stormy
sea.
Figure 8-2 illustrates the logic supporting this three-cell
system. The final outcome is the same as for the two-cell system.
The main change is that the introduction of an override to
mediate between admiral and "eye" inverts the logic of the
admiral's system. We can see at a glance that this system's logic
is less elegant, and practically speaking there are other problems
too. A third neuron increases energy consumption and is one
more thing that can go wrong.
Evolution has tolerated this seemingly clumsy system because of the effect of experience on the snail's behavior. The
override neuron changes the system from a reflex to a memory
that uses experience. Alkon has found that the override neuron
will sometimes ignore the admiral's veto. This mutiny happens
when experience repeatedly associates light with moving water.
If a silent admiral neuron repeatedly lets the override fire, the
chemical balance within the override neuron changes. It becomes more difficult for the admiral to inhibit the override
neuron. Now, no matter what the admiral does, the appearance
of light is enough for the override neuron to fire and inhibit's the
eye neuron. Input (light plus the admiral's inhibitor) that had
previously blocked output now leads to output. In time the
override neuron will change again and will accept inhibitions
from the admiral, but for the moment it ignores the input. The
logic behind this new behavior is shown in Figure 8-3. The
Act
Fig. 8-2. A Three-neuron Reflex: An "override" neuron between the "admiral" and
the "eye" complicates the process but leads to the same result as the two-neuron
reflex.
No
Fig. 8-3. A Three-neuron Memory: By changing its response to identical inputs, the
"override" neuron changes the behavior of the system.
illustration matches Figure 8-2, except that now the admiral's

input does not matter.
This change helps the snail adapt to the uncertainties of
life. The best tactic after rough waters is probably to hang on
tight for a while, even when the waters seem calm. Fate being
the fickle thing she is, just as the snail starts to move, a wind
gust may start the waters sloshing about again. So the third
neuron gives memory to the sea snail; it changes the behavior of
the snail to suit recent experience. Please take careful note:
Memory in the sea snail does not preserve any data; it changes
behavior.
Just to deepen the grave for the old consensus, the important chemical changes within the snail's override neuron do not
occur at the synapse. They take place near it, but not at it. That
detail is secondary, however, to the main point. Alkon has found
a way that the nervous system can learn from past experience
without storing any information about that experience.
The Engram
At last we have seen a neural team in action. Just as a
shortstop mayor may not cut off a throw, the snail's override
neuron can treat its input in two distinct ways. The term Karl
Lashley used for these teams, or fundamental units of memory,
was the engram. He first imagined the engram as being like a
bead stored somewhere in the brain. When that idea proved
wrong, he thought bits of the engram might lie scattered about.
Whatever the functional unit of memory turns out to be, the
term has stuck, and neuropsychologists have determined to call
it an engram.
Alkon has shown us a working engram composed of three
neurons. Despite the enormous gulf between human and seasnail memories, Alkon' s engram bears some surprising resem-
blances to what we saw in Part One about the way our own
memory functions. Most obviously, the sea snail's memory
focuses on present needs instead of on past events. Alkon's
engram permits a snail to behave prudently after a storm, but
the snail has no recollection of anything about the storm or even
that there ever was a storm.
A second recognizable feature of Alkon's engram is its
independence. The engram presides over the snail's behavior
and needs no central control to direct the neuron's changes.
Each neuron acts according to its own experience and only the
actions of neurons within the engram determine behavior. The
great implications of this independence are summed up in the
fact that it takes two charts to describe the logical behavior of
these neurons. In even the most complex computer program one
chart will serve. We can predict the operation of a machine if
we know only its logic and its inputs. In sea snails we need to
know history as well. Logic and objective input, of course,
matter to the engram's function , but experience is equally important. At last, on a chemical level, we see the introduction of
context to the story of behavior.
The sea snail's engram breaks down if we destroy even one
of its neurons . The three neurons interact, and depending on
which neuron is destroyed, the engram will either never permit
motion again or never again let the action of the sea inhibit its
motion. The behavior becomes reflexive instead of adaptive.
Nature, however, is seldom so cavalier about the dangers of
injury that it lets survival hang by one unprotected thread. In
the sea snail's case, it guards against the risk of injury by
including several identical engrams in the snail's eyestalk. If one
neuron fails, other neurons in other engrams can carryon the
work by themselves. This repetition of engrams makes the risks
of injury less certain. If we damage the eyestalk, the effect on
behavior will depend on the amount of damage. A little destruction will impair performance only a little. Massive damage to the
eyestalk will have more serious effects. This proportional damage-to-effect ratio matches exactly with the one that Karl Lashley observed in his experiments with mice. Lashley' s results,
therefore, need not imply that he had slowly destroyed the

stored contents of a single engram. He had killed the functioning
of many engrams.
At this point Alkon's three-neuron engram can no longer
help us. Alkon studied the operation of one engram with one
function. Human behavior, even at its most primitive, is more
complex. Yet we can now see that something is localized after
all. We do not store data, but the engrams do occupy particular
places and damage to those places must damage the accomplishment of their functions.
In older days, we should have expected a long digestive
pause to follow Alkon's portrait of a simple engram. Its lack of
storage, independence from programming, flexibility, and functional unity have filled a large platter. During that pause conservative defenders of the old consensus about memory could have
regrouped, insisting loudly that we cannot draw conclusions
about human memory from sea-snail engrams. But our age
moves too quickly. In the same year (1984) that Alkon published
the monumental summary of his study of the sea snail, a
scientist named Magda Arnold published a book describing the
location of functions in the human brain. Her work takes us
across the giant gap between Alkon' s one engram and memory's
high staircase.
MEMORY CIRCUITS
Only damn plan sounds like grab whatever they can get
their damn hands on ...
-William Gaddis , JR, 1975
NeuroPSYChOlogy studies brain functions and the circuits that link distinct functional areas. For many years research
concentrated on identifying function, but during the 1980s success at identifying circuits has accelerated. This exciting work
lets us see how separate parts of the brain can cooperate to
construct a memory.
The findings tell us much about the everyday interactions of
memory and mind. We can see why conversations fly off on
tangents of memory and why we can concentrate for hours on
some tasks, remembering what to do as the need arises. The
work is exciting, too, because the circuits have no fixed bounds.
These loops take away control of behavior from environmental
circumstances and hand it to us. Our memories, tastes, emotions, and understanding are critical to the course of the circuits.
The brain is not a piece of clockwork that holds us in orbits
determined by the mathematics of our situation. It is a biological
wonder that lets us use and build on experience, if we dare. The
memory circuits have no absolute end. They are loops , leading
back to their starting place, letting us move up and down the
levels of memory until we ourselves feel that we have remembered enough.
Naturally, the neurons along the circuit are more intricate
and complex than those of a sea snail, yet our neurons remain
138/
Memory Circuits / 139
only neurons. The sea snail's neuron changed its internal programming through temporary changes in its chemistry. Neurons
in the human brain can undergo many more complex and enduring chemical changes, enabling us to make more subtle and
lasting responses to experience. So great is the complex pattern
of inputs and outputs in the brain that scientists have yet to
identify all the links of a single human neuron. Even so, the
many developments in human neurons are only elaborations on
the sea snail's neuron. Human neurons can change in more
ways, output more things, and interact with more cells. Not
surprisingly, therefore, we can do a universe of things impossible for a snail. Yet the basic power of the neuron persists. It can
still change its response to unchanged inputs. It remains the
organ of memory and serves as the elementary part of the
circuit. The brain then transforms this elemental wonder into
something still more potent and remarkable, providing us with
the powers we need to use the memory staircase. The brain
makes the associations and gives the awareness, emotions,
attention, and insights that let us use experience to advantage.
Thanks to the brain, we become what we experience.
What the Brain Is

The human brain is the most complicated structure in the
known universe. Beside it the organization of galaxies, a DNA
helix, and even the Pentagon seem like toys of childish simplicity. In this account I will keep the story simple and give only the
barest outline of the brain's structure. A brain contains over one
trillion cells of different types. Most of these cells are so small
that if you saw 100,000 sitting together on a table you would
likely assume they were a morsel of dust. It takes several million
cells to form a part of the brain large enough to be noticed by
the unaided eye. Many bumps, bulges, and twists in the brain
have been identified over the centuries by anatomists who had
no idea what function they served. Thus, a structure might be

called the pons, Latin for bridge, because it looked to someone
like a bridge. I will refer to structures by their anatomical names
only if they are crucial to the story of memory.
Adding to the brain's complexity is its double nature. The
body commonly gives us two copies of a crucial organ. We have
two eyes, two lungs, and two kidneys. We almost have two
brains. The brain is not a ball, but a ball that has mostly been
cut in two. The halves are joined by several thick fibrous
connectors, but generally the two work independently of one
another.
To keep the story as simple as possible, I will describe each
circuit as a single thing. The fact that there is, for example, one
circuit for emotional memory in the right half of the brain and
another in the left half becomes important in memory studies
only if part of a circuit is damaged. Then the circuit on the other
half may do double duty, just as a person who loses a kidney
finds that he can make do with one.
Popular accounts of the brain often stress the existence of
these two halves. We read about right- and left-brained tasks,
and it is probably true that part of the circuitry for certain highly
specialized functions lies mainly in one or the other half. But
such specialization comes only at memory's most advanced
functioning. In this chapter we are not concerned with the details
of particular circuits, but only with their outlines. We want to
know how the brain's organization makes possible the memory
functions described in Part One, and for that question we can
consider one circuit in just one of the brain's halves.
Finally, the brain's complexity reflects its enormously long
evolutionary history. Our memory powers are among evolution's most recent developments, and I will not have much to
say about the brain's oldest structures. Most of the memory
circuitry lies in the most recently evolved region of the brain,
known as the cortex. The cortex is the outer part of the brain
and includes the scrambled-egg like material we see in photographs and models of the brain. The circuits we understand in
the greatest detail handle perception. Perception itself occurs in
two separate cortical areas known as sensory and association
thalamus
r-~=----
right
hemisphere
left
optic tract
Fig. 9-1. The Double Brain: Although the brain is divided into two hemispheres,
its circuits usually operate independently in the separate halves. For example, sight
in the left hemisphere begins with stimulation of the eyeball, which excites the optic
tract. Input then arrives at the thalamus and from there it travels to the part of
the cortex that specializes in vision. An identical circuit lies in the right hemisphere.
cortex. The term association reflects an old speCUlation that this

tissue is the site of sensory associations, but we have no evidence to support that idea. For simplicity's sake I will refer to
both of these types of cortex by the term perceptual cortex.
What the Brain Does

Traditionally, neuroscience imagined the nervous system as
simply a mediator between sensory stimulation and motor ac
142 /
tion; however, this definition has proven too passive. Most

obviously, it does not take into account such self-generated
actions as getting up from a desk and preparing a cup of coffee.
Nothing has happened out in the environment to account for
this self-willed behavior. The nesting activities of birds are
common natural examples of creatures actively responding to
internal urges instead of passively mediating environmental inputs. The brain makes us actors on the world stage instead of
serving as just part of the scenery.
Alkon's work has shown that even the simplest nervous
systems place an action in the context of memory. The brain
lets us benefit from past experience. In every nervous system
we see three phases: (1) A trigger (stimulation or internal drive)
leads to (2) memory, which (3) provokes appropriate action. The
action is appropriate to the memory, not necessarily to the
objective characteristics of the trigger. In this chapter we will
focus on what happens during the memory phase of an experience. The simplest way to imagine the organization of an experience uses a flow chart. The basic chart for any experience
shows:
The nervous system controls all three of these stages. In

simpler animals we find the stages organized together. The
snail's eyestalk contains a complete trigger-memory-action system. As we move up the evolutionary ladder, the nervous system
grows more specialized. Sensory stimulation occurs in specific
organs like the eyes, ears, and taste buds. Action depends on
muscles. And memory occurs in the brain.
The brain brings all our sensory stimulations into one organ,
where they can associate and become part of a unified experience-as when a violinist reads a score, listens to his performance, moves his hands, and obeys the conductor all at the same
time. Theorizers once argued that all these separate inputs must
come together into a single neuron for processing. If the brain
worked liked a computer, it would indeed have to bring all inputs
into one common processor; however, brain circuits permit a
coordination impossible in computers. The circuits permit separate areas of the brain to work together.
The sharpest proof of our ability to coordinate different
brain areas has come from the so-called split-brain patients. The
split-brain operation, a means of controlling epilepsy, severs the
fibers that link the two halves of the brain. The brain is not
completely cut in two. Sensory signals still reach both halves,
but the brain can no longer communicate between its halves.
Cooperation becomes impossible. In everyday life, this operation produces surprisingly few problems, and patients compensate well. Experiments, however, find some subtle difficulties.
The leading expert in this field has been Michael Gazzaniga, an
American psychologist who has worked with several split-brain
patients and written the book The Bisected Brain. Gazzaniga's
experiments have firmly established that normal behavior depends on an ability to coordinate separate functions. One experiment presents a split-brain patient with a simple two-piece
cutout and asks the patient to assemble the pieces. It is the
world's easiest jigsaw puzzle. When told to use only one hand,
patients can solve the puzzle. Because control of each hand
depends on a different half of the brain, we can see that the
operation has not damaged either half's visual or hand-control
region. But if the patient is told to use both hands, he cannot do
it. Coordination of the two hands requires cooperation between
two different regions of the brain, and these regions can no
longer interact. Coordination is a major brain activity, and brain
damage often produces the peculiar effects that come from
damaged coordination.
The memory circuits coordinate different functions of memory to give us a unified experience. We, of course, are not aware
of experience as bits and pieces. It comes to us whole.
My open mention of awareness, by the way, reflects another
development in brain research. Awareness was once a forbidden
144 /
topic in both psychology and neuroscience. The taboo arose

partly because no one can observe it directly and partly because
experimental psychology began in reaction against the introspective psychology that studied only awareness. The subject
has returned to respectability in recent years, however, because
we can observe its effects. We do not know how it happens, but
the brain transforms the colors we see, the sounds we hear, and
the tastes we savor into a private experience.
The transformation of sensation into perception changes
seeing into observing, or hearing to listening, touching to feeling, tasting to savoring. Perception implies stimulation plus
something more. In quest of defining that "more" discussions
of perception can wander toward mirages, trying to resolve such
hopeless questions as whether the red I experience matches the
color red you experience. We do better if we stick to the notion
that perception combines an unsharable subjective experience
with an observable effect on behavior like coming to attention
or acting with recognition. If we try to discuss the unsharable
experience, we stray from science. We cannot know what a
yellow banana looks like to a chimpanzee. But we can discuss
attention, acting with recognition, and the brain circuits.
The perceptual circuits we know in richest detail support
vision, and within the visual region of the perceptual cortex lie
several maps of the retina, the place in the eye where an image
first forms. A "map" on the cortex is a region of precise echoing
of a stimulation. Visual maps make point-by-point responses to
stimulation on the retina. If a small light shines on different
points in the retina, corresponding points on the brain's visual
maps respond. The maps distort the retina's shape a bit. They
put greater emphasis on the details in the center of the eye than
on the edges. When we move our eyes to look directly at
something, we bring the full power of our visual maps into play.
Different maps serve different visual functions. One map is for
depth perception, another for color perception, and yet another
seems to map complex hand motions. We think some monkeys
have as many as fifteen visual maps, and presumably people
have at least that many.
The term map helps us understand the point-by-point correspondence between an image on the retina and an echo in the
brain; however, it is a confusing term in one important respect.
A map implies a display of information and a reader of the map.
Nobody lives in our head reading these maps. They are part of
the brain's circuitry. A perceptual map is a functional area of
the brain, and can best be understood as a member of the team
that constructs an experience. When an eye doctor shines a light
on a patient's retina and particular points on the different visual
maps respond, it is as though a ball had been put into play. It
was caught by the retina and then thrown to particular team
members farther on. Of course the complexity of the brain and
the many maps soon overwhelm this sports analogy. Different
neurons in different functional areas respond to the doctor's
light. They catch the throw and (maybe) pass it on. Soon balls
are flying about all over the brain, just because of a pinpoint of
light. The complexity of the response to so simple a stimulus is
terrifying. Yet the basic idea is crucial. The different functional
regions work individually and yet cooperatively.
Perception does not simply reproduce; it judges the real
world. The best-known example of this power occurs at the
movie theater. A moving picture consists, objectively speaking,
of a long strip of still pictures. Each picture appears briefly on
the screen, to be replaced by another. It is a rapid-fire slide
show, but we perceive motion. The movement we see happens
in our heads, not on the screen. The importance of this difference becomes apparent if we try to program a computer to
watch a movie. A computer has a hard time discovering the
motion that we observe automatically. A machine would have to
analyze each image in detail, then compare that analysis with an
analysis of the previous image, then apply a series of rules to
deduce what, if any, movement is underway, and it would have
to do this analysis at the rate of twenty-four images per second.
Today's fastest super computer could not do it.
Recognition is another function of perception. The memory
circuits we will examine show that recognition always occurs on
146 / REMEMBERING AND FORGElTING
the perceptual cortex. Past perception makes recognition easier,

no matter what the condition of circuits in other parts of the
brain. We can see these effects best in brain-damaged patients
who can no longer learn the associations of factual memory. In
one study, patients looked at partial images or words. If they
could not identify the item, they saw more of its details until
finally they could recognize it. Because the subjects all had
amnesia, they promptly forgot about the tests. Without factual
memory, they formed no new associations with the images, and
the next time they saw the text items they had no recollection of
ever having seen them before. But when the experimenters
repeated the test, the patients needed fewer details before they
could recognize what they saw. Their normal visual cortex was
enough to improve recognition.
This creation of experience is, from the perspective of
memory studies, what the brain does. The associated inputs of
stimuli and the coordinated outputs of behavior depend on this
intermediary organ. The richer the experience, the more of the
brain we use . Neurons by themselves can give an animal some
memory. The brain provides us with a specialized organ for
using and experiencing that memory much more profoundly.
Arnold's Circuits
In the past few years we have begun to understand the links
between the parts of memory's neuron network. The most
comprehensive theoretical work in this field comes from the
American neuropsychologist Magda Arnold. Arnold was born in
a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire that later became Czechoslovakia. An Old World background often is a part of the
Bartlett tradition's leading proponents, and despite her interest
in the brain Arnold never ignored the importance of subjective
causes for behavior, particularly emotion. Her earlier work
includes a two-volume study titled Emotion and Personality.

She also undertook an important comprehensive study of the
way brain damage affects memory, and in 1984, when she was
more than eighty years old, she published a full statement of her
work in her book Memory and the Brain. Hers is the most
comprehensive account yet devised of the coordinated memory
operations in the brain. Arnold continues the Bartlett tradition
of studying memory in the context of personal meaning, imagination, and construction, but instead of testing for memory of
stories or of experimental apparatus, she has studied the failures
of memory that follow specific forms of brain damage. Her
theory organizes these details int? a series of memory circuits.
Thanks to her work, we at last have a picture of the coordinated
actions of different areas of the brain. Arnold describes several
loops that comprise the various circuits that lead to memory.
Each of these loops move through the brain, and damage to a
portion of the loop results in characteristic damage to a person's
ability to build a memory.
Arnold's circuits show the relation between several regions
of the brain. The first region is the perceptual cortex, and we
have already seen that its functional maps operate in complex
coordination. A second area of great importance is the limbic
system. This region of the brain is, in terms of evolutionary
history, much older than the perceptual cortex. A few decades
ago scientists sometimes called the region the "nose-brain"
because they thought it served only the sense of smell and the
emotions that accompany it. Others called it the "crocodile
brain," in reference to its ancient evolutionary origins. In Arnold's circuits, the limbic system evaluates a perception's personal importance, so I will call it the evaluation system.
In Arnold's theory, memory circuits cycle through these
perception and evaluation areas. The basic route goes from
perceptual cortex to evaluation system. This simple two-step
function lies behind the many complex associations and levels
of human memory. First we perceive something, then we evaluate it. Using the trigger-memory-action flow chart, we can
diagram the basic memory this way:
148 /
MEMORY
Ltrigger/-
L..-_p_e_rc_e_iv_e_tr_ig_g_e_r----J
evaluate trigger
perceptual
cortex
Fig. 9-2. Basic Memory Areas: Memory circuits begin in two cortical regions at the
back of the brain-sensory and association cortex, where perception occurs. The
brain evaluates perceptions in the structures deep in the brain that comprise the
limbic system. This book uses functional names for these areas: perceptual cortex
and the evaluation system.

This system is much less complicated than it would be if we
stored our memories. In that case we would first sense the
trigger and then look it up in memory to find out what it was.
The Circuit for Emotional Memory

In Part One we saw that emotional memory develops when
the perception of an object evokes an emotional response. It is
this level of memory that behaviorist experiments focus on. In
Arnold's theory, the effects of this level arise from what she
called the affective circuit. This circuit begins with the basic
perception-evaluation circuit and then loops back on itself.
Much animal memory functions on this level, but it carries
a great problem. A creature can become trapped in a situation
without evident solution. In these circumstances the circuit may
not discover what to do. Memory becomes a trap. Suppose
someone does not know an appropriate action, but remembers
that the situation leads to pain. We can diagram the problem this
way.
TRIGGER
MEMORY
unfavorable
situation
perceive situation
evaluate as
,--_u_n_d_e_s_ir_a_b_le_-"
ACTION
I /
--+
Because the person does not know how to solve the problem,
the trigger persists. This cycle of unfavorable circumstance
150 / REMEMBERING AND FORGETIING
without solution can quickly lead to panic or depression, neither

of which helps survival.
Emotional memory can reduce panic by cycling back on
itself before turning to action. The emotional circuit normally
leads from the evaluation system to a structure known as the
hippocampus. The name of this critical organ means sea horse
and refers to its shape, which does resemble a sea horse,
especially its curly tail. The hippocampus can convert an emotional evaluation into an action, or it can direct the memory to
circle back to the evaluation system for further work. This return
route follows a million-fiber cable called the fornix to a group of
nutlike kernels called the anterior thalamic nuclei. From there
the circuit returns to the evaluation system. This route is known
to anatomists as the Papez Circuit.
We can see the importance of emotional memory's return
route by comparing two experiments with cats. In both experiments, the cats must remember to push a lever. In one experiment, pushing the lever produces milk. This leads to a basic
emotional circuit:
TRIGGER
MEMORY
place cat
near lever
perceive lever
evaluate as
good to push
ACTION
-j
push
lever.
This circuitry works without the cat's ever deliberately saying

to itself, "If I push that lever, I can get some milk." Proustian
recognition is enough to make it want to push the lever. We
know the cat's emotional circuit is simple because destruction
perceptual cortex
Fig. 9-3. Emotional Memory's Circuit: Stimulation of the perceptual cortex produces
perceptions and then the circuit enters the evaluation system. After evaluation, the
circuit travels to the hippocampus, which either signals for action or directs the circuit
via the Papez Circuit back to the evaluation system.
of the anterior thalamic nuclei in the return route has no effect

on a cat's learning to press the lever. Instead of returning for
further evaluation, the hippocampus calls for prompt action. For
this most basic memory, a circuit is unnecessary; one input and
one emotion is all it takes. But the world does not always make
survival so simple.
152 /
In another experiment life gets more complicated. Experimenters placed a cat in a box where it received electric shocks.
The memory circuit here becomes:
TRIGGER
MEMORY
place cat
in box
perceive location
evaluate as
bad place to be.
But what action can the cat take? Normally, the cat would run
or jump away, but it is trapped in a box. The solution is to push
a lever, so the circuitry must return for a fuller evaluation of the
perception. The full logic for the memory stage of the experience
says:
MEMORY
perceive location
perceive lever
evaluate as
bad place to be
evaluate as
good to push
r----~~/r----~~
This second evaluation makes sense only in the context of the
first one. The cat can learn to push the lever only after it first
remembers the unfavorable associations of the setting, and then
it must avoid blinding panic. The hippocampus must delay

calling for action and direct the circuit back through its return
route for further evaluation. We know that such learning requires
another lap through the emotional-memory circuit because if we
damage the return route the cat cannot learn to press the lever.
Here we see the power that comes by adding a circuit to
memory. Neurons do not need brains to change their actions
and brains do not need circuits to form associations, but circuits
let us put sequences of dependent details into one memory. In
theory at least, the emotional circuit could go into a perpetual
loop of perception and evaluation, richer perception and evaluation, still richer perception and evaluation ...
In practice, panic, depression, or something else will put an
end to this loop, but the circuit shows that creatures who delay
panic can find rich uses for emotional memory even without
recalling the reasons for their various emotions. Perhaps people,
when caught up in a rich aesthetic experience, cycle endlessly
through this circuit. The use of a circuit that can continuously
turn back onto itself provides a means for exploring every
experience deeply.
The Circuit for Factual Memory

Factual memory, as described in Part One, associates
things. One thing reminds a person of another. It is at this level
that people learn the arbitrary associations behind classical
conditioning and the lists of nonsense syllables that Ebbinghaus
studied. Arnold's theory explains this memory by a recall circuit.
The recall circuit sends the neural activity back to the
perceptual cortex. Both recall and immediate perception occur
at the same perceptual-cortex neurons. If I close my eyes and
see again the white cliffs of Dover, my brain re-creates the
experience on the visual cortex. Many years ago, when I first
crossed the English Channel, I saw those cliffs because light

reflected off the land and entered my eyes. That event led to
neural action in the visual cortex. Now once again I can see the
cliffs and even feel the motion of the ferry as it approaches the
land. The energy for the original sight came from the sun, but as
I see those cliffs again there is no sunlight bouncing into my
eyes. I can revive that awareness because of a circuit that leads
away from the evaluation system, back into the perceptual
cortex. This reactivation of the same cells explains how I can
reexperience the white cliffs of Dover without storing their
image in some filing cabinet. I do not retrieve the image from a
warehouse; I re-perceive it.
Stimulation of the same perceptual neurons lets us use
imagination to remember things. We can subjectively stimulate
the same parts of the perceptual cortex that objects in the
external world stimulate. The energy that supports such reperception is less intense, less focused, and less enduring than
the energy from first-hand experience. It is unusual for an
imaginary perception to be as clear and rich as a perception of
something real. But we do perceive anew.
The crucial brain structure in this circuit is the thalamus, a
word from the Greek meaning chamber. It serves as the entrance
chamber to the perceptual cortex. All sensory organs, except
for that of smell, enter the cortex via the thalamus. Neuroscientists have long known that the thalamus is also active during
memory. Arnold's circuits explain why. The thalamus is an
entrance chamber with many doors. Entrants can arrive from
the sense organs or from elsewhere in the brain. Not everything
we perceive has come from the outside world.
A complete factual memory adds recall to the circuitry of
perception and evaluation. Suppose, as in classical conditioning,
we learn to associate a bell with the arrival of food and the
association becomes so convincing that our mouths water when
we hear the bell. The recall circuit sends our imagination back
to perceptual cortex and stimulates an imaginary perception for
us to evaluate:
thalamus
perceptual
cortex
Fig. 9-4. Factual Memory's Circuit: Factual memory's distinguishing characteristic

is the recall of a perception. As usual, stimulation of the perceptual cortex excites
the evaluation system. The circuit continues to the hippocampus, which directs it
toward the thalamus. The thalamus redirects the circuit onto the perceptual cortex,
starting the loop again.
TRIGGER
MEMORY
perceive
sound
ACTION
perceive
(imaginary)
ste~
r--e-v-al-u-a-te-----
evaluate as
neutrally
good to eat
Structurally, this factual memory appears much like the complex emotional memory of the cat in the shock box. The difference is that the second perception is imaginary. Emotional
memory can respond only to sensory perceptions; factual memory can create its own perceptions.
The circuit in this system begins like the emotional memory's circuit: Sensations stimulate the perceptual cortex and the
evaluation judges the perception. The evaluation, however, does
not produce an immediate emotional response. In the presence
of a more neutral evaluation, the hippocampus responds by
exciting the thalamus, and a new imaginary perception then
arises on the perceptual cortex. The circuit has returned to its
starting point and the evaluation system judges this new, imaginary, perception. That route, returning to the perceptual cortex
for recall of an associated experience, is the basic circuit for
factual memory.
The role of the hippocampus in this circuit contributes to
learning, but once learned past associations can be remembered
without help from the hippocampus. In Chapter 7 we saw the
tragic case of an epilepsy patient called H. M. who developed
amnesia after radical brain surgery. The surgeons destroyed the
hippocampus on both halves of his brain. Naturally, no one ever
tried this radical therapy on another human, but researchers
have studied many laboratory animals this way. At first it
seemed that destruction of the hippocampus had no damaging
effects on an animal's memory, but most animal behavior depends on basic emotional memory and the hippocampus does
not participate significantly on that level of memory. Closer
examination has shown that an animal without a hippocampus
does lose factual memory.
It cannot, for example, habituate to new situations. We saw
that factual memory begins with an orientation response, which
quickly leads to new behavior or habituation. But with a destroyed factual memory, an experience always seems new. An
animal never learns about a new trigger and continues to react
with an orientation response. Such a damaged animal also
cannot unlearn established factual memories, so previously
learned behaviors do not become extinct. For example, a cat

may learn to press a blue button to open the door into a feeding
area. If researchers then destroy the cat's hippocampus, it will
continue to press the blue button. Suppose, however, researchers change the situation. Pressing the blue button no longer
opens the door. Now the cat must press a red button. Normal
cats will learn to ignore the blue in favor of the red button, but a
cat with a destroyed hippocampus does not learn. It faithfully
continues to press the blue. Even if it accidentally presses the
red and opens the door, it does not learn from the accident and
continues to push the blue. It can no longer adapt to a changing
world.
The hippocampus is critical for the formation of factual
associations , but established associations can survive without
the hippocampus. Patient H. M. can recall events up to three
weeks before his surgery, but he cannot remember anything that
has happened more recently. This observation strongly suggests
that the hippocampus somehow regulates the development and
fine-tuning of memory's circuitry. Once established, the circuits
endure by themselves.
The Circuit for Interpretive Memory

Memory's top level combines two separate associations into
a chunk. At this level we recognize the meaning of something
and construct its details because we understand the chunk. In
Arnold's theory these chunks are organized by an imagination
circuit.
When neural activity first reaches the evaluative system,
the brain can appraise the activity in any of three ways: emotionally, neutrally, or quizzically. An emotional evaluation leads to
memory on the level of the emotional circuit. A neutral evaluation directs the circuit toward the hippocampus where it may
continue on for factual recall. Sometimes, however, the evalua-
158 /
tion system is unable to appraise the perception. In those cases

it directs the circuit to the amygdala, another organ in the brain
where crucial circuitry begins. The amygdala is important to
attention. When researchers destroy the amygdala, the initial
arousal of the orientation reaction persists, but the organism no
longer focuses its attention. The amygdala can activate neurons
along several circuits, and when faced with a puzzling perception it "kicks the matter upstairs" by directing the circuit toward
the frontal cortex, one of several areas of the brain specialized
for motor behavior. The oldest portion, called the cerebellum,
handles motor responses below the level of interpretive memory,
like mouth-watering. The frontal cortex controls advanced motor actions.
The frontal cortex gets its name from its presence in the
front of the head. This part of the brain gained general notoriety
from the surgical frontal lobotomies that sometimes left patients
with permanent and severe impairments. Cortex is the most
recent evolutionary development in the brain, and the frontal
cortex is the most recently evolved cortex. Over the past million
years evolution has greatly increased the amount of the human
frontal cortex, encouraging people to assume that the cortex is
the seat of pure thought. The conclusion seems natural to a
society that assumes abstract reasoning is our greatest power,
but in fact the frontal cortex governs purposeful action, including the purposeful constructions that govern interpretive memory.
The frontal cortex focuses on the ends of behavior. When I
bite into a carrot or say, "Bah, humbug," I may begin with the
same mouth action, but their purposes differ so much that
separate regions of cortex govern them. This pattern matches
our own awareness. When we act voluntarily, we consider the
purpose we hope to achieve rather than the muscles to flex. We
have little practical knowledge of how we act. Our behavior
depends on the coordination of muscles and nerves, but most
people have no idea how their muscles work or where they are
or which ones help what action. Suppose my right hand rests
against my chest and I decide to touch my nose with it. Control
amygdala
Fig. 9-5. Interpretive Memory's Circuit: The perceptual cortex stimulates the
evaluation system, which responds quizzically and directs the circuit to the amygdala.
The amygdala kicks the problem upstairs to the frontal cortex. From there the circuit
can return via the thalamus back to the perceptual cortex.
of that voluntary action begins in the frontal cortex. Suppose

my right hand is on top of my head and again I move to touch
my nose. The muscle actions needed to do this second maneuver
differ from those of the first, yet both actions begin at the same
point in the frontal cortex. Intentional behavior focuses on
outcome (touching the nose). Damage to the frontal cortex can
impair our ability to act purposefully, and without control over
purpose we loose adaptability.
The most subtle form of human adaptability occurs in
symbolic expression. We saw an example of this in the insight
160/
that let a three-year-old boy break down a phrase and say, "Wait
for it to dry," instead of his usual "Wait for it to cool." This
insightful deviation from an established motor pattern typifies
frontal lobe accomplishments. It allows us to introduce novel
deviations into established motor patterns. Some people with
damaged interpretive memories suffer from an inability to act as
they wish. A person may want to say something, recognize that
his speech is inappropriate, and yet still be unable to speak as
he wants. This problem follows damage to the frontal cortex.
A standard clinical test known as the Wisconsin cardsorting test shows how bizarre this inability to match actions to
understanding can be. The test uses a stack of special cards,
each marked by form, color, and number. A card might have
three red stars or one blue star or two green triangles. The test
requires a subject to sort the cards without knowing whether to
sort them by color, shape, or number. The subject, of course,
begins randomly. He puts down the first card and then places
the second either on top of the first or next to it. The tester says
whether the sorting action is right or not. This clue is a big help,
and soon almost anybody discovers that the proper method
sorts by color. Once the tester sees that the subject has learned
to sort by color, he changes the rules. Now he says, "Right,"
for sorting by form. Normal people quickly realize that the rules
have changed, and they begin to search for the new rule.
People with a damaged frontal cortex often cannot act on
this rule change. They have not lost the ability to understand the
way the world has changed, but their understanding does not
improve their behavior. They continue to sort by color although
each error brings the news that the action was wrong. Such a
peculiar inability to learn anew seems like some grotesque
breakdown of the imagination. The patient appears unable to
benefit from endless "negative reinforcement," as behaviorists
term this continual saying no. A pigeon can learn more quickly
than this. But before we write these people off as hopeless fools,
listen to what they say as they sort the cards. They know they
are botching it. A typical patient said, as he continued dealing,
"Form is probably the correct solution so this [sorting by color]
will be wrong, and this will be wrong, and wrong again." The
problem is not one of imagination, or reasoning, or any of the
things we normally think of as having to do with intelligence. It
is an inflexibility in voluntary motor behavior that seems incredible, as though, having once decided to touch one's nose, it
becomes impossible to touch one's hand instead.
Normally, people can adapt their behavior to their circumstances, as they understand them. We have seen that mental
organization, or the grammar of our understanding, presides
over interpretive memory. It is that grammar that orders and
alters our behavior, and its proper functioning depends on the
frontal cortex. When the amygdala directs a circuit into this
area, it turns to the grammatical associations of interpretive
memory.
In Part One we saw that interpretive memory depends on
two separate types of associations. One type is the perceptual
association that permits us to recognize a chunk. The other type
is the grammatical association that lets us recall a chunk. For
interpretive memory to function properly the brain must coordinate the actions between these two types of associations.
Many of the most baffling and bizarre forms of brain damage
disrupt this coordination.
The area of grammatical association is the frontal cortex.
Perceptual associations continue to rest under the control of the
perceptual cortex. Thus, a properly functioning interpretive
memory depends on the continuing interaction of the frontal and
perceptual regions of the brain. The circuit can travel from the
frontal to the perceptual cortex through the thalamus, just as in
the circuit for factual memory.
Now that we have seen that two brain regions support
interpretive memory, perhaps we can make better sense of that
peculiar test in which people with brain damage could not
change their method of sorting cards. They can recognize the
problem because they have suffered no damage to their perceptual cortex, but purposeful action is controlled in the brain's
frontal areas. When that region is damaged, they may not be
able to adapt their actions, no matter how good their perceptions
162/
are. A well-functioning interpretive memory depends on a loop

that brings the separate regions of the brain into harmony.
The parts of the brain used in the basic interpretive circuit
are: perceptual cortex (recognizes a chunk), evaluative system
(evaluates quizzically), amygdala (kicks the matter upstairs),
frontal cortex (constructs a chunk). If the circuit loops back on
itself it will return to the perceptual cortex via the thalamus. It
is also through this front-perception link that interpretive memories can become bothered. The grammatical associations used
by the frontal cortex lead us to recall one thing, but when we
construct it the perceptual cortex does not recognize what we
recall. Instead of working in harmony, the two separate parts of
the circuit contradict one another. We feel bothered and try to
resolve the tension.
The looping through the frontal and perceptual cortex can
lead to prolonged periods of concentration. Breaks in the concentration loop can occur with a completing action (e.g., a
surgeon finishes sewing a wound); an evaluation that keeps the
memory on the emotional level (e.g., a writer begins to feel
threatened by his own ideas and quits pursuing them); a distraction that sends the circuit to the hippocampus instead of to the
amygdala, turning memory to the factual level (e.g., during
conversation a reference distracts the speaker and sends him on
a tangent away from his point); or a "bothered" sense that
grammar and recognition no longer support one another. A
conscious, creative judgment may resolve this tension and permit resumption of the loop.
Some of the research that supports Arnold's theory was
done in her own laboratory, but much was done by others in
many different laboratories. Her most important contribution
showed how we can organize these circuits by referring to
subjective motives for the construction of a memory. Arnold is
hardly alone in talking about the role of the hippocampus,
amygdala, or thalamus in remembering. Her real achievement
has been to show how we can unite the separate circuits into a
meaningful whole if we say that sUbjective experiences matter.

She states her own position bluntly:
Memory is not an isolated process. It depends on perception,
is influenced by emotion and imagination and embedded in the
whole sequence from perception to action. Without memory,
there can be no perception as we experience it, no learning,
no motivated action .... that is the sum and substance of my
theory of brain function.
It sounds almost exactly like Bartlett's remarks on imagination
fifty years earlier; only Bartlett studied behavior whereas Arnold

examined the brain. The study of the functioning of memory
and the functioning of the brain has at last come together.
10
MEMORY STUDIES
TODAY
When people disagreed with him. he urged them to be
objective.
-Joseph Heller. Catch-22. 1961
One basic idea emerges from Alkon's work: Experience changes a neuron's activity. Arnold's work adds a second
idea: The brain is organized in a way that lets us use those
changes in the neuron. There is a long way to go before all the
issues in this research are accepted as settled. It will take
decades and many experiments before we understand human
neurons as well as we do the sea snail's. We also have much to
learn about the details of the brain's circuits. But it is striking to
see how far already these two basic principles have penetrated
into the generally accepted account of memory. The crisis that
arose from the long frustrating search for the memory store is
past.
In the summer of 1986 Science , the journal of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, published an article by Larry Squire, a San Diego psychiatrist, about memory
and the brain. Squire titled his article "Mechanisms of Memory," the same title Roy John gave his pivotal book twenty years
earlier. Within the first two paragraphs of the article Squire had
made both points-experience changes the neuron and the brain
remembers by returning its circuits to the changed neuron.
164 /
Memory Studies Today / 165
These principles are too new to be carved into stone, but they
already occupy the mainstream of memory studies.
Squire continues to speak of storage. He wrote, "Memory
is stored as changes in the same neural systems that ordinarily
participate in perception." To my mind the reference to storage
is unnecessary. All that has to be said is that experience changes
the neural systems that ordinarily participate in perception, but
perhaps I am quibbling about terms. The point is that already
the conservative authorities agree that the old model was wrong.
The word storage has become no more than a synonym for
change, and change occurs at the site of experience. The change
that supports memory does not occur in specialized storage
areas that people once assumed must be part of any memory
system.
Mechanical Memory
The biggest loser in this new notion of how memory works
is the idea that computer memories and human memories have
anything in common. The subject of mechanical "memory," the
memory of computers, has long led us into bogs and briars of
confusion. We snagged ourselves on a bad pun. Because every
computer has a "memory," people have assumed that some of
our insights into mechanical memory could help us understand
biological memory. Discussions of human memory often used
words drawn from computer terminology, and theorists liked to
take analogies from computer operation, imagining that the
metaphors could help understand the architecture of human
memory; however, human and computer memories are as distinct as life and lightning.
Scientific approaches to human powers assume of course
that natural laws underlie our actions. In Freud's age, naturalistic assumptions required that everything be explained in terms
of matter and energy, even though many observers doubted that
such basic biological processes as reproduction and metabolism

could possibly depend on matter and energy alone. In the decade
following the close of World War II, those doubts were justified
by the discovery that reproduction and metabolism both depend
on information stored in a cell's DNA. Naturalistic assumptions
then urged that all human achievement be explained in terms of
matter, energy, and stored information. But our survey has
shown that by the time birds evolved memory had begun to
replace inherited information as a guide to action. Alkon's work
shows that it is not the brain but the single neuron that works
like a computer, and the neuron changes its output in accordance with changes wrought by experience. We can still hope
for natural explanations of human behavior, but any full account
must consider matter, energy, information, and experience.
Forty years ago, when the computer first shunted onstage,
the Western imaginatipn had no vocabulary, no philosophy, and
no science that could help it sort the differences between what
the machines did and what people do. The bill had arrived at
last for our long refusal to credit importance and prestige to our
active vitality. It took decades for us to find words and a science
that could distinguish between mechanical processes and living
experiences.
A particularly strong source of confusion was John von
Neumann's decision to refer to the computer's store of information as its "memory." Von Neumann was a great mathematician, the founder of game theory, and a key contributor to the
development of the atomic bomb. During the Second World War
he learned of the development of the computer and became
fascinated by it. Von Neumann designed the basic computer
architecture used to this day. He was the first to speak of
memory in these machines, and that clumsy choice of terms has
made it hard ever since for people to distinguish between what a
computer's memory does (store electronic information) and
what a human memory does (adapt behavior).
The two major parts of any modem computer are its central
processing unit and the "memory" that stores electronic patterns. Normally people call storage space a shelf or a drawer or
a warehouse, and the first computer designers did not call the
information-storage machinery memory. Charles Babbage, the
Victorian mathematician who first conceived of a computing
machine, used the metaphor of a factory to explain his idea. He
called the central unit a "mill" and the memory a "store."
During the 1930s several prototype computers appeared, leading
to the wartime development of a programmable computer. ENlAC, as the working machine was known, was one of those
secret World War II projects like penicillin and the atomic bomb
that made the postwar world profoundly unlike prewar life. It
received data via punch cards and used a series of devices called
accumulators to store the working calculations. In early 1944
Pres per Eckert, the Oppenheimer of the ENIAC project, described an idea he had for storing a computer program on disks:
"This is similar to the tone-generating mechanism used in some
electric organs and offers a permanent way of storing the basic
signals required." So Eckert knew he needed storage but still
did not call it memory.
When von Neumann learned of the ENIAC project, he
wrote his own draft proposal for an advanced version of such a
machine and he submitted his ideas in June 1945. In that draft
he deliberately used the analogy of the computer as a brain. He
called the parts of the computer that performed mathematical
operations "specialized organs" and he compared the relays of
the computer with neurons in the brain. (Von Neumann assumed
that neurons were electric relays. No one then imagined that
they might be capable of changing their behavior.) In this spirit
of analogy von Neumann discussed the problem of programming
the computer:
Any device which is to carry out long and complicated sequences of operations (specifically of calculations) must have
a considerable memory . ... Even in the process of carrying
out a multiplication or a division, a series of intermediate
(partial) results must be remembered ... . The instructions
which govern a complicated problem may constitute a considerable material. ... This material must be remembered ....
168 I
REMEMBERING AND FORGElTING
In this passage von Neumann's use of the words memory and

remembering seem entirely casual, but then he became more
direct:
To sum up the third remark: The device requires a considerable
memory. While it appears that various parts of this memory
have to perform functions which differ somewhat in their
nature and considerably in their purpose, it is nevertheless
tempting to treat the entire memory as one organ. . . . The
three specific parts C[entral] A[rithmetic part], C[entral]
C[ontrol] ... and M[emory] correspond to the associative
neurons in the human nervous system. It remains to discuss
the equivalents of the sensory or afferent and motor or efferent
neurons. These are the input and output organs of the
device ....
With this analogy, speculation about memory took a drastically
wrong course. Computer memory and biological memory are
profoundly different, yet because of their shared name many
bright thinkers have for forty years assumed that, at bottom, the
two memories must be profoundly alike. Computers have no
emotional drive, no capacity to attend to experience, and no
ability to recognize individual things. They operate exactly as
Freud once speculated our own brains must work. Inputs pass
through them without making any lasting changes. Instead of
providing artificial intelligence, these machines suffer from artificial amnesia. They sit like frogs on a lily pad waiting for
prescribed conditions, and they act in a prescribed manner.
Memory as we know it has nothing to do with their performance.
Although no one took von Neumann's analogies literally,
many students of "artificial intelligence" and cognitive psychology have viewed them as serious metaphors. Some people
argued that despite the many physical differences between mechanical and animal memory, the two must share functionally
similar components. This argument too can no longer stand.
Human memory adapts behavior and uses emotion, attention,
and insight. Computers have different functions and neither their
storage systems nor their processors have any counterparts to

memory's functional circuits.
Every step up memory's staircase demands some special
associative power. Emotional memory requires an awareness of
pleasure and pain. Factual memory begins with attention. Attention has many surprising attributes, including the way, as we
learn a skill, we can turn our attention from the performance of
an action to the purpose of the action. Computers have no
attention to turn or purposes to turn to. If we persist in active
attention, we can hope for an insight that will lift us to memory's
third level. Insight discovers previously unknown associations
between apparently separate chunks. It lets us take a grammar
from one chunk and apply it elsewhere, creating a new chunk.
Indeed, for the past generation, philosophers have argued that
creative thinking means finding ways to associate ideas that had
previously seemed separate.
The most famous story of such a creative discovery goes
back to the ancient Greeks. The mathematician Archimedes was
asked by his king to determine whether a crown was pure gold.
Faced with what, by all known laws of metallurgy, seemed an
impossible problem, Archimedes seemed certain to fail. Then
he settled into his bath, and noticed that his presence made the
bathwater rise. He suddenly saw a link between his problem and
the rising bathwater: Pure gold will displace one amount of
water; a gold alloy of the same size will displace a different
amount. Eureka! he shouted and ran naked through the streets.
It is an inspiring tale, one so appealing that even people who
have never heard of Socrates seem to know that a Greek once
ran about town shouting eureka. Thanks to Archimedes' insight
we gained a new chunk of knowledge based on the principle of
buoyancy.
People who venerate the computer love to pose this challenge: Imagine that you can communicate via teletype with a
computer and a person. You do not know which answers come
from the person and which from the machine. Can you think of
a question that, in principle, a machine can never answer as well
as a human? On the day you cannot find such a question, the
170/
distinction between human and machine intelligence will cease

to matter.
If the teletype experiment had been done in Syracuse in
about 250 B.C. we could have used Archimedes as our human
and have asked, "How can the king discover whether the crown
given to him is, as advertised, one of pure gold?" At the time of
asking, neither the computer nor Archimedes would have had
either the information or the procedures necessary to answer
the question. Yet we know that Archimedes used experience
and insight to find an answer, two things that, in principle,
computers lack. In this experiment we see the critical difference
between human memory and computer storage. Once we have
acquired information and devised procedures for manipulating
it, computers make wonderful tools, but we still must do the
learning, adapting, and the updating. Those powers are what our
memories do best, and why the search for mechanical memories
to replace living ones is a dead end.
Chemical Memory
In our new understanding of memory, biochemistry has
won as big a victory as computer science has lost. In his study
of memory, Roy John's most firmly stated point held that "the
sustained change which we call memory must be mediated by
some alteration of matter, some redistribution of chemical compounds." That doctrine has triumphed. All interaction between
neurons is chemical, as are all long- and short-term changes in
neuron structure. When experience changes a neuron, its chemical activity changes.
The chemical changes in the neuron suggest that drugs
might help a person's memory, and since most people wish their
memories were more accurate, every large pharmaceutical company hopes to develop a memory pill. Memory drugs might work
in a variety of ways. For example, they could help in engram
formation by improving the efficiency of damaged neurons, or

by restoring a neuron's weakened capacity to emit a particular
chemical, or by maintaining a neuron's ability to change in
response to experiences. Any of these strategies may prove
effective. Rumors in the pharmaceutical industry suggest that a
memory drug for some victims of stroke may become available
before the decade of the 1980s is out.
Yet we must remember that memory is not one single thing.
Its many levels depend on one another, but they are distinct.
During the Renaissance, too, physicians and alchemists hoped
to find a potion that would help a person remember better.
Rosemary and a variety of other herbs were said to have the
power of memory. Today, however, the idea of a pill that simply
permits a person to "remember better" sounds as naive as the
hope that hypnosis can make a person remember better. We
cannot seriously hope to find a drug that will guarantee the
correct reconstruction of an experience.
It is easier to disrupt emotional memory than to establish a
desire artificially, so the first emotional-memory drug is more
likely to induce amnesia than to improve memory. This use may
seem strange, but survival sometimes depends on an ability to
endure the awful without panic. A particularly notable example
comes from childbirth. If the pain of delivery stayed fresh in
memory, each new labor in a woman's life might be greeted with
increasingly uncontrollable terror; however, during labor the
uterus releases massive amounts of a hormone, oxytocin, and
apparently this natural drug induces extensive forgetting of the
childbirth experience. Although each of us knows exceptions to
this rule, the gospel parable about women forgetting the pain of
childbirth seems literally true in many cases. Drugs that block
formation of terrible associations may gain a place in treating
victims of particularly brutal shocks.
Drugs that work in the opposite direction-promoting emotional associations-are more difficult to identify. Many people
do form emotional attachments to drugs themselves, but a drug
that leads to an emotional association with some other person
172 /
or experience seems more difficult to sustain. Such a discovery

would constitute a love potion and is not near to hand.
Factual memory would improve if we paid more attention
to things, so drugs that increase arousal might improve memory
automatically. Caffeine is well known as a stimulant, and research has established that taking caffeine enhances memory in
the laboratory. One current research project studies a caffeine
medication 100,000 times more arousing than a cup of coffee,
without the side effects on blood pressure. Another common
drug that seems to improve attention and memory is nicotine.
Smoking a cigarette just before presentation of a fifty-word list
improves recall after intervals of ten and forty-five minutes.
Higher nicotine cigarettes are more effective than low nicotine
brands. There are many good reasons for not smoking, but
under laboratory conditions, nicotine can improve one's factual
recall.
Another approach to improving factual memory might try
to speed up the rate at which we associate experiences. We
know that somehow the hippocampus consolidates associations
so that one experience reminds us of another, and it might be
possible to increase the rate at which the hippocampus does its
work. One hormone that may speed up the formation of factual
associations is arginine vasopressin, a hormone secreted by the
pituitary. Another chemical, one related to vasopressin, also
helps factual memory, but only in males. Why a particular
chemical should affect one sex and not another remains a
mystery. It often happens too that the effectiveness of a drug
depends on a precise dosage. Too much or too little has no
result. The complexity of the brain suggests that although the
first memory drugs may appear at any moment, new drugs will
continue to appear for many years. By this century's end,
memory drugs are likely to be familiar, but two decades into the
next century, all twentieth-century memory drugs may seem
primitive.
There is, however, something tragically naive in the hope of
using drugs to artificially improve factual memory. Drugs may
stimulate us, but attention still requires an initial curiosity, and
as we pay attention, we must continue to feel curious and

interested. Arousal by itself does not guarantee attention to
what we are supposed to attend. The college student of the
future who takes a memory pill before listening to a lecture may
find that he is alert to everything but the boring lecture. The
secret of attention, the quality that distinguishes it from the
input device on a computer, is its selectivity. We base our
selections on emotional memory. We can bring some discipline
to the activity, but surprisingly little. Selective attention permits
us to concentrate on the things that matter to us and ignore the
things that do not. Almost certainly, drugs will one day help
people whose damaged brain functions impair their memories,
but drugs may never do much more than that. The whole point
of memory's evolution has been to pull us beyond our own
internal assumptions so we can see and use what stands out
there in the world beyond our skin. Drugs produce their effects
without reference to what occurs beyond that skin, making them
profoundly anti-memory.
Active Memory
At present the biggest dispute in memory studies concerns
the active role of memory's separate functions. Roy John
doubted that functions were localized, but that argument is over.
Today, few investigators seriously question the idea that there
are different kinds of memory dependent on different areas of
the brain. Researchers also agree that some kinds of memory
have a much older evolutionary history than others and that
some kinds develop sooner in children than others. There is
even agreement that different areas produce different sUbjective
experiences. Squire's survey of memory, for example, said,
"This notion [of different kinds of memory] necessarily accepts
the concepts of conscious and unconscious memory as serious
topics for experimental work." But there is considerable disa-
174 /
greement over whether these sUbjective experiences matter to

the construction of a memory.
In this book I have followed Arnold's principles for organizing memories. They lead to the staircase of dependent levels
we saw in Part One, but Arnold has a very active view of
memory. Desire, attention, and judgment all play important
roles in her theory. Many memory theorists deny that subjective
processes can help us understand either the workings of memory
or the relation between the different kinds of memory.
The dispute comes down to the passive or active question.
If memory is entirely passive, manipulated only by objective
factors, the brain is a machine. It is not a computer or a tape
recorder, but it is a biochemical device and its activity comes
from outside itself. Many people insist that it is unscientific to
deny that the brain is a machine. The repeated use of the title
"Mechanisms of Memory" is an aggressive assertion that memory is part of the dead mechanical universe. These thinkers will
not lightly embrace a view of an active memory whose adaptations depend on subjective factors known only to the individual
actor.
Every step up the memory staircase, however, depends on
a subjective factor-awareness of pleasure and pain, emotion,
recalled perception, insight, and judgment. Arnold was extremely bold to include such factors in her circuits. They change
behavior from mechanical output to a creative performance. In
this active view the brain is like a piano and memory is like the
replaying of a tune. Instead of retrieving images, memory gives
us a performance. Instead of preserving old images, memory
gives us new ways to perform. This metaphor would once have
seemed impossible for it immediately raises the question of who
plays the piano. Do we have a little man in our head? Today,
however, we know enough to see that the neurons perform in
their millions and billions along the memory circuits.
Is memory a machine or a performance? In time, I believe,
memory scholars generally will resolve this dispute in favor of
performance, of an active memory. I am no prophet, but events
seem to flow toward common acceptance of Frederick Bartlett's
position that subjective factors are as important as objective

ones. Even a conservative like Larry Squire finds himself forced
by the evidence to acknowledge a subjective presence, and if it
is present why have we evolved it? Is it an ornament, an
appendix that has always been irrelevant to survival? The suggestion seems unlikely on its face, and Arnold's theory depicts
an evolutionary advantage that comes from these subjective
factors. They provide new powers for adapting to the environment. The active view of memory enables us to make sense of
its evolution among species and its development in the individual. In Part Three we shall also see that it helps to make sense
offorgetting, traditionally one of memory's most puzzling problems. But for all its strengths, the active view changes our
understanding of scientific explanation.
Subjective factors have crept into one area of psychology
after another. Even emotion was once a taboo subject for
mainstream psychology, but that day has passed. By the mid
1970s the subject had become so respectable it got its own
scholarly journal, Motivation and Emotion. Meanwhile, other
psychologists have reconsidered the matter of attention. Theories that seek an objective explanation for attention see it as a
process of filtering input. Computers can do that much, responding only to digits, for example. But increasing numbers of
scholars have concluded that attention is a subjective selection
of what to take in. This group says, for example, that at a
cocktail party people actively select the sounds made by the
person they are speaking with. We choose what we listen to.
The most respected figure in this reconsideration of attention
has been Ulric Neisser, one of the leaders in the development of
cognitive psychology. In 1976 he published a book expressing
his disappointment over the way cognitive psychology had developed. In criticizing theories that said attention was objectively programmed into the brain, Neisser complained:
The villains of the piece are the mechanistic informationprocessing models, which treat the mind as a fixed-capacity
1761
device for converting discreet and meaningless inputs into

conscious percepts.
And Neisser closed his chapter about attention with the words,
"Consciousness is an aspect of mental activity, not a switching
center on the intrapsychic railway. " Bartlett could not have said
it more insistently.
Insight, creativity, and the perception of symbols have
always posed challenges for thinkers who insist that only objective stimuli control thought. B. F. Skinner boldly denied that
creativity exists, but few other psychologists have gone that far.
Most of those who concentrate on the objective side of behavior
have preferred to ignore creativity, a problem to consider later.
Subjectivity was never seriously exorcised from this field, and
we saw in Part One that the first principle of interpretive memory
holds that subjective organization presides over this level of
memory.
Memory study has reached a crossroad similar to the one
physics reached sixty years ago. Until the 1920s all physics, all
science, assumed that everything in the universe was determined
by strict cause-and-effect relations. Then quantum mechanics
appeared and replaced determinism with uncertainty. The idea
so scandalized Einstein that he spent the rest of his life vainly
trying to refute it, but other physicists saw the practical value of
the idea and used it. Today physics without uncertainty is
unthinkable. A similar challenge faces memory study. Until
recently all science has assumed that only objective factors
control events. Now we find that we can explain much about
memory if we add subjectivity to the account. Some people,
perhaps some of psychology's deepest thinkers, will never accept the idea. Many people have devoted their professional lives
to projects of artificial intelligence and to the metaphors of
cognitive psychology. Some of them will surely resist suggestions that imagination holds the secret of memory. Today we
can only wait to see if they will find a refutation to subjectivity's
importance.
PART
THREE
THE FORGEI'I'ERY
tt
ORDINARY
JlFORGEI'I'ING"
I know very well that people won't forget. It's natural to
think that they might, since they forget most everything
else. . . . From what I've seen, usually people only
remember something if they was around personally at the
time; or maybe if their father was around ... . But nobody
ever forgets the " Black Sox," and that's the truth.
-Harry Stein, Hoopla. 1983
Most discussions of the memory problems in everyday life begin with an exaggerated faith in ordinary remembering
and understanding. If you assume, for example, that it is easy
to remember your intentions, then a forgotten intention becomes
a puzzle. Yet everyone has found himself standing in a familiar
room wondering what on earth he came to fetch. We forget
contexts and we forget actions. Our continual forgetting of
things little and large is a great annoyance. Then we double the
burden by imagining that the difficulties are peculiar.
True memory breakdowns are so bizarre that almost anybody can spot them. They show th~mselves as an inability to
move up through the levels of memory. For example, a person
may be unable to form new factual as-sociations. A patient with
amnesia must be reintroduced to his doctor each time they meet,
even if they have been meeting for years. It is needlessly cruel
to tell an amnesiac about a death in the family. He may be
1179
moved to tears and feel a deep sense of loss, but he will forget,
and the next time someone mentions the death the news will be
just as shocking as the first time. Even after the twentieth time,
the news comes as an unexpected, unsoftened blow.
Ordinary forgetting is nothing like this. We may forget the
name of everyone we met at last night's party, but we remember
that there was a party. We can forget being told to do something,
and may not even recognize the instruction when it is repeated
later. But we can remember something that did hold our attention-the magazine we were reading, for example-back when
we ignored the instruction. Ordinary forgetting is the routine
failure to use the memory powers that we have. Pathological
forgetting is the loss of one of memory's powers. The difference
is as palpable as the difference between not using your fingers
and having no fingers.
We have seen that remembering is a much more active
process than the old storage metaphor supposed. To construct
our memories we need arousal and understanding. Forgetting,
by contrast, is more passive than we realized. A popular joke on
Washington's Capitol Hill holds that although a politician needs
a good memory, he needs an even better "forgettery" that
actively denies the many sins of his past. But usually forgetting
is not so creative. Just as cold is the absence of heat, so
forgetting is the absence of remembering.
When it seemed as though remembering was just a matter
of retrieval from storage, philosophers asked what happened to
disrupt retrieval. Did we drop the item? (Indeed, in its Germanic
origins forget means to lose hold of.) Many researchers have
tried to find active explanations for forgetting. Perhaps we
retrieve the wrong thing or misplace an item in storage or
unconsciously refuse to retrieve it. Perhaps items in storage fade
with time or perhaps over time associations break apart. Each
of these ideas has had its defenders, but looking for a cause of
forgetting is like looking for the cause of darkness on a moonless
night. Instead of asking what happened to cause the darkness,
we must wonder why there is no moon. Instead of asking what
Ordinary "Forgetting" / 181
happened to cause forgetting, we must look for what would have

caused remembering had it not been absent.
It is in the consideration of forgetting that we see immediately how the world of memory studies has been turned upside
down. Many of the pillars of the revolution hardly seem radical.
Common sense tells us that emotions, perceptions, and reminders are all important to memory, but the old theories ignored
these points and developed as though they did not exist.
Emotions, perceptions, and reminders all stir the imagination, and imagination, not storage, is the basis of memory. If we
try to remember a name and cannot, we search for reminders
that will help. We try to construct as many details as we can in
the hope that they will help us remember. Many students discover that if the teacher asks a question and they have forgotten
the answer, they may remember just by starting to reply. Construction of the answer produces it. Forgetting is the absence of
that construction.
Contrast this forgetting with that of a computer that does
use storage. I have a computer myself and once even wrote a
short program that retrieves data that had seemed hopelessly
lost. A danger of word processors is that something can go
wrong and all one's work evaporates into some electronic limbo.
Former president Jimmy Carter lost drafts of several early
chapters to his memoirs that way. Believe me, it is maddening
to see all your prose disappear in the twinkling of an electronic
glitch. On my word processor, however, there is a secret storage
area where the text survives, so I wrote a little program for
emergencies. It gets into that secret area and retrieves the lost
text. The first time I saw the vaporized text come rolling across
my computer screen I felt like a man who had summoned the
dead from their tombs, but it was no miracle. When difficulties
arise with stored information, the problem is always to find out
where the stored data lies. Problems with remembering, however, require a different approach. We need to assist our imagination.
182 /
Missing Reminders
Memory begins when some aspect of present experience
triggers an association. At the level of emotional memory an
experience may evoke an emotion, at the factual and interpretive
levels it may evoke an image or a symbol, respectively. Whatever the level, memory begins with reminders. We saw that
artificial memory starts by inventing reminders. Artificial forgetting begins by removing them. If we want to help people forget
something, we first try to remove likely reminders from their
surroundings. It is said that Las Vegas casinos have no clocks
and that croupiers wear no watches, in order not to remind
gamblers of the time. At the other extreme, airports and depots
are full of clocks to help travelers remember that time passes
and that it matters.
.
Suppose we want something and go to the bedroom to fetch
it. We arrive. Now what did we come to get? I have asked myself
that question too many times. We need a reminder to remember
what we came for, but we left the original reminder back in the
room we just came from. If we go back to that room, it will
probably remind us again, but going back means extra work and
leaves us feeling foolish. If the item we seek lies in plain view, it
can serve as its own reminder. But if we do not notice it we have
no reminder. A potential third reminder is some mental association. When we arrive in the room, the room itself reminds us, "I
came for X," but mental associations form only if we paid
attention at the outset. If we do not attend to the point of the
task when we head off to the room, the room will not remind us
of what we came to get.
Without reminders, memory is doomed. Even if we have
paid close attention to something, we need a reminder to trigger
its memory. Freud said that the best proof that memory needs
more than attention comes from the forgetting of intentions. We
may plan something, may even discuss it, and yet we forget it.
He cited the example of a lover who fails to keep a rendezvous,
and he warned that the lover should not say, "I forgot," in
defense. The other will reply, "A year ago you would not have
forgotten. Touche! A year ago everything seemed to trigger
thoughts of one's lover, but today that passion has cooled. Freud
himself believed that all memories are stored and that retrieval
is automatic unless blocked. The forgotten rendezvous, he said,
shows a deliberate (although perhaps unconscious) intent to
forget. Our new understanding of memory softens that harsh
judgment. Love's obsession has cooled, but that need not imply
active scorn. We need reminders to remember even the things
we want most.
Missing Attention
Reminders trigger associations and associations begin with
attention. In Chapter 4 we saw that William James defined
attention as "the taking possession" of parts of an experience.
His active metaphor agrees with our own view of memory as
doing. Attention is like digestion. We do not store the food we
eat; we break it down so that it becomes part of our body.
Attention selects parts of experience and uses it to nourish our
memories. We do not store this experience, we use it. Of course,
we eat many things that we do not digest and we also experience
many things without paying them any attention.
We get into quick trouble if we imagine inattention as a
refusal to eat, as a kind of sensory filter that keeps some things
from entering our brains. Psychologists have searched closely
for such filters and never found them. Attention actively takes
in. It does not just keep perceptions out. Every mother knows
the problems that arise from the naive view that perception
implies attention. A mother can tell a child, "I want you to do
so-and-so." The child listens and forgets. It is not that the child
did not hear the instructions. He did. He did not, however,
actively seize them and make them his. Attention is an aroused
response to experience, and most things do not arouse us. Or, if

they do, they do not arous'e us for long.
The most common distraction is probably concern for oneself. When two people meet, their attention tends to focus on
themselves. Outwardly they seem alert. They smile, shake
hands, look each other in the eye, and say their names aloud.
Inwardly, a person may even think he is paying attention to the
other because he sees and hears that other person. But the
display of interest is automatic. Meanwhile the other person also
pays attention to himself, to looking good and making a good
impression. When both people seek to make a fine impression,
neither makes any and both forget the exchange in an instant.
Actors and actresses at auditions often show this type of
self-concerned distraction in a memory failure known as the
next-in-line effect. After trying out for a part, performers may
remember many other 'people's auditions but they find it nearly
impossible to remember the tryout just before their own. Normally people at an audition worry about their own performance.
As they have little else to do and they feel curious about the
competition, they generally watch the other performers, but
when their own tum comes nearly due, they concentrate on
getting ready. The next in line serves primarily as a cue, indicating the time for them to start. If a person had to, he could pay
attention to the next in line and remember what the person said
or did. But people normally have no special reason to pay
attention.
Experiments have shown that the next-in-line effect also
occurs during laboratory procedures. In one such experiment,
researchers assembled groups of people to read lists of words.
In some groups, participants knew the order of their performance. In other groups, participants did not know when they
would be called on to read. Only people who knew their order
of performance showed a marked next-in-line effect, and experimenters abolished the effect by the simple expedient of telling
people they would be questioned about the list read just ahead
of them, in effect, giving them a reason to pay attention.
Similar self-distractions probably lie behind the stereotypical problems of the "absentminded professor." In these situations a person quickly forgets information or instructions even
though he seemed to be paying attention when he originally
received the information. Paying attention requires more than
listening. When a person's thoughts are interrupted, he must go
through a two-step process. First, he must put his old thoughts
on hold; second, he must actively digest the new information. It
is not enough to put thoughts on hold and hear the new information. Attention means listening-perceiving, judging, thinking
about.
In a setting where interruptions have become common,
attention requires deliberate effort. People who need to practice
paying attention should begin by exaggerating their involvement.
"I'm going to listen," says the interrupted person, and he
attends carefully, putting other thoughts aside for the duration
of the interruption and considering precisely what he hears and
imagining himself performing the instruction. Paying attention is
work. We do ourselves an injustice by assuming that passive
listening is enough.
Even when we pay enough attention to learn something we
never learn the whole context of an experience. There are
always flies buzzing in the comer or cracks on the ceiling that
we ignore. Often we form only the barest associations. This
partial learning has a built-in benefit, for partial knowledge is
generalized knowledge. It carries few associations and travels
from context to context without difficulty. This transfer matters
particularly in the use of symbols like words. Adults know many
thousands of words, but can tell how they came to know only a
few of them. Of English words, I believe I can recall the origins
of my knowledge for precisely one-punctual. Unfortunately,
my memory on the point is so clear that I have problems using
the word. Whenever I hear it, I remember when I was seven
years old excitedly waiting to see my first major league baseball
game. My parents and I waited for a fourth person (known to
my memory only as "the Yugoslav"), who was late. My father
said, "He is usually so punctual," and I asked what that word
186/
meant. Believe me, it is a nuisance to have so powerful an

association that the mere sound of a word transports me back to
the gate at Griffith Stadium (a gate torn down decades ago).
Words have to be used in a more generalized way. Languages
would hardly work if every word provoked such specific memories of past acquaintance. Interpretive memory depends on our
ability to combine symbols whose origins we do not recall
according to a grammar we cannot explain.
Experiments have long demonstrated our tendency to ignore sources of information. Researchers originally called this
poor memory "interference," reflecting the old assumption that
a memory problem indicates some difficulty in retrieval. Psychologists first observed memory's generalizing tendency in
studies that presented subjects with several lists to learn. Subjects confuse the lists, mixing early lists with later ones and later
lists with earlier ones.
We tend to remember similar experiences as a piece and
cannot easily distinguish one from the other unless we have paid
attention to some quality that makes it unique. Although this
tendency confuses any precise memory for particular past
events, it enriches our general appreciation for the possibilities
of experience. We learn and associate details with a generalized
version of an experience and become ready for a broader range
of possibilities the next time something similar occurs. Thanks
to partial learning we can acquire a skill and need not be too
particular about the setting in which we practice it.
In the early days of learning a skill we must pay close
attention to our actions. When we first learn to type, for example, we search out every key and then calculate which finger we
should use. We pay close attention to the keyboard then. The
same holds true when learning to drive with a stick shift. We
have to pay close attention to coordinating our foot movement
with the proper hand action, but in time we learn these actions
so well that we need not pay them any attention. The skilled
typist and experienced driver treat their machines as though
they ran automatically, obeying their wish like the humblest
servant. Like some god-king of old, the typist says, "I merely
have to think 'C-a-l-l- -m-e- -I-s-h-m-a-e-l' and it is typed." Of

course, the body still controls and directs all this activity, but
the events are too quick and precise for conscious direction or
even for feedback control. We act without attention. The discovery that action does not imply attention was an important
turning point in modem psychology. In 1948, Karl Lashley
argued that instead of making us attentive, automatically organized behavior disengages us from the world. Psychologists
buzzed in consternation. At that time the dominant school of
thought held that the environment controls every detail of an
action. Today, the concern runs in the other direction as we see
just how much of our behavior is automatic. Does learning tum
us into robots?
Many memory failures reflect exactly this danger. Absentmindedness generally indicates inattentive mechanical behavior.
Typically, its problems arise amid familiar surroundings, when
doing something well practiced. Situations like these dampen
attention. The familiar setting and routine behavior keep the
orientation reaction at bay. And if anything else catches our
attention, we may ignore entirely the automatic action of putting
aside our keys or wallet. Only later do we wonder where we put
these things.
If we set out to do something and then let our attention
wander, some automatic action may intrude on our behavior.
We may head off to a hardware store and find ourselves standing
in the grocery store instead. The habit of going to the grocery
store has intruded on the plan. Our mind attended to something
other than making sure that we went to the right place. Habit
has taken over, and suddenly we have arrived in the grocery
store.
To prevent a skill from becoming robotic we must continue
to pay attention to our actions. Typists who know the keyboard
no longer have to think about finding a letter or which finger to
use, but must continue to give attention to their copy. An
experienced driver no longer thinks about how to coordinate
foot and hand maneuvers, but continues to pay attention to the
traffic.
188 /
Actions based on interpretive memory absolutely depend

on an ability to act and continue paying attention. Insights carry
us to memory's top level; concentration keeps us there. Lower
levels have essentially one attention-action cycle:
perceive and evaluate

circumstances
act according
to evaluation
But on the interpretive level we imagine our intention and can

redirect our attention to suit the changing situation.
A classic case that shows the need for interpretive attention
comes from a woman who worked for years filleting fish and
then suffered frontal lobe damage that disrupted her interpretive
memory. The fish continued to remind her of her job and she
would pick up a fish as though to fillet it, but then could not
continue. She might make a stab or two, but the purposeful act
of filleting a fish was beyond her. After picking up the fish she
would put it down and pick up another. The reminder got her
started, but she could not imagine the purpose she was after and
could not finish her work. She found similar problems at home.
She would start her domestic chores but could not complete
them. She would pick up a sugar bowl as though to put it away
and then not know what to do with it. Sometimes she set it down
in the refrigerator.
Some animals too can adjust their attention to a small
degree. The most dramatic shifts occur among hunting animals.
They can persist in a hunt, while changing tactics. One pair of
wildlife photographers observed a young male lion as it developed this flexibility. The lion had left the pride and had to feed
himself. It took him several weeks to make his first kill, and he
was in danger of starving. He began his hunting efforts by
charging vainly at a crowded water hole. At first he simply
charged and then gave up when his original prey got away. He
succeeded at last when he did not stop after his initial failure,
Ordinary " Forgetting" / 189
but switched his attention in mid-charge and noticed a small

zebra that could not escape. This continued evaluation permits
a creature to adapt its behavior even after it has started to act.
The non-primate portion of the animal world seldom gets more
flexible than this. In this situation, action does not put an end to
purpose. The attention-action cycle repeats itself:

circumstances

new circumstances
act according
to evaluation
act according
to reevaluation
Our primate ancestors were probably never as lethal as a lion,

but life in the trees demands concentration. Any creature who
starts leaping from branch to branch must either concentrate or
risk falling to the ground.
People can maintain these attention-action cycles for hours
at a time. Philosophers often think of concentration as purely an
intellectual activity , but skilled athletes do it too. Pitcher Jim
Kaat, whose major-league career lasted twenty-five years, says,
"Control [of the ball] is a matter of concentration." It sounds
like the gibberish athletes often spout, until you understand it as
referring to the attention-action cycle. As the pitcher begins to
throw, he continues to pay attention to the situation and continues to evaluate what he sees.
Because concentration is a period of prolonged attention ,
we might suppose that we have super-memories for such experiences. Instead we are almost amnesic for them. I know this
paradox from long experience as a professional writer. I devote
hours every day to writing, yet if anybody asks me for the details
of what I have done , I can hardly remember. Even when I see
190 /
the manuscript I do not recall many of the moments of actual

writing. When I write, I concentrate on expression and pay no
attention to my hand as it flies along, setting my expression
before me. Neither do I attend to its motions when I mark up a
page. Those details are irrelevant to my purposes, and when I
see a heavily reworked page I often feel surprised by the number
of changes I made.
Professional athletes call this experience of super-focused
attention "the tunnel." Football players talk about running
through a tunnel in which they perceive only their immediate
situation and what to do about it. Perhaps the clearest look the
sport fan gets of the fact of this intense concentration is at a
baseball game when three fielders collide while trying to catch a
pop fly. Everybody in the stands can see that the men are
rushing toward one another, but none of the three sees it, hears
it, or feels it. Each has brought only the ball into his awareness.
Laboratory studies of concentration find the same thing.
Psychologists study concentration with a technique called shadowing. Subjects listen to a message through earphones and
repeat the message aloud as they listen. Experimenters can
introduce different problems to make the task more challenging.
A shadow word can start at the left ear and finish at the right.
The message can come with a distractor. One voice says into
the right ear, "In summary, although frontal lobe lesions . . . ,"
and the subject repeats that aloud while another voice whispers
simultaneously into the left ear, "Halfway down the Rue Vercingetorix a tall guy ... ," and the subject ignores those words.
We can change the task, whispering the to-be-shadowed message
into one ear while shouting the distractor message into the other.
We can change the task again, requiring the subject to recite one
message as usual and write down the other. Yes , amazingly
enough, it is possible to learn to repeat one thing aloud while
writing something else down at the same time. During the days
of the moon exploration it was widely reported (and widely
doubted) that newscaster Walter Cronkite could speak into the
camera while receiving information from two different sources
whispering via earpieces into his ears. Research shows that
subjects can do all this work, and more. What they cannot do is
remember what they heard and repeated. If we ask a subject
what the shadowed messages said, he does not know. I have
seen the same thing among typists. The better their skills, the
less typists remember of what they typed. Concentration of this
sort ignores most details of an experience to focus exclusively
on how to accomplish one's aims.
The critical aspect of all these tasks is that they are purposeful. The lion on the hunt, the orangutan in the tree, the
pitcher on the mound, the writer marking up a page, and the
experimental subject shadowing a message all have to act and
keep on acting. They need to develop skills, and they do. A
person who simultaneously recites the words coming into his
right ear and writes the words heard in the left is a skilled
wonder. When laboratory experiments first tackled the task,
neither the subjects nor the experimenters believed it was possible. But the subjects learned how to do it. The meaning of
whatever they repeated was irrelevant to their purposes, however; shadowing is quite unlike going to a theater and watching
a movie for two hours. In that setting, meaning is all and many
people upon leaving a theater can recite much of the film's plot.
Of course they went there to learn a good story. On the other
hand, even regular movie fans might find it quite difficult to
watch a movie and repeat every word spoken immediately after
hearing it. Shadowing words is a skill that takes intense concentration. The experimental subject ignores everything that seems
irrelevant to the task, including the meaning of the shadowed
message. It should hardly surprise us to discover that after
ignoring meaning, subjects do not remember it.
Nonnal Memories
Naturally, people who suffer from frequent bouts of absentmindedness wish they had more satisfactory memories. Conven-
192/ REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING
tional wisdom urges people not to make too much of ordinary

forgetting. We know from close studies of everyday memory
that absentmindedness is a regular part of normal life. If we
realized how often absentmindedness affected other people, we
would appreciate that our own slips are nothing special. But this
advice is easier to give than to receive. We want to control
events, or at least control ourselves. When memory works right,
it gives us that control. When it does not work right, we cannot
expect to be cheered by the thought that control is hard for
everybody.
The advice about not worrying may even contribute to the
problem. It says pay no attention to your problem, and your
problem is that you do not pay enough attention to your actions.
Memory students should not act like the Great Oz shouting
authoritatively, "Pay no attention to that little man behind the
curtain. " People shoul!i pay attention, but in a fruitful way.
Ordinary forgetting does not imply stupidity, creeping senility, or even not caring. You have not forgotten where you put
your keys because unconsciously you do not really want to find
them. You forget because you did not notice where you put
them. So practice noticing. Take your keys from your pocket
and notice where you set them down.
I am sometimes absentminded myself and well know the
sense of impotent despair that comes from looking for a piece of
paper that I held in my hand not ten seconds ago. Only when I
began working on this book, however, did it cross my mind that
absentmindedness need not be a fate assigned by the gods. If it
came from unnoticed automatic actions, perhaps I could practice noticing my actions. As I put something down, I would
notice, "I'm putting this here," and, by Jove, it works. I find
things more readily now. I still make absentminded errors on
occasion, but the occasions are fewer.
I did the same thing with the problem of habit intrusion.
The place where I found the problem most annoying was at a
particular subway station where I often change trains. Usually,
I transfer downtown, but sometimes I switch to an uptown train.
Usually I take one particular train, but sometimes I use another
Ordinary " Forgetting" / 193
line that arrives on the same platform. I have discovered from

painful experience that I can automatically walk to the downtown platform when I want to go uptown, or let a train go by
that I wanted to take. For years, I just accepted this plight as
one of my mental defects, but stirred by my own investigations,
I decided to try to overcome the problem by deliberate attention.
As my original train arrived at the station I began consciously
reminding myself of my travel plans. At first I used complete
sentences about where I was going and how to get there ; now a
quick shorthand does the trick. At first I had to remember to
remind myself. Now the simple act of arriving in the station
serves to remind me that I should remind myself of my destination and route .
A few years ago it would have embarrassed me---even in the
privacy of my own brain-to think that I had to act so deliberately. I would have felt like some fool in a Charles Dickens story
who wanders all the way across London reciting aloud a fiveword sentence so he can give the message to someone who
needs it. But remembering is hard work. We cannot take it for
granted. Now I feel more like a shortstop who is in every play
because, each time the pitcher begins to throw, he orients
himself. To remember more, digest more and then fill the world
with reminders.
12
FORGOlTEN CHUNKS:
THE FAILURE OF
INTERPRETIVE MEMORY
... she couldn't think of a single reason why they hadn't
thought of looking there. This vacuum was disturbing. It
was like reaching, out for someone and finding that your
hand had been cut off at the wrist.
-Thomas Williams, The Moon Pinnace, 1986
Reminders and attention work only when a person

can move up and down the levels of memory. If something
prevents such travel, catastrophic memory failures begin to
show themselves. These failures tell us most clearly what each
level accomplishes. In this chapter and the following two we will
examine the problems that come when people lose the ability to
use part of memory. Each step on the staircase depends on
those below it, so damage to a low step affects performance on
the higher ones too. Thus, pathological forgetting often shows a
confusing host of symptoms. Some memory may survive, but
other seemingly unrelated types of remembering are lost. The
farther down the memory levels we go, the more general the
problems become. A person with damaged memory at the
interpretive level may have an amazingly specific problem, such
as the inability to remember names of fruits. Someone with
factual level damage may suffer from so general a disability that,
194/
Forgotten Chunks: The Failure of Interpretive Memory / 195
along with not remembering the names offruits, he cannot recall

what he did five minutes earlier or recognize his mother or even
respond to his own name. Because forgetting on any level
implies problems on higher levels too, we will start at the top of
the staircase with interpretive memory where the problems are
most specific.
Interpretive memory begins with an insight that unifies
recall and recognition. Without that level, chunked memory is
forgotten. Chunks permit purposeful behavior, so when they fail
so does purposeful action. A chunk of spatial memory, for
example, permits a person to follow routes he has never previously taken. He can remember his destination and understand
how to move toward it. Without interpretive memory, the same
person could still move about, still find his way to many places,
but such movement would depend on factual memory for past
experience. It would follow only practiced paths, and there
would be many places "you can't get to from here."
Damage to memory's interpretive level always implies an
inability to construct a chunk. With so many possible chunks,
people seldom lose the ability to create any at all, but partial
forgetting is common. Indeed it must be uilUsual for a person to
discover how to create all possible chunks. Many normal people,
for example, cannot achieve any musical insights. They can
enjoy music's rhythms and harmonies, even "hear" tunes playing in their head, but cannot imagine new melodies, new harmonies, or new ways to perform music. If this lack of insight
comes from inborn limitations, nobody is likely to notice, but if
the problem comes from an injury, we can see the remnants of
shattered insights. For example, Maurice Ravel, the composer
of "Bolero," was in a terrible automobile accident. He survived
for most of another decade but never again composed music,
yet he continued to enjoy listening to music. In his case, his
constructive power had gone, yet he continued to apprehend
chunks. The reverse problem-an inability to recognize chunks,
but a capacity to produce them-seems even stranger and perhaps more terrifying. Such a person might, for example, fail to
196 /
recognize even a single passage from the Bible, but be able to

recite long biblical passages.
Normal memories treat the grammatical and perceptual
associations of a chunk as so much of a piece that we seldom
think about the insights needed to understand them, yet using
something even as ordinary as a jar depends on interpretive
memory. A jar's simple grammar is the relation between the
storage bowl and the lid. When we see a sealed jar, we remember
its use and can imagine the same jar with the lid unscrewed.
Suppose a cabin-raiding bear finds a jar of honey. Factual
memory may be enough to set the bear to work. It sees the jar
and remembers honey found in similar jars, so it smashes the jar
to the floor as it has done in the past. Presumably, people too
could use only factual memory to open jars. A person sees the
jar; the jar reminds him of the contents; he wants the contents
and makes the necessary gripping and twisting motions to unscrew the lid and reveal the contents. But with interpretive
memory we act from understanding as well as desire. Emotions
tell us that we want the contents of the jar. Understanding tells
us that we want to remove the lid from the jar. This second
memory helps us if we meet trouble opening the jar. If the usual
actions fail us, instead of smashing the jar, we seek other ways
of removing the lid.
In this example we see the basic difference between objective reminders and subjective purposes. A reminder triggers a
factual memory and results in an action. A purpose is the
subjective construction of interpretive memory. A person acting
on the interpretive level depends on a private purpose, not a
visible reminder, to guide his progress. Wrestling with a jar
shows interpretive memory at its most ordinary, but some braindamaged people cannot remember the chunk that lets them open
a jar. People with ideokinetic apraxia can perform an action like
unscrewing a jar, but they cannot simply pretend to do the
action with an imaginary jar. The apraxia has destroyed their
memory for the purpose behind an unscrewing action. Since
factual memory survives, the physical presence of the jar serves
as a trigger to remind them of how to act and they can still open
ajar. But pretend actions require a memory for the purpose that
lies behind the action. Without interpretive memory they forget
the purpose of things, so creative and playful actions disappear.
Neither science nor philosophy has analyzed most of the
chunks that fill our daily lives. The most prominent exception
has come from linguists who have analyzed many aspects of
how language works. Even though their field developed along a
line wholly unrelated to memory studies, linguistic analysis of
language agrees with our findings about interpretive memory.
The basic unit of linguistic analysis is the sentence. Like other
chunks, sentences can combine to form still larger chunks of
paragraphs and essays. The sentence fuses two separate components-grammar and meaning-into one whole. Thanks to the
detailed study of language, the best descriptions of problems
with damaged interpretive memories concern language problems.
Sometimes a person's power of grammatical association
fails. In those cases, the person can recognize grammatical
speech but cannot speak grammatically. He cannot recall the
words he needs to use. Other times, perceptual association fails
and a person can produce grammatically correct sentences, but
cannot understand them. This last problem is particularly surprising because we have usually assumed that understanding
controls grammar. But grammar and understanding are equal
parts of a linguistic chunk. Each supports the other.
Lost Grammar
Memory chunks work like zippers. They consist of two
separate strands bound together as a unit. These are magic
zippers whose connecting teeth appear only as we imagine them
and disappear as we imagine the succeeding teeth. But apart
from their insubstantial side, chunk-zippers work and fail much
like ordinary ones. Sometimes a zipper acquires a snag and,
although it continues to function, the zipper always leaves a hole

at one particular spot. Chunks can fail in the same way, damaging the recall-recognition interaction. Perceptual and grammatical associations no longer combine at that point, leaving a
memory hole. In optical aphasia visual perception no longer
reminds a person of a name. We know that recognition survives
because we can see the person react in other ways. A person
seeing a bowl of ice cream might lick his lips and smile, but
cannot name what he sees. We also know that recall survives
because other reminders still work. If the person touches, tastes,
or smells the ice cream, he can name it. Yet the interaction
between visual recognition and verbal recall has gone.
More severe cases destroy one side of the zipper. Sometimes the ability to recognize perceptual associations goes.
Other times, recall's power of grammatical association fails. One
study examined a patient referred to as R. H. While serving in
Vietnam he had been shot in the head and thereafter he could
no longer speak either fluently or grammatically. Typical of his
speech was this account of his mother's death six months after
his fifteenth birthday.
My uh mother died uh me uh fifteen uh oh I guess six month
my mother pass away. An uh anen uh oh uh seventeen seventeen ro uh high school an uh Christmas well uh I uh Pittburg
an uh an uh anen I hitchhike uh ba uh (long pause) uh
Baltimore an stay all night an' en lIef for Florida
Speech like this is painful even to read, in part because it so

obviously troubles the speaker. Grammar seems forgotten, but
R. H. sees its absence and tries, pretty much in vain, to correct
himself. The capacity to use grammatical associations has gone.
R. H. could follow and understand conversations, but he could
hardly read a sentence and, when asked to listen to long stories,
he could not understand them when sentences turned into paragraphs.
His problem in understanding long speech matches his
inability to construct grammatical sentences. He could recog-
nize the meaning of a single sentence, but listening is a creative

process. The perceptual side of R. H. 's zipper-chunk seemed to
be normal, and he could recognize words or phrases. When he
heard another phrase, he could recognize it too. But without
grammar he could no longer imagine how to get from the first
recognition to the second. Comprehension, of course, broke
down. Ordinarily we can remember what a person said because
we understood him and we understood him because we constructed a chunk as we listened.
We can find similar problems in epilepsy patients whose
brains have been surgically severed so that the two halves no
longer communicate. Apparently the left half of the brain handles the grammatical associations that construct a chunk. (At
least this principle holds true for severe epileptics, but their
brains may not be organized in a normal way.) If we show a
split-brain patient a ball in such a way that only the right half of
the brain perceives it, the patient cannot name what he sees.
But if we show him a group of objects, and say, "Pick up the
ball," the patient can do it. He can recognize meaning, but
cannot produce speech. We also find that without grammar,
understanding soon falters. A split-brain patient's right hemisphere cannot construct chunks, and as with R. H., complicated
instructions soon overwhelm him. People whose interpretive
memory no longer uses grammatical associations resemble patients who have lost the coordinated use of their brain and must
rely on the silent right hemisphere.
Lost Meaning
Some people with dementia can read whole pages aloud,
pronouncing the words correctly and maintaining the basic
rhythms of speech, but they have no notion of what the words
mean. They are like amateur performers singing an Italian aria
nicely enough, but without a clue about their song's meaning.
200 /
REMEMBERING AND FORGElTING
These problems seemed so strange and so foreign to our theories

of understanding that until recently we barely knew how to
describe them, let alone analyze or explain them. Only in the
past few decades have people gotten a serious model of complex
actions without understanding. Computers do not know the
meaning of words, and yet they can generate some sentences.
The problems involved in programming computers to use language are exactly the problems facing a person who can no
longer use the recognition side of a linguistic chunk. The machine has no purpose and no notion of where it is now.
Freud coined the name agnosia, meaning a state of not
knowing, for the ruin of the recognition side of a chunk. It
contrasts with aphasia, the usual term for people who cannot
recall words and construct speech. We can understand the
differences between the recall failures of aphasia and the broken
recognition of agnosia by looking at the distinct problems these
people have with words about color. In color aphasia a person
cannot name a color, but can follow instructions about color. If
you tell a color aphasic to pick up the red balloon, he can
recognize the word red and pick up the appropriate balloon. But
if you hand him the balloon and ask him what color it is, he
cannot recall the name. In color agnosia a person cannot recognize the colors. A patient cannot follow instructions to pick the
red balloon from a group of balloons.
The problems are interpretive. There is nothing wrong with
the color aphasic's speech organs that blocks him from shaping
the word with his mouth. Indeed he can make the same sound
in other contexts, saying for example, "I read that book." The
color agnosic's problem is also interpretive. There is nothing
wrong with his eyes, nor is he color blind. Color aphasics can
continue to use colors as reminders on lower levels of memory.
For instance, a color aphasic could learn to select a red balloon
to receive a piece of candy. This latter task relies simply on
emotional memory (perceive color--evaluate as good to select).
Selecting a color and receiving a reward is the sort of task
Skinner proved repeatedly that even pigeons can learn. But
when we ask someone to select a red balloon, emotional evalu-
ations no longer matter. Now the person must associate the

symbol with perceptions.
When the problem concerns something as ordinary as colors, the difficulties of a color agnosic seem unspeakably bizarre.
Suppose instead of a pile of colored balloons we had a string of
forty binary digits, as in the chunking experiment that George
Miller described. We ask a person to pick out the pair of digits
equal to the number three:
0110000110111010100001011001100010010101
Many people cannot accomplish the task, although with practice
they could learn. Even without practice in binary numbers,
however, most of us could learn quickly to select a billiard ball
marked" 11" and receive a reward. To a color agnosic, colors
are as devoid of meaning as strings of binary digits.
Agnosia is an inability to interpret a perception. Often the
problems take subtle and specific forms. In facial agnosia-the
inability to recognize faces-a person might greet an old friend
by saying, "How do you do, I'm so-and-so," and then be
startled to hear a familiar voice reply, "Yes, dear. I know." The
agnosic can still recognize voices. The oddity of such behavior
seems to be increased by the survival of other levels of memory.
When I see a good friend, I know who it is (interpretive memory)
and feel affection (emotional memory). lithe interpretive memory disappeared, the emotion would persist. I would feel the
attraction and might want to introduce myself, to learn who this
intriguing person is. So I would perpetually introduce myself to
friends while continuing to ignore strangers.
In facial agnosia some people cannot recognize their own
face in a mirror; it is perhaps the most bizarre agnosia of all.
The notion of oneself does not disappear, but the connection
between that idea and the face in the mirror has gone.
Not all agnosias concern visual perception. In anosognosia
a person cannot recognize the fact that he is ill. He feels lousy,
acts sick and rundown, but cannot make the leap from the
symptoms to the perception, "I'm sick." There are also numer-
202 /
ous agnosias for sounds. The most damaging such agnosia, an

inability to recognize speech, is sometimes called word deafness
because the patient reacts to other sounds, but treats language
as empty noise. Some children are word deaf. Because they
cannot recognize speech, they naturally never learn to use it.
One study found that these children were just as willing to watch
television with a garbled soundtrack as one with a clear track.
We recognize so much that we never think about the need
for memory in such a task. Recognizing one's own illness seems
no more than a sensory event. A person feels awful, so he knows
he is sick. But of course we know that children often do not
realize they are sick. Their parents recognize the symptoms
before they do. Similarly, mature adults who have not been
seriously ill for years may respond to a sudden disease more
with confusion than recognition. Even the most basic experiences require remembering as well as sensation before a person
can interpret what he sees.
A general agnosia lay behind Oliver Sacks's famous case of
the "man who mistook his wife for a hat." The patient in this
case, called Dr. P, could not recognize his hat, wife, or anything
else. At one point the examining doctor handed Dr. P an object
and asked what it was. Dr. P could see the thing perfectly and
described it as "a continuous surface, infolded on itself. It
appears to have five outpouchings, if this is the word." But for
all his advanced geometry, P could not name the object.
Failure to name something often indicates a problem of
recall, an inability to construct a word. Here, however, Dr. P's
problem lay in an inability to know what word to construct. Like
all patients with damaged interpretive memories he could not
remember purposes and so could not imagine a use for the thing
held in his hand. Dr. P did finally name the test item when, by
chance, he slipped it on his hand and said, "My God, it's a
glove." Only after he saw its purpose could be identify the
strange object. We with our functioning memories move easily
between present state and remembered purpose, but Dr. P was
tied to the logic of his senses.
Missing Insights
Inborn problems in interpretive memory result in a failure
to achieve insight, but of course years may pass before even the
most basic problems become apparent. Often difficulties do not
appear until school, and probably many people pass their whole
lives without anyone realizing that a specific problem exists. We
all know people without any spatial, or mechanical, or musical
imagination. Does its absence indicate a lack of interest, a lack
of confidence, or some specific inability to construct memory's
top level?
In linguistic development the earliest signs cannot appear
before age three or four, the age at which most children begin to
speak from interpretive memory. Language development studies
have reported the case of a preschooler called John whose
speech at the age of three and one half reflected nothing beyond
factual memory. John needed a physical reminder to talk about
anything, including playful singing or chanting. Even if a parent
began singing a familiar song, John still needed a tangible
reminder to join in. To sing something like the eeyi-eeyi-o chorus
in Old Macdonald, John would have to ' have a toy associated
with the past experience of singing the chorus. The words by
themselves were not enough. When he played with his toys he
talked, but almost every word he spoke was an exact quotation
of something he had heard. He never had any insights that let
him modify his speech to suit the situation. As with normal
children, his speech grew longer. He went from one-word expressions like "mama," to two, "mama come," to three,
"mama come chair." As sentences grow longer, however, they
become increasingly unintelligible if not supported by grammar.
John could stick more words together, one behind the other, but
they never took on grammatical order and never served any
communicative purposes. The insights that transform cliches
into appropriate speech never came.
Fortunately, such dramatic problems are rare. Children
usually learn to talk without needing much help. Reading prob-
204 /
lems, however, are widespread. Our powers of speech are instinctive throughout the species, but reading is a cultural adaptation and we should not expect the genes that support reading
to be so universal. Inborn reading problems are called dyslexia.
At one time dyslexia was thought rare and attributed solely to
difficulties in perception. Recent work has found that the problem is more common than once supposed and there are many
types of dyslexia.
No one has yet made a detailed comparison of the workings
of memory and the forms of dyslexia; however, many of the
problems do match what the memory staircase leads us to
expect. Attentional dyslexia, for example, is an inability to pay
attention to a specific letter in a group of letters. If we show one
letter to a child with attentional dyslexia, he can name it, but if
we show the child the same letter surrounded by other letters he
has a much harder time. With an inability to attend to specific
letters in a string, a 'child's reading can stumble even before
reaching the level of factual memory.
Some children with good powers of attention can develop
problems based on a poor prompt recall for written words.
Although we understand sentences as unified chunks, we encounter their parts sequentially and must remember the parts
individually before perceiving their meaning. This need for
memory probably puts limits on everybody' s reading and listening abilities. Consider a sentence like:
When verbose Victor grew silent, John, the honest, honored,
once-famous, long-feared, grey-bearded , dandified old gentleman who had so impressed the electorate of all Alabama, rose
like a pitiful, tired, bankrupt, bedraggled refugee from Troy to
begin speaking pleadingly with the six bored voters of Lee's
Crossing.
This sentence has so many lists of details that readers forget

they are reading about John, let alone his characteristics. In
dyslexic cases powers of prompt recall for written words may
be so weak that people can have trouble understanding even
short sentences. They may find trouble even with a sentence

like:
Spot ran up the stairs.
In this sentence, Spot is a dog's name and understanding it
requires no memory for the rest of the sentence. Understanding
ran takes a little more memory. The reader must remember that
Spot is running. Understanding up puts yet more of a strain on
memory. The reader must remember first that Spot ran and then
must wait for the word stairs to learn what he ran up. A person
with limited prompt recall for written words can have trouble
remembering a word's context, and recognition depends on
context. In cases of reading students diagnosed as suffering
from deep dyslexia the students find it easiest to read nouns like
Spot, and hardest to read prepositions like up. With such a
troubled factual memory, a reading student cannot easily advance to reading on memory's interpretive level.
These students make reading errors similar to the errors
found in testing factual memory. In tests of factual memory a
person might read the word salt on a list, and recall instead its
common associate, pepper. Students whose reading is stuck on
the factual level can make similar errors. They might see the
word merry but speak its common associate Christmas. These
errors indicate reading without understanding.
Even if factual memory is in good working order, a person
may still have problems either recognizing or constructing
words. Some people can construct written words, but not recognize them. They read by spelling the words, letter by letter,
either silently or aloud. Often, these people can write and spell
well, but they have a hard time reading what they wrote.
Other reading students have problems recalling written
words. Instead of spelling them out, they must translate the
letters into sounds and sound them out. This system works well
for a word like hat but does not work for knight. These children
often spell poorly, but phonetically.
206 /
It is difficult to read a list of dyslexia symptoms and not
suspect that each of us has traces of at least some of its forms.

Our improved understanding of genetics has led to the discovery
of many more hereditary diseases. Our new understanding of
memory seems equally likely to find many previously unsuspected imbalances in interpretation. In most cases there is
probably no right balance. Different balances lead to different
strengths, making one person an accountant, another a mathematician, and yet letting both find fulfillment in their work.
13
AMNESIA:
THE FAILURE OF FACTUAL

MEMORY
And think no more of this night's accidents
But as the fierce vexation of a dream .
-Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream. c 1595
When reminders cease to trigger associations factual

memory has broken down. The inability to learn new reminders
is among the most common forms of pathological forgetting. It
changes life from steady adaptation and learning to something
much like an endless dream in which shadows pass without
explanation or expectation. The general term for this breakdown
is amnesia.
Popular dramatists and novelists have long used amnesia as
a plot device. The hero or heroine receives a blow on the head
and, upon coming to, cannot remember anything-except how
to speak, chase bandits, make love, and do the other things no
potboiler can do without. The amnesia lets the character move
through an alien world and have new adventures before receiving
another blow on the head and returning to a normal suburban
life back in Milksop Heights. We have seen this story so often
that people begin to assume it must have some basis; however,
this species of amnesia, the forgetting of one's own history
1207
without losing any other faculties of mind, is a writer's invention. The closest thing to it in real life, known as a fugue, is an
incident involving failure to use the emotional level of memory
and we will discuss it in the next chapter. Although potboiler
amnesia favors the forgetting of events that happened before the
onset of the problem, real amnesia almost always destroys the
ability to remember things that happen after the problem begins.
The ruin of factual memory also halts any further development of interpretive memory. A person can no longer have
insights into his own experience. The most terribly wounded
amnesics cannot achieve even the insight necessary for them to
realize that they have amnesia. They live trapped in a world
where experience does not improve their understanding. They
cannot organize their experiences into new chunks and cannot
describe any episodes in their life that happened after the onset
of amnesia. Because it. takes an insight into one's experiences
to realize there is a problem, patients with amnesia are often
completely unaware that their memory no longer works properly. They forget that they do not remember.
Although amnesiacs can no longer remember new facts long
enough to construct new chunks, they do not forget their old
chunks. Amnesia damages the functioning of factual memory,
but does not destroy existing powers of interpretive memory. In
contrast to one suffering from facial agnosia (a problem on the
interpretive level), a person with amnesia will find that people
become harder to recognize because they grow older and look
less like the way the amnesiac remembers them. In contrast to
one suffering from aphasia (another interpretive-level failure),
an amnesiac often grows quiet for another reason. He has less
and less to say. The amnesia appears to alienate him from his
surroundings.
When amnesiacs dQ talk they often invent their facts. These
fabrications are known as confabulation. Some amnesiacs confabulate extensively, telling stories about themselves and their
activities. The stories rely on chunks established before the
amnesia so the details sound plausible. A man will say that he
played pool last night. He did not, but at one time in the past he
Amnesia: The Failure of Factual Memory / 209
played pool often. As the confabulations become longer, however, the speaker forgets the story he is telling. The confabulation becomes incoherent, taking on the characteristics of a
dream in which setting and situation are liable to change in an
instant.
Factual memory helps keep normal people from slipping
into incoherence by using the steady presence of orienting
reminders. We take our orientation for granted and do not ask
how we know where we are, but we are surrounded by reminders
that evoke and provide associations that connect us to our
present. These reminders and their associations also serve to
keep us up to date. For example, if your child marries, you must
remember this new detail. If your car is stolen, you must not
plan to use it this evening. The continual learning of new facts
and the extinction of old ones is a part of every normal life.
With amnesiacs that process disappears. The old stays learned,
the new remains foreign. As time passes, less and less knowledge remains current. People grow older and less recognizable.
Neighborhoods, prices, and social values change. Television
programs come and go, and so do public officials. Amnesiacs
sometimes seem to live in the past, because they cannot remember anything that happened since some distant time, however
their nonorientation makes it hard to say they live in any time.
They are lost in timelessness.
Many of the symptoms of amnesia appear to be symptoms
of a massive disorientation. Amnesiacs often seem alert and
attentive, but their actions, like their stories, become incoherent. They appear motivated, but cannot sustain an activity.
Their behavior is reminiscent of the brain-damaged woman who
could no longer fillet fish, but the basis of the unproductive
activity is not quite the same. For amnesiacs, the problem lies
in sustaining attention for a task. An amnesiac who learned
chess before the onset of his memory problem, for example, can
still remember the purpose of chess and can talk about chess
positions. He may even start to playa game, but as the match
continues he forgets what he is doing. To continue playing he
must keep his attention on the board. The board itself shows the
current position, and in theory, an amnesiac might not need to

remember the game so far if he could analyze the position. After
all, computers play chess without remembering how a position
arose, but computers do not depend on attention. Normal chess
players are sometimes distracted, but can return their attention
to the game. Distracted amnesiacs forget the game exists. A
normal chess player sees the position and remembers how it
came to be. These associations help sustain a player's interest,
reminding him of the struggle that has already taken place on
the board and of any little strategic ambitions he may cherish.
Without these associations to help sustain interest in the game,
the activity of playing chess peters out. Apparently orientation
is as important as purpose in prolonged action.
People who suffer from transient amnesias because of blows
on the head or epileptic seizures often speak of the terrifying
disorientation. After a seizure, epileptics are disoriented and
have no memory of the incident. They need to be told: It is all
right; you have had a seizure, but it passed; now you are at such
and such a place. I know the disorientation of amnesia from
personal experience. I was once in a motorcycle accident in
which I banged my head. Fortunately, I wore a helmet, and
apart from a scar on my chin, the damage was extremely shortlived, but for perhaps an hour I was as disoriented and confused
as I ever hope to be. I forgot everything. I did not remember the
accident or the people who stopped to help or that I was on my
way to a clinic. I was not unconscious, just confused. Even now,
I can recall only one image from that blackout period. I am on
the front seat of a Land-Rover beside a man taking me to a
clinic. The grey metal dashboard rattles in front of me. The
strong brown arms of the driver emerge from white sleeves and
hold the steering wheel. I am thinking, "What is happening?
Why don't I know what is happening?" and I am terrified, as
terrified as I have ever been. I am not afraid of what will happen
or what these people in the Land-Rover might intend. I have no
thoughts about that. It is the complete alienation between myself
and my surroundings that terrifies me. That terrified arousal
probably explains why I can remember this single moment. For
years after this event I wrote stories that began with characters
suddenly coming to, with no knowledge or sense of where they
were or how they came to be there.
Even if an amnesiac's disorientation does not alarm him, its
terrible consequences distinguish amnesia from ordinary cases
of poor memory. Reminders may not remind us of much for
long, but we do know where we are. Factual recall depends on
the richness of its associations. Some experiences have so many
associations that many events can remind us of them. This
process of acquiring associations, known technically as memory
consolidation, can persist for years. If they form few associations with a particular experience, ordinary people in perfect
health forget about the event. In this sense, amnesia for most
things is routine. Yet, a precise reminder can suddenly trigger
old associations in normal people. They can visit a place they
have not seen or thought of in years, and suddenly remember
particular associations from decades ago.
Deliberate Cases
Since attention raises us to the factual memory level, memory falters when attention falters. In theory, serious brain damage could destroy a person's ability to pay attention to anything,
but in practice that problem seems unknown (unless this is the
brain damage that underlies autism). Voluntary inattention, however, is common. People can decide that happiness does not lie
in a particular direction, and look away. We can see this phenomenon in movie theaters as audience members deliberately
tum away from some approaching screen violence. These refusals show the intricacy of the memory staircase. A memory level
can be damaged objectively by a disruption in the brain circuitry,
or subjectively by its simply not being used. In the case of
factual memory we can develop amnesia for specific experiences
by deciding to stop our construction one step down, on the
emotional level. This form of amnesia is commonly referred to

as a repressed memory.
Because repression is an emotional response to a particular
event, it has proven difficult to study under laboratory conditions, but a recent experiment managed to create memory
repression. Subjects looked at slides of faces. Each slide listed
four brief descriptions of the person shown. Before viewing the
slides, the subjects received a shot of adrenalin. As we might
expect, their memories for the faces and the descriptions were
good. The subjects were aroused but not alarmed, and they paid
good attention to what they saw. A second group viewed the
same slides but became aroused in a different manner. They too
received an injection, but it was merely a salty solution with no
arousal effect. The real arousal came when in the course of the
slide show the subjects suddenly saw a series of horrifying
images that raised their emotional reactions. Researchers then
tested memory by showing the faces from the slides and asking
the subjects to recall the associated descriptions. Not surprisingly, the emotionally aroused group did not do as well as the
group aroused through adrenalin shots.
The subjects were attached to devices similar to lie detectors to measure their physiologic responses to the slides, and by
that measure both groups were equally aroused. Both groups
also completed questionnaires about their reactions , and that
test also scored the two groups as having similar levels of
arousal. So, by available standards, the two groups appeared to
have been equally aroused, but one group's memory was better.
Despite the fact that the experiment contains ambiguities and
the techniques used to measure arousal are far from perfect, the
results suggest the effects of repression. Traumatic arousal leads
to uncertain memories. Memory depends on active efforts at
construction. We have to pay attention to learn and pay attention
again to remember. We may not construct memories associated
with awful things as well as we construct other memories. We
should not expect emotional memory to encourage that pursuit
up to the level of factual memory. Even without pathological
amnesia, we can feel reluctant to remember.
The theory of deliberate repression of memory is Freud's

most famous contribution to memory studies. He considered
repression the keystone of his entire theory of neurosis; there
is, however, an important difference between refusing to climb
to memory's higher levels and the older idea of repressing a
memory. Freud took it for granted that all memories are stored
somewhere in the brain and that we automatically retrieve these
memories when we need them. In his clinical work, however, he
constantly saw people who could not remember important
things. What, he asked, caused this failure of retrieval? He
assumed there must be some active but unknown agent repressing the memory.
Freud's observation of deliberate amnesia was an accurate
and original contribution to memory theory, but his belief in
storage was misplaced. The memory staircase provides a different explanation. At the level of emotional memory, decisions
depend on a basic recognition that leaves us feeling attraction,
repulsion, curiosity, or boredom. Because we respond from
Proustian recognition alone, we do not know the historical basis
for our emotion. We have seen before that it takes courage to
climb to memory's higher levels. If an emotional association is
particularly frightening or one's temperament is timid, a person
can halt at memory's emotional level and remember no more.
Deliberate refusal resembles habituation. At the levels of factual
memory, habituation begins as a decision that something is not
worth attending to. Emotional refusal too begins as a decision
that the consequences of attending to something are too disagreeable to pursue.
The older theory assumed that if we could overcome a
block to memory, we would automatically remember and-if the
block had really been overcome-the memory would be accurate. The theory of refusal is less encouraging. We may summon
the courage and strength to try to remember, but the effort does
not guarantee success, especially for memories that we have
refused to think of for years. We cannot assume that our
memory will be historically correct when at last we recall some
long-refused fact. Everything we have learned about memory
214/
suggests that the result will mix fact and fiction into a compound
beyond sorting. If we deliberately refuse to remember an episode, we can suffer (or enjoy) a lifetime's amnesia for the event.
Case of K. F's Motorcycle Accident

We can form factual associations as a result of a double
take as well as because of immediate arousal. Some forms of
brain damage can damage the power of prompt recall. The
orientation reaction survives, but a person cannot make the
double take that should let him pay attention to something he
originally ignored. The first person studied with this problem is
known as patient K. F: The case was reported in 1969 by a pair
of British researchers, Elizabeth Warrington and Tim Shallice.
K. F. suffered brain damage in a motorcycle accident.
Generally, he does well, but the accident almost destroyed his
prompt recall of sounds. Tests show a recency effect for auditory
stimuli of only one item. If he hears a string of two digits-say
6, 3-he can recall only the 3. He has already forgotten the 6.
Although serious, it is not a ruinous problem; only when life
gets complicated does K. F. exhibit the disorientation that
comes from damaged prompt recall. A number of tests were
given in order to examine this problem. An example of such a
study is in the use of plastic cutouts-triangles, squares, and
circles of various sizes and colors. If an examiner said, "Touch
the large green circle," K. F. could do it. He could also follow
instructions if they were given in sequence, as in, "Take the
small red triangle and touch it against the large green circle."
Apparently he could organize these instructions into a chunk
and use them. But if examiners gave these same instructions in
reverse sequence-' 'Touch the large green circle with the small
red triangle"-K. F. could not follow them. A close look at that
sentence shows us where K. F. ' s problem lies. Simple as the
sentence seems, it requires prompt recall. The first item (large
green circle) depends on the second item (small red triangle).

K. F. can pick up the triangle , but by then he has forgotten what
he should do with it. When he was first diagnosed, his case
seemed unique. Since then , several similar cases have appeared.
Because prompt recall is only one basis for developing
factual associations, this form of brain damage does not lead to
complete amnesia. K. F. likes to follow current events and can
discuss the latest news. Often he seems perfectly normal, but
then someone recites something like a phone number and his
shaky grip on reality becomes apparent. He forgets the number
as it is still being spoken.
Case of H. M. 's Surgery

We have already mentioned the most notorious case of
amnesia in memory studies, the story of patient H. M. In 1953,
H. M. underwent radical brain surgery to treat epilepsy. Following the operation he never again learned a new association. By
terrible misjudgment, the surgeon had destroyed both of H . M. 's
hippocampuses, exactly those parts of the brain necessary to
form new factual associations. It is as though the operation had
sliced through the memory staircase at the factual level. Everything below the slice continues to function; nothing has appeared
above the cut. H. M. continues to enjoy a good memory for the
details of his life up until three weeks before the operation. And
because the surgery did not damage his powers of attention, he
continues to orient toward surprises and tests show normal
prompt recall.
Because ofthe precision of the damage, H. M.'s is the most
closely studied case in the history of amnesia. It established
positively that past reminders continue to function in amnesia,
but that amnesia destroys the ability to learn new reminders.
The forgetting of the three weeks before the brain damage is
called retrograde (or retroactive) amnesia. Amnesiacs usually
216/ REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING
do suffer some forgetting of associations that preceded the

injury, although often it is mild. An old speculation, known as
Ribot's conjecture, holds that retrograde amnesia affects older
memories less than memories for events that occurred just
before the injury. The conjecture is unproven, but widely supported by clinical observation. Doctors used to consider retrograde amnesia as a loss of stored memories. That explanation
began to falter as more and more cases showed spontaneous
recovery and rapid reversal. The victims could not recover from
the amnesia if they really stored memories and the stores had
really been lost.
Amnesia appears to disrupt the brain's capacity to change
its circuitry and form new factual associations . Thus, amnesiacs
cannot recall new experiences after a trauma because they form
no associations with the context of those experiences. At the
same time , experiences "immediately before the trauma may still
have so few associations that nothing reminds an amnesiac of
them. An analysis of retrograde amnesia published in 1984 found
that it is indeed a failure of cues and that the more severe the
amnesia the farther back in time the retrograde amnesia extends.
Throughout our lives we add new associations to some old
memories, associating them with later occasions when we were
reminded of them. It seems more like a process of enriching
than of congealing or consolidating. Retrograde amnesia affects
those associations that time has not yet enriched sufficiently.
Sometimes in the general blank of retrograde amnesia a person
will have an island of recollection about a particularly important
event.
One of the most startling findings about H. M. turned up a
significant improvement in IQ. Before the operation his intelligence was normal but undistinguished, almost perfectly average.
Tests after the operation scored him in the top third of the
population. Few discoveries could more profoundly challenge
the assumptions that underlie measures of intelligence, for
H. M. can barely function. He is so disoriented , so unable to
learn the most basic associations, that a person who did not
know his history would conclude that H. M. was probably the
least intelligent fellow he had ever met. Yet his IQ score went
up.
Intelligence tests deliberately avoid measuring the concrete
knowledge -that comes with experience. Recognition and reminders are exactly what the test authors try not to measure
because one person may not have had the experience to know
particular facts or recognize particular things. (No IQ test has
ever successfully abolished all questions that call for concrete
knowledge.) IQ tests challenge a person's ability to use grammatical associations and generalized facts. Amnesiacs retain
their ability to use previously established grammatical associations and their generalized knowledge continues to grow.
We saw that generalized learning comes when we do not
pay attention to the context of an experience. For example, if I
had not paid so much attention to the situation in which I learned
the word punctual, its meaning for me would be more general.
Tests have shown that amnesiacs have nearly normal abilities to
learn details without an explicit context. Some studies have
tested the capacity of amnesiacs to remember words from lists.
During recall they are as likely to remember a word from an
earlier list as from the list they have . just heard. This same
phenomenon accompanies generalized learning in normal people.
Tests of amnesiac recognition do show a general bias toward
past experience, but with no memory for the details of the
experience. Experimenters presented subjects with a list and
afterward forced the subjects to study word pairs and choose
between the two words, guessing which word they saw before.
Under these conditions, amnesiacs will recognize a word from
the studied list almost as reliably as normal subjects, but the
amnesiacs do not remember the learning episode; they just
know.
H. M. has learned things since 1953, but he has no idea how
he knows them. He also shows good motor memory. As we have
seen, motor memory, like learning to ride a bicycle, is so basic
that even butterflies can use it. We saw that babies use it to suck
their thumbs, so we would not expect damage high up the
218/
staircase to disrupt it. H. M. 's still survives. He has learned a

so-called stylus maze, a maze that one explores with a pointer.
The explorer cannot see the maze, but simply examines it by
feel. Learning depends on motor memory. H. M. experimented
with such a maze several times. Each time he protested that he
had never seen the maze before, and yet he improved. Finally,
he could put a pointer in the maze and move it directly to the
exit point without making an error, objecting all the while that
he had never touched the maze before and could not possibly
solve it.
Alcoholic Cases
Long-term amnesias can have many causes, including a
thiamin deficiency (usually associated with alcoholism), prolonged lack of oxygen (sometimes following a heart attack), and
a severe blow to the head. The most widely studied form of
amnesia comes from alcoholism and is known as Korsakoff's
syndrome. The worst cases are sometimes called Korsakoff's
psychosis. It is a progressive disease, and the extent of its
damage varies. Even short bouts of drunkenness can leave a
person amnesic for the period of intoxication, and patients with
Korsakoff's syndrome usually suffer from a retrograde amnesia
more severe than the three-week loss of patient H. M.
Many of their symptoms match those of H. M. They are
perpetually disoriented. Usually their disease forces them to live
in a hospital. Since they came to the hospital after the amnesia
began, they have no memory of being in a hospital or knowledge
of why they are there. They do not recognize their doctors or
nurses, even after years of care. At the same time, as a mercy
from generalized memory, the hospital setting comes to seem
vaguely familiar, so their disorientation is more dreamlike than
frightening. They almost always confabulate, sometimes inces-
santly, as they invent an incoherent world in which the present

reminds them only of places and people long past.
Emotional memory continues to function in amnesiac patients. A French psychologist, Edouard Claparede, performed
an experiment in 1911 on a woman with Korsakoff's syndrome.
He hid a pin in his fingers, reached for her hand, and stuck her.
Later, he again reached toward her hand, and she pulled her
hand back. Claparede pressed her for an explanation of the
withdrawn hand. She, of course, could not remember the fact of
having been stuck, but the Proustian recognition of potential
pain survived. The best explanation the woman could provide
for her behavior was a generalized remark: "Sometimes pins are
hidden in people's hands."
In his book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,
Oliver Sacks tells of a patient with Korsakoff's syndrome who ,
while living in the 1980s, could remember nothing he had learned
since 1945. Yet he formed a powerful new emotional relationship
with his brother. Although dead to new facts , his emotional
memory continued to develop, permitting experiences and behavior unknown to the man in 1945.
The survival of emotional memory in amnesia is exactly
what the memory staircase leads us to expect. In many ways,
amnesia reduces a person to intellectual infancy. He lives and
learns as a baby does. One 1985 article on amnesia noted, "The
memory tests in which infants [up to about their first birthday]
succeeded were similar to those on which amnesic patients
demonstrated preserved mental abilities, whereas those tests on
which infants failed , amnesic patients also displayed a profound
impairment." But these people are not children, and they do not
outgrow the limits of their memories.
14
FORGEI'I'ING
TO REMEMBER:
THE FAILURE OF
EMOTIONAL MEMORY
This counsel [to "know thyself"] has been often given
with serious dignity, and often received with appearance
of conviction; but as very few can search deep into their
own minds without meeting what they wish to hide from
themselves, scarce any man persists in cultivating such
disagreeable acquaintance , but draws the veil again between his eyes and his heart, leaves his passions and
appetites as he found them, and advises others to look
into themselves.
-Samuel Johnson, The Idler #27 , 1758
When children construct levels of memory, they

come more profoundly into contact with the world beyond their
skins. Forgetting retreats from that contact. Even ordinary
forgetting is a transitory slipping of the grip. That sense of
alienation from the truth of things makes absentmindedness so
frustrating. It adds a sense of incompetence to an already
irritating confusion. The sight of pathological forgetting is even
more terrifying because we can see a person has lost hold of
220/
Forgetting to Remember: The Failure of Emotional Memory / 221
something real. Creative understanding disappears when one

forgets chunks; factual associations go next, leaving a person
with only emotional memory. At that level one can still learn,
still form and develop emotional bonds with the world. When
emotional memory fails too, contact with reality ends.
Physical brain damage that destroys emotional memory
would be so devastating that it is hard to imagine. A person
would either be comatose or so retarded as to be nearly immobile. Thus, the only examples we can study of people who forgo
their emotional memory are neurotics. When they reject the use
of emotional memory, they are really trying to reject themselves
and the world. People who have abandoned emotional memory
might no longer turn their noses from the smell of ammonia or
might even prefer to bark like a dog rather than speak English.
Bizarre as these responses sound, they have become a
familiar part of the folklore. We treat hypnotism's strange powers as a scientifically mystical way to "refresh" memory, or as
light entertainment. We could just as easily consider them as
warnings. When the stage hypnotist tells a person, "I am going
to hand you a bouquet of roses , '.~ the audience laughs as the
subject takes a rag soaked in ammonia and sniffs it deeply, as
though finding pleasure. If a stolid banker appears on stage and
barks like a dog or a large man acts like a seductive woman, the
audience treats it as mere amusement. Stage hypnotism should
not be taken seriously, we feel.
If the same act were performed in another spirit, however,
it could be terrifying. I once watched an African magician
demonstrate hypnotism and nobody laughed. The performance
was simple, yet its point was super-serious: We can lose contact
with the world in an instant. The magician asked his audience of
students to nominate a "volunteer" for the demonstration, and
a boy was sent forward. He grinned a little sheepishly as his
friends laughed and stirred in their seats. The magician sat the
boy on a table and the student's eyes suddenly lost their sparkle,
for no clear reason that I could see. The magician was talking,
giving instructions too quickly for me to follow. The boy began
to slip backward until he was lying immobile on the table. The
222 /
magician continued his talk, now directing it toward the audience, and at first most people paid more attention to him than to
the student who lay on the table. But slowly eyes shifted to the
boy. I was a little puzzled. I expected more from a display of
hypnotism. Some of the audience called to their friend; no reply.
Slowly the cumulative strangeness of the scene began to affect
me. The boy did nothing and I thought, well, do something. And
he did nothing. The magician babbled on about the mystery of
hypnotism, and the boy still did nothing. More time, more
nothing. And still nothing until finally it sank in: He is going to
do nothing. The boy was gone, out of touch . He could lie there
forever like a corpse at a wake. The noise, the heat, and the
presence of friends had lost their hold on him.
To recall his subject to life the hypnotist blew cigarette
smoke in his face. The boy jerked up, and then stumbled back
to his classmates with a walk as unsteady as Lazarus's after his
time in the tomb. Only when I saw the stupor in the face of the
boy returning to his seat did I know for sure that he had not
been faking. Somehow, without any apparent effort, he had
been transformed from grinning student into a totally disoriented
boy.
-.
Sometimes people can abolish their own orientation through
self-hypnotism. They suggest to themselves that the world is
other than it is, and memory tumbles. They may suggest to
themselves a new identity. Self-hypnotism on this level seldom
turns a person into a barking dog, but it changes the way he
responds to perceptions. The most familiar examples of this
form of change come during play. A child who is normally
frightened of people in costume, may-when in a scary Halloween costume of his own-suddenly assume the identity suggested by his dress and roar back at witches and goblins. Or
self-hypnotism can suggest that unwanted perceptions do not
exist. In ordinary experience we call these withdrawals daydreaming. Bored students imagine a world of their own and
many a television viewer steps into a private fantasy as soon as
the commercials begin. Paradoxically, then, the destruction of
all memory begins with a decision at memory's highest level
Forgetting to Remember: The Failure of Emotional Memory I 223
that the world and oneself are no longer compatible. A person

wishes the world were some other way, and changes that wish
into experience. Recognition disappears; hallucinations begin.
Societies have recognized the symptoms of such breakdowns for thousands of years and diagnosed them variously as
devil possession, malingering, laziness, self-pity, cowardice,
lack of will, obstinacy, contrariness, and irresponsibility. The
list does not show much sympathy for the sufferer; devil possession is the least judgmental diagnosis of the lot. A breakdown
this profound can signal memory's complete failure. Memory
can no longer use a person's desires and understanding to
answer the question, "What should I do now?"
Society always limits its members' freedom, and sometimes
it tells them precisely what they must do. This power leads to
the tensions between duty and desire, between the group and
the individual, that characterize every society. Sometimes this
tension becomes so overpowering that. a person abandons memory altogether. The people most likely to suffer this final memory loss, naturally, are the ones most constrained and channeled
by society-notably women, dependent children old enough to
know their own minds, soldiers, and minority groups. Although
I normally praise the orienting powers of the higher memory
levels, orientation may not seem desirable if life and the world
become a nightmare.
Suppose, for example, you are a soldier about to go over
the top in a charge against enemy machine guns. You probably
do not want to go, but your sergeant and your pride say you
must. Under such pressure, you might forget the identity that
entraps you and start to flee. This breakdown is as close as
forgetting ever gets to potboiler amnesia, but in books and
movies these incidents usually begin with a blow to the head. In
real life they begin with the rejection of self and circumstance.
The technical name for this kind of forgetting is fugue, meaning
flight, because along with the loss of identity, a person desperately wants to go somewhere else. Often people in a fugue
discover they have forgotten their identity only when somebody
224 /
asks them for their name and they realize that they do not know
it.
Most fugues are short lived, lasting no more than a few
hours, and they often have some element of absurdly inappropriate behavior about them. In one such case, a woman called
I. J. was at a party with her husband. She enjoyed it because the
gathering had many men who flirted with her, but she reluctantly
left when her husband said they must. They were visitors in
town, and back at the hotel I. J. entered a fugue state. She
returned to the hotel lobby and was picked up by another guest.
In his room they had intercourse numerous times, and during
the whole interlude I. J. talked about the weather. Her husband
had once advised her that if a man tried to pick her up she
should talk about the weather.
In another case a fugue lasted for perhaps only an hour. In
this incident a light-skinned black called C. D. was visiting a
city where he bumped into a white friend and his white girl
friend. One of the men suggested they go horseback riding, but
the girl objected, saying she would not ride with a Creole. C. D.
was stung to the quick" but he remembered a lynching he had
witnessed and said nothing. Instead he briefly entered a fugue
state in which he was completely at a loss to know who or where
he was.
Fugue is probably most common among soldiers in or
bound for combat. During World War II 5 percent of American
neuropsychiatric patients in the South Pacific suffered from it.
One case of unusually long duration lasted thirty-two days. A
soldier, known as A. B. in the case studies, was on a raiding
party in Africa when a German dive bomber came straight
toward him. A. B. should have fired at the plane, but his hand
froze on the gun. He thought to himself, "I can't take it. I have
to get out of here. I'm yellow. I'm a coward." The next thing he
knew he was in a hospital in Syria hundreds of miles to the east
and somebody was asking him his name. In his fugue he had fled
far from the scene of battle. A. B. had almost no memory for
those days of escape, but while in the hospital he himself likened
his fugue state to being hypnotized.
The Fugue of Louise L.

Fugues are usually only partial. A person wants to flee and
forgets one identity, but does not replace it with a new one.
Recently, however, a military doctor reported an unusually
complete fugue case in which the patient, Louise L., did invent
a new identity. This exchange permitted Louise a range of
astonishing accomplishments as she took both the name and
talents of her new persona. Louise had, in effect, hypnotized
herself and given herself a new set of skills. After her fugue a
psychiatrist gave Louise a battery of tests. Measuring hypnotizability on a scale from 1 to 5, she scored a 5.
Louise was a teenage girl trapped in an unhappy situation.
Her parents had recently divorced, and during that process she
had five or six hallucinations in which she saw her mother lying
in a pool of blood. Once during a hallucination Louise began
screaming in the middle of class. Her mother married an enlisted
man and Louise disapproved. After the marriage, Louise had
several fainting spells in school. The family was then transferred
to a remote overseas military post. While she was living in this
isolated area Louise underwent her extraordinary fugue.
It began with an especially unhappy experience at a school
dance. The school French Club organized a kissing booth, and
Louise joined in the project; the other girls then left her alone in
the booth. To add more humiliation to her loneliness, almost
nobody bought a kiss from her. The next night, after a picnic,
Louise, her sister, and a girlfriend went for a walk. They met
two boys and the other girls abandoned Louise to go off with
them. Not knowing what to do, Louise climbed a tree and
wished to heaven she could be somewhere else. Later she
reported that while up in the tree she said to herself, "I am
going to leave this place. I don't know how, but I will, and I'm
not going to come back until I have healed the hurt and until
people realize I have feelings. I am not a nobody, a marionette
on a stage." As she grew more angry she remembered a nightmare she had had of a French woman trapped in a burning
226 /
pioneer's cabin. Recalling the dream, Louise said to the woman,

"Take my place. "
When Louise came down from the tree she was in a stupor.
Her sister got her home in a taxi. Louise did not recognize her
family; she spoke mainly French and her English had a heavy
French accent. She claimed to be Jeanne Marie Theresa Le
Grand Ducourtieux, and she was determined to go to Marietta,
Ohio, to join her husband. She thought the date was some time
around 1803, and she did not use words or facts that post-dated
that era.
The fugue lasted for several days, and during that time
Louise's family had to actively keep her from trying to get to
Marietta. "Jeanne" disliked the modem clothes she wore and
sewed herself a sun bonnet and a long calico skirt. She cooked
ham and French pastry for her amazed family. Previously,
Louise had failed even to sew buttons on straight, and her
parents also considered cooking beyond her. Her new abilities
probably resulted from sudden attention. Louise could not be
bothered to sew or cook well, but "Jeanne" concentrated on
her task. The French she spoke was less astounding. She had
studied it since fourth grade and was active in the French Club.
William James said fugues were trances of unusually long
duration, and we have learned nothing to question his opinion.
Louise's hypnotic susceptibility and her deliberate decision to
abandon her identity argue that she replaced recognition with a
world of her own suggestion. Surely the most surprising part of
"Jeanne's" behavior was her acquisition of new skills. It suggests that people have a potential to do many things they never
do. Because remembering is active, it can change if we suddenly
pay attention to new things and ignore old distractions. With a
change in ambition as drastic as that of Louise's fugue, it is as
though a new person had taken over the memory levels.
Louise seems to have quit her fugue after less than a week
because her mother had adapted to the change too well. Her
mother acted as though she preferred having a hard-working
helpful "Jeanne" around the house, and she showed no hint of
awareness that her daughter's problem might indicate serious
difficulties within the family. Louise found that she had become
an unusually helpful daughter, and that result had not been the
purpose of her attempted escape.
The Hysteria of Anna O.

An even more debilitating self-hypnosis leads to lost perception, hallucination, and inability to function. It is commonly
called hysteria. In ordinary speech, the term usually means no
more than an overly emotional or fearful reaction. In psychiatric
history's classic cases, hysteria substitutes suggestion for recognition. Instead of wanting to flee, hysterics may become
nearly immobile.
A famous case in psychiatric literature is the hysteria of a
young Viennese woman named Bertha Pappenheim, referred to
by Sigmund Freud and his colleague Joseph Breuer as Anna O.
Anna became Breuer's patient in 1880. Freud learned of her
case only after the fact, but it led him to the technique of letting
patients talk about their problems.
As with Louise L., Anna 0., was highly hypnotizable.
During her years of treatment Breuer hypnotized her on an
almost daily basis for hours at a time and she seems to have
excelled at self-hypnosis too. Before the onset of her hysteria
she had systematically hallucinated an alternate world that she
called her "private theater." Anna lived in a fairy-tale domain
of her own imagination and might have moved forever into a
dream world, like one of Tennessee Williams's southern belles,
had her father not, in July 1880, become fatally ill with tuberculosis. Anna and her mother shared nursing duties, and it became
essential that Anna stay alert and tend to the invalid.
Anna's life bore certain thematic resemblances to Louise's.
Both were trapped in situations where memory served only to
remind them of their prison. Louise was young and lived with
her family on a remote island. Anna was older than Louise
(twenty-one), and today there would be no question about such

a bright, capable woman going off to seek her fortune, but the
Vienna of her day expected complete self-denial from women.
Anna's life rested on duty, and she refused ever to show emotion. She spent her days tending to her dying father, never giving
way to anger, refusing even to let her father see her tears. Anna
seems to have found no relief, no soldier's night off to unwind
and laugh about respected superiors. Nor did she try to personalize her duty , to change it to desire. It is possible to tend to a
dying person with love and even to find pleasure in the intimacy
it brings, but Anna did not understand duty that way. She seems
to have viewed it as a substitute for her own desires. If left to
choose for herself, she would have developed in other ways, but
she was not left to choose. She accepted her fate , although
privately she was miserable about not having her own way.
Thirty years later, looking back on this period, she wrote in a
letter, "How happy are present-day girls! I remember how
difficult people made it for me at this age trying to keep me from
the way that was right for me." Yet for all her resentment, Anna
did not rebel-not overtly at any rate.
The illness of her father brought Anna's impotence to a
crisis. It took all her time and concentration to attend to him.
She could no longer retreat into her private theater, but she
could not bear her new life either. Her first reported symptom
of the change was an hysterical cough. Once while ministering
to her father she heard an orchestra playing in a house across
the way. Anna briefly wished she could be at the party, and then
felt guilty for wanting to dance while her father lay in such a
state. She coughed instead, and from then on, she coughed
whenever she heard music.
This little change typified the way Anna altered her emotional memory. She heard music-perhaps one of Johann
Strauss's new waltzes-and associated the music with happiness. As her thoughts climbed the memory levels, she remembered her father and her duty and she despised her wish for fun.
Her self-contempt changed the association she had with music:
Forgetting to Remember: The Failure of Emotional Memory I 229

TRIGGER
EJ-
MEMORY
ACTION
perceive
music
evaluate as
guilt inducing
-E}
Because she evaluated so many things as guilt inducing, she was

prone to continual nervous coughing.
Finally, in December, after half a year of this duty, Anna
took to her bed. She did not live in the constant deep trance of
Louise L. Instead, Anna flickered between memory and suggestion. When she used some memory, Anna was much her usual
self except that she stayed in bed and had a bag of bizarre
behaviors, like coughing at the sound of music, revulsion at the
sight of water, and speaking only in English. During her loathing
of water she survived only by eating fruits, and her use of
English forced the Viennese family to hire an English-speaking
governess. When suggestion took over completely Anna lost her
powers of recognition and even perception. When her recognition powers failed, she did not see people and did not hear them.
Dr. Breuer managed to break through to her and could maintain
contact by steady speech, but Anna did not perceive strangers.
Once Breuer brought a colleague to observe her, and she literally
did not see the man. She discovered the second doctor only
when, like my African magician, he blew cigar smoke in her
face. She looked around to find the source of the smoke and
suddenly saw the stranger. She began to run and fell unconscious onto the floor.
Anna O. eventually overcame her hysteria and became an
important figure in Austria's feminist movement. Like Louise,
she seems largely to have recovered on her own, although her
changing circumstances surely helped. Her father died; she went

into a sanitarium where she had no duties. Breuer's intensive
therapy helped relieve her of some symptoms, but others replaced them, and when he stopped her treatment, after two
years, she was no better than when she began. Many more years
were to pass before she could stand on her own.
As with refusals to construct factual memories, the fugue
cases and the hysteria of Anna O. indicate that emotional
memory failures need not have objective causes. The brain may
be in working order, but a person prefers not to remember.
Memory focuses intensively on the world as it is, but often that
world is not what we would like it to be. These problems seem
beyond a doctor's solution. Breuer could listen and help abolish
particular hysterical symptoms. Louise's doctor could encourage her growing discontent with "Jeanne's" popularity. But
Breuer could do nothing directly about the plight of middle-class
women in Viennese society, and Louise's doctor could not
repair his patient's isolation and family snarl. Both Anna and
Louise saved themselves, and perhaps it could be no other way.
To sustain memory people must find something in themselves or
in the world that strikes them as worth remembering.
15
FORGEI'I1NG
AND OLD AGE
I'm facing the big one, Sidney. Number four-oh. In two
freaking weeks I'll be middle-aged! ... I can't get my
head off my fortieth. I'm taking it real hard. Thank God
for this vacation , take my mind off middle age. First thing
goes is your memory.
-Joseph Wambaugh,
The Secrets of Harry Bright, 1985
Even when we stay eager to live and ready to learn,

time passes. We grow old. Many fatalists hold that senility is
inevitable if you live long enough. Shakespeare's soliloquy about
the seven ages of man agrees. The melancholy Jacques describes
a cycle in which morning-faced schoolchildren ultimately return
to a second childishness where foolish thoughts accompany a
ruined body toward oblivion. Modem folklore continues to
preach that memory's ruin is inevitable by the time a person
reaches seventy or eighty. We have had to add the "or eighty"
clause because the country has plenty of keen-witted seventyyear-olds. The exceptions that "prove" the rule have grown so
much in evidence that they have modified the rule. Soon the
notion of inevitable senility is likely to seem as absurd as the
learned proofs that women cannot think scientifically.
Somewhere between Shakespeare's day and our own, this
prejudice against the old took on a scientific-sounding justification: Neurons in the brain die and are not replaced; by the time
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232 /
a person reaches seventy (or eighty) so many neurons have died

that the mind is bound to fail. This notion ignores how many
cells the brain has. Even over a seventy-year period, the random
daily destruction of cells simply could not do the damage people
credit. We have so many cells that even at a loss rate of one
million per day we would have lost only a few percent by age
seventy.
Serious memory problems arising from cell death usually
follow a stroke. These can kill a large group of cells in a
concentrated area and break a memory circuit. The effects of
stroke are random and much depends on where the stroke
occurs. Sometimes a stroke damages an area but the brain
quickly recovers because the corresponding circuit in the other
hemisphere continues to function. In other cases the circuits in
the two hemispheres do not appear to have developed equallywe are not sure why--:-and damage is serious and lasting. Many
agnosias and aphasias are caused by stroke. The other terrible
destroyer of memory is dementia. This disease is less a killer of
neurons than a tangIer and confuser ofthem. It snarls and blocks
the memory circuit without killing it outright.
Dementia is an uncommon disease, but it brings a devastating loss of previous mental abilities. It is not limited to the
elderly, although true to their prejudices against the elderly,
doctors called the disease pre-senile dementia when younger
people contracted it, and assumed it had a different cause than
the senile dementia of the elderly. Only recently have doctors
discovered that the two are the same thing. Alzheimer's disease,
as the condition has come to be called, is the most common
form of dementia. It appears to destroy those areas of the brain,
particularly the hippocampus , that control levels above emotional memory, damaging factual memory directly and thereby
undermining interpretive memory. But diagnosing Alzheimer's
disease is still uncertain and not every elderly person with
memory difficulties suffers from it. A survey of recent scholarly
articles about Alzheimer's disease shows that a high proportion
report new tests and techniques to aid in diagnosis. Although
such abundance may sound good, in medicine it usually means
Forgetting and Old Age / 233
that no single test or set of tests is truly satisfactory. When one

is found, it will become standard. At present, positive diagnosis
requires an examination of the brain after death. Doctors can
easily confuse overmedication and more specific functional disorders with Alzheimer's disease. As terrifying as Alzheimer's
disease is, it is still rare, seriously affecting only a few percent
of the population. For the majority, the news about memory and
aging is good! If you stay interested, you stay interesting.
Is Senility Inevitable?
In recent years, memory studies have taken a new look at
memory among the elderly. With America's large popUlation of
healthy seventy-year-olds and older, it has become increasingly
apparent that although some people do suffer catastrophic memory losses, many others do not. Science has begun to ask
whether the entire notion of senility could be a myth.
One elaborate memory experiment with the elderly tried to
teach them the artificial memory of the ancients. Surprisingly,
the subjects found the method easy to learn. Their age became
a help because they already had plenty of long experiences with
places and they did not have to spend time learning spaces,
whereas in the ancient world, young students of rhetoric had to
concentrate hard just to learn the places they wished to "walk
through. " Less surprisingly, it was not clear what benefit artificial memory has to offer the elderly. They too have access to
paper and can jot down shopping lists and other things that
artificial memory once organized. Even after the lessons, the
elderly did not spontaneously add artificial memory techniques
to their repertoire. The experiment did yield two lasting lessons,
however. It demonstrated that the elderly can still use their
memories in disciplined, precise ways. It also proved that you
can teach old dogs new tricks. The difficulty in teaching novelties to the elderly lies in persuading them to make the effort.
234 I
When learning something seems important, as with improving

memory, they catch on quickly.
Success at teaching the old to learn new skills raises questions about an especially widespread belief about the memory
of the elderly. The old, we hear, have good memories for the
long ago, but poor memories for recent events. Careful study,
however, has found that, except among the significantly depressed, the elderly show no measurable difference between the
memory for the recent and long past. I have to say "careful
study" because sloppy studies do report differences. If you ask
old people where they were when they heard about the attack
on Pearl Harbor, they can tell you. If you ask what they had for
lunch last Thesday, they do not remember. The obvious difference lies in the level of interest.
This finding is bound to surprise many people. It denies one
of the most wide-spread beliefs about the memory of the elderly.
When speaking about the memory of the elderly, many people
distinguish between "long-term" and "short-term" memories.
This commonplace distinction, however, is a creation of the
storage metaphor, referring as it does to long- and short-term
storage. Because we have found that nothing is stored, we
should not be surprised to discover that the long- and short-term
distinction does not hold up in careful studies. Memories for
recent and for long-ago events depend on the same constructive
abilities and the same emotional, factual, and interpretive levels
of memory. If a person can still remember past events well and
still tell interesting stories about the long ago, he has the equipment to do the same for more recent events. Failure to remember
the present in such cases suggests a failure to pay attention to
the present, not an inability to learn new details.
Reduced interest does not imply a lost capacity for attention. The two forms of attention that carry a person of any age
to the factual memory level are prompt recall and the orientation
reaction. Prompt recall appears to show no lessening with age,
and the orientation reaction persists as well. I have seen very
old people literally on their death bed come to attention when
an unexpected friend came through the door. A general disap-
pearance or weakening of the orientation reaction in a person of

any age probably indicates depression. Factual and interpretive
memory depend on attention, which in tum requires a healthy
interest and curiosity. Depression severely reduces a person's
attention to the environment and harms memory even though
the brain has no organic problems.
Depression accounts for many of the familiar problems
among the aged. One study questioned the families and elderly
outpatients at a psychiatric clinic about the patients' memories.
Patients also had their memories tested. To the surprise of the
researchers, tests showed that by objective standards patients
who complained of failing memory had no worse memories than
those patients who were not troubled by memory problems.
Patients worried about their memories, however, tended to be
significantly more depressed. These findings can mean two
things. The depression could imply that memory is fine, but the
person is so down on himself that he just assumes a serious
problem lies behind any evidence of faltering memory. It could
also be that depression actively interferes with memory. Both
factors are probably at work.
I have seen the effects of depression on my own memory.
For many years I have played a mental game with myself. I pick
a bygone date at random and try to remember a conversation I
had on that date. Usually I can remember something that I heard
said around that time, but through this game I have discovered
two black holes in my life, periods in which I draw a blank and
remember little or nothing. Both of those times were periods of
depression over the way my life was going. Those were young
times in my life and I did not even realize that my memory was
not up to par, but if I had been elderly I might well have been
more alert to the notion of memory difficulties and interpreted
them as proof of my declining mental powers. No doubt such a
conclusion would have deepened my depression. The deepened
depression would have slowed my memory even more. I would
have become still more depressed. This dreadful cycle can
sustain itself endlessly.
The End of Fatalism

Laboratory testing has turned up one important difference
between the memory of youth and that of old age. Experiments
with list learning showed that recall powers decline over the
whole age range , but recognition powers remain stable. These
experiments used meaningless lists and suggest that over a
lifetime memory's balance shifts in favor of meaning. In youth,
the world is unknown and confusing. We need to learn how the
world is and then try to make sense of it. As we grow older, we
know more about how the world works and need to know how
something fits in with past experience. Recognition , therefore,
does not fade . Its stability supports the one favorable stereotype
about the elderly-they have seen much and know the implications of events.
Research has not destroyed all the old notions about memory and aging nor declared them to be purest nonsense. It does,
however, deny the fatalism that accompanied the notions. Many
of the things known about normal memory do have implications
for old age:
Absentmindedness results from automatic or routine
behavior, from not paying attention. If a life is largely
dull routine, many of its details are forgotten the instant they occur. This principle holds true at any age,
but may be especially true for those older people who
seldom do anything out of the ordinary.
Factual memory stays generalized unless a person pays
attention to aspects of context that make a particular
incident unusual. Children and young people who have
yet to encounter many ordinary things meet a continuing series of "firsts" to remember, but an older person
finds much less under the sun that seems new.
Interpretive memory develops from insight to insight,
and insight depends on wrestling with experience, dis-
covering its depth. As a person grows older, many

problems seem solved, and it is easy to stay with
insights formed decades ago. In more traditional societies, the slow steady accrual of insight gives old
people strong grounds for respect, but in our rapidly
changing world some unrevised insights will become
out of date.
All memory depends on active movement up through
its levels, and action demands physical energy. As
people grow older and have less energy, moving up the
staircase may become more and more like climbing a
real flight of stairs. They can do it, but it takes longer
and the temptation to stop at a lower level grows more
enticing.
In each of these cases we see similar themes. Memory depends
on staying interested, staying alert, and staying active. People
have not just dreamed up the memory problems of old age, but
they have been cruelly fatalistic in supposing that any difficulties
signify an irreversible decline in mental powers.
PART
FOUR
THE EXPERIENCE
OF MEMORY
16
MEMORY AND LIFE

In psychological analysis we must never forget the utilitarian character of our mental functions, which are essentially turned towards action.
-Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, 1911
Constructing and climbing a memory staircase is not

an unambiguous mark of progress. Much of our adaptive power
comes from using the interpretive level of memory, but much of
our humanity and vitality is already visible at memory's emotional level. The construction of a new step on a staircase has a
price. The time I began to remember Swahili vocabulary after
one hearing of a word otTers an example of the losses that
accompany a gain. Of course my speaking fluency began to
accelerate, but my wonder at the language's music faded. During
the first month of lessons, this new language sounded magical
and marvelous. After I began to recognize the sounds in a word
my amazement disappeared and never returned. By now it has
been so long that I have no sense at all of the foreignness of the
language and its words. In particular there had been that special
word of greeting that pleased me, and after adding a new step
on my Swahili stairs I could remember the word whenever I
wanted it. Unfortunately, however, the word no longer seemed
as wondrous. It was just a word with a particular use and
meaning. I had once thought that if only I could remember the
word I should love to say it, but when I could remember it easily
the fun of saying it seemed less satisfying.
Because of the practical benefits in learning the language
and because I wanted to learn it, I have no doubt that in this
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242 /
instance the gains in my memory outweighed the costs; however,

sometimes the price can seem too high. Many forms of work
that seem nightmarish and dehumanizing use only higher levels
of memory and ignore the lower ones. A keyboard operator, for
example, may pass the day putting the information on handwritten forms into a computer. Such work is still done by people
because computers cannot yet read handwriting with anything
close to the accuracy necessary to do the job. People use
interpretive-level recognition to perceive handwriting, and interpretive-level recall to type what they recognize. Postal workers,
many office typists, and check handlers at banks spend all day
concentrating on this work. Although it depends on interpretive
memory skills enjoyed only by humans, the work satisfies no
desires and deepens no curiosity. It is precisely the absence of
a role for memory's lower levels that makes such work seem
dehumanizing. We cannot assume, therefore, that the upper
levels of memory are superior to the lower.
In this final section of the book we will consider three
individuals and see how their memories worked and served
them. These three cases differ from the examples found in "The
Forgettery" because they have no pathology. The people differ
according to what we can call their styles of remembering, but
we do not know of any organic or neurotic problem that prevented them from using all of their memories. Their styles
depend on all of the principles that have emerged from our study
of memory: Memory is a construction of the imagination; it is
produced as much by subjective factors as by objective ones;
and it serves to adapt behavior to present circumstances. Consequently, when appraising and describing an individual's memory, we can no longer content ourselves with attempts to measure a memory's storage capacity or to score a memory's
accuracy nor with any set of purely objective standards.
Traditional attempts to evaluate memory usually begin with
tests, variations on Ebbinghaus's experimental techniques with
lists, that try to measure a person's storage space and the rate
at which he can shovel in new data. They allow an examiner to
report that a person's memory is average, above average, or
Memory and Life / 243

below average. Unfortunately, these results have almost no
predictive value concerning the quality of a person's behavior.
Instead of relying on the fallacious notion of storage, the chapters in this section consider the level of memory a person finds
satisfactory to his understanding of an experience. Any appraisal of a person's memory must include a consideration of
the levels he uses in remembering.
We do not have to climb to the top of a memory staircase
every time we act, not even to act well. With some things we
can hesitate to climb at all. For example, even very young
children can enjoy dancing spontaneously to music. Other creatures do not act that way, but for reasons both mysterious and
joyful, our species does. A two-year-old I knew with precocious
language skills once told me, "Music makes me happy," and as
she spoke she improvised a dance. Her memory levels were not
terribly high; her action seemed almost a motor association, like
riding a bicycle, yet her action and memory suited the occasion.
Grown people too may feel content to bring no more than this
level with them when going dancing. They have a good time at a
dance and ask no more from their outing. Others, of course, do
observe as well as enjoy. Besides dancing, they pay attention to
how guests are dressed and they will remember who came with
whom. A minority may also interpret what they see, understanding the relationships they see around them. They know which
dancers' hearts have been broken, and who is moving toward
seduction. At the end of the evening these different people have
different memories of the party because they care to know
different things :-"It was fun."-"That Priscilla Dumont
Looked so beautifuL in pink. "-"1 believe ScarLett likes Captain
ButLer more than she admits ." But although they remember
different things and use different memory levels, no one can say
whose memory is best. It is a case of to each his own, and there
is no basis for making a final judgment.
Traditional accounts of memory have always tried to appraise and explain memory through purely objective causes.
Behaviorists sought the cause in objective stimuli outside a
person. Newer schools of psychology looked both to stimuli and
244 /
to memories stored in the head. But we now find that the

construction of memory includes sUbjective causes like desire,
continuing attention, and interpretation. Emotions and ambitions have much to do with the memory level a person prefers
to use. There may be no objective reason that one person
remembers a ball on the emotional level whereas a friend remembers it on the factual level. Their brains may be similarly
endowed and their circumstances at the party might match, but
their desires differ. The party-goer whose style favors emotional
memory may, the next day, have a sense that there was a new
type of music that is enjoyable to dance to. The friend whose
style leans to factual memory may recall that a new color is
gaining favor with the fashion leaders. Thus, a discussion of
memory has to explore motivation as well as memory levels. Of
course, even though different interests lead people to remember
different things, it would be absurd to say one desire is superior
to the other because it takes a higher level of memory to satisfy'
it.
Memory's adaptive role offers a basis for judging quality.
Memory must answer the question of what to do now, and some
solutions do work better than others. Adaptation always implies
adapting to something for some reason, and it provides a context
for judging a memory despite its subjective motivation. Biologists have long considered contextual matters, and they know
that objective measures are the least informative approach to a
subject. A biological study of birds' wings, for example, could
develop a gross ranking from longest to shortest, but understanding comes only through a consideration of a bird's flying
needs and accomplishments. That issue quickly leads a biologist
away from objective measures and into questions about aerodynamics and about the bird's habitat.
A biologist considering an animal's memory abilities must
also ask about the context and habitat. If a biologist compared
the memories of a gazelle and a lion, he would soon notice that
the lion sometimes seems to climb fairly well up a memory
staircase. Lions can concentrate during a hunt and adapt their
behavior to the swiftly changing situation. Gazelles operate
Memory and Life / 245
much lower on a staircase. Their greatest feat may be just

recognizing lions when they see them, but the gazelle has no
need for memory's upper levels. It eats grass and the grass does
not run away. Neither does the gazelle have to outwit the
charging lion, only outrun it. No biologist would care to argue
that the lion's memory is better than the gazelle's. Each has a
memory suited to its circumstances.
At the same time, the limitations on an animals' memory do
put boundaries on its use of a habitat. George Schaller, an
American biologist who spent years observing lions in the wild,
reports that both leopards and lions are in competition for
gazelles. Leopards like to haul their gazelle carcasses up into
trees and feed on them at a leisurely rate over several days.
Lions prefer to eat their gazelles at one sitting, and if they could
get at the hanging carcasses, their thieving would become a
major annoyance to leopards. Lions are not the great tree
climbers that leopards are, but they do climb and could get at
many of the gazelle carcasses. Yet memory limitations make it
almost unknown for a lion to steal the leopard's cache. After a
day or two under the African sun a gazelle carcass is ripe enough
to draw lions to the trees the way the. smell of strawberries
draws children. The lions circle and stare up into the branches.
They look straight at the dangling carcass, but the meat is
twisted in a peculiar way and is in a bizarre context. The lions
look and smell, but Schaller says, they cannot recognize the
thing above their heads. This limit on their imagination sets a
bound to their ability to exploit their environment just as surely
as the physical limitations on their strength and speed circumscribe their capacities.
In the three chapters that follow, we shall try to see the
relation between memory and life. The individuals had memory
styles quite different from one another, but they also had distinctive purposes and tastes that change the context of our evaluation. In each case an appraisal depends on how well a person's
memory adapted him to the pursuit of his own desires.
17
THE EMOTIONAL
MEMORY OF
JOHN
DEAN
I would say I have an ability to recall, not specific words

necessarily, but certainly the tenor of a conversation and
the gist of a conversation . . . . my mind is not a tape
recorder, but it certainly receives the message that is
being given.
-John Dean, Senate testimony, 1973
In the summer of 1973, John Dean appeared before

televised hearings about the Watergate scandal. He was one of
the most devastating witnesses any tribunal had ever seen. He
spoke coolly and dispassionately" describing an easily understood, coherent story of justice obstructed. Other Watergate
witnesses tended to retreat quickly into pleas that memory failed
them. They would not deny that something had happened, but
would say they could not recollect what had really transpired.
This convenient forgetfulness frustrated and raised suspicions in
observers, but John Dean boasted of his wonderful memory and
many people took him at his word. Observers called him the
man with the tape-recorder memory and listened in awe as he
reported details of old conversations.
A comparison of Dean's testimony with the facts, however,
indicates that Dean had a terrible memory. Investigators settled
246/
The EmotionaL Memory of John Dean / 247
the question of Nixon's guilt long ago, using evidence much

more reliable than one man's self-serving memory, so when I
report that John Dean's memory was abominable, I do not mean
there was no Watergate conspiracy. I mean simply that Dean's
memory was awful, awful in both the ordinary sense that Dean
got his facts wrong and in the sense that Dean's memory led his
judgment desperately astray.
At the time of Dean's testimony, it seemed as though his
memory's accuracy would always be subject to partisan dispute,
but then the world learned that Nixon had secretly tape recorded
meetings in the Oval Office and it became possible to test Dean's
memory directly. Memory students suddenly had a natural
experiment permitting them to compare one man's recollection
with what really happened.
Dean's testimony and the related transcripts are too long
for a full analysis, but we can consider one incident in detail.
Dean described a meeting he had on September 15, 1972, with
Richard Nixon and Nixon's chief of staff, Robert Haldeman.
The meeting's purpose was to discuss the indictment of the
Watergate burglars and some of their bosses. From the White
House's perspective, the indictments had brought good news
because nobody had been charged whose name had not previously appeared in the press. Particularly, the indictments did
not expose the role of top officers of the Nixon campaign
committee in financing and organizing the burglary. Most of the
conversation at the White House meeting, however, was not
about the indictments, but about the revenge the administration
would take on the people who had made the Watergate incident
so uncomfortable for the president.
To examine Dean's memory we can compare his testimony
with the transcript. The left-hand column below presents Dean's
entire statement about his meeting with the president, broken
up claim by claim. The right-hand column presents relevant
excerpts from the transcript of the tape recordings of the meeting. These excerpts do not appear in their proper sequence, that
of the transcript, because Dean did not always remember things
in their order of occurrence.

DEAN'S TESTIMONY
TRANSCRIPT
The President told me that Bob

[Haldeman] had kept him posted on
my handling of the Watergate case,
told me I had done a good job
and he appreciated how difficult
a task it had been
PRES: The way you have handled

all this seems to me has been
very skillful, putting your
fingers in the leaks that have
sprung here and sprung there.
and the President was pleased that

the case had stopped with Liddy.
I told him that I thought there
was a long way to go before this
matter would end
and I certainly could make no
assurances that the day would
not come when the matter would
start to unravel.
DEAN: Three months ago I would

have had trouble predicting
there would be a day when this
would be forgotten, but I
think I can say that 54 days
from now [election day] nothing
is going to come crashing down
to our surprise.
Early in our conversation the

President said to me that former
FBI Director Hoover had told
him shortly after he had assumed
office in 1969
that his campaign had been
bugged in 1968.
The President said that at some
point we should get the facts
out on this
and use this to counter the
problems that we were encountering.
PRES : We were bugged in '68 on

the plane ... the FBI did the
bugging.
DEAN: It is a shame that
evidence to the fact that that
happened in '68 was never
around ...
PRES: It isn' t worth it-the
hell with it.
The EmotionaL Memory of John Dean I 249

The President asked me when the
criminal case would come to trial
and would it start before the
election.
I told the President that I did not
know.
I said that the Justice Department
had held off as long as possible
the return of the indictments,
but much would depend on which
judge got the case.
The President said that he
certainly hoped that the case
would not come to trial before
the election.
The conversation then moved to the
press coverage of the Watergate
incident and how the press was
really trying to make this into a
major campaign issue.
At one point in this conversation
I recall the President telling me
to keep a good list of the press
people giving us trouble
because we will make life difficult
for them after the election.
The conversation then turned to the
use of the Internal Revenue Service
to attack our enemies.
I recall telling the President that
we had not made much use of this
because the White House did not
have the clout to have it done,
DEAN: One of the things I've

tried to do, I have begun to
keep notes on a lot of people
who are emerging as less than
our friends . . .
PRES: I want the most comprehensive notes on all those who
tried to do us in ... It has to
be done.
DEAN: ... this will be over some
day and we shouldn't forget
the way some of them have
treated us.
PRES: ... We have not used the
Bureau [of Internal Revenue]
and we have not used the
Justice Department but things
are going to change now. And
they are either going to do it
right or go.
DEAN : What an exciting
prospect.
250 /
that the Internal Revenue Service

was a rather Democratically
oriented bureaucracy
and it would be very dangerous to
try any such activities.
The President seemed somewhat
annoyed
and said that the Democratic
administrations had used this tool
well
and after the election we would get
people in these agencies who would
be responsive to the White House
requirements.
If the reader is like me and remembers accepting as gospel

every word Dean spoke, this comparison may be something of a
shock. Dean's memory was terrible. Of the twenty-six separate
assertions in Dean's testimony, fourteen have no historical
basis, seven are badly distorted, and two are completely false.
That leaves three correct assertions-the assertion that the
Nixon campaign was bugged in '68 and the part about the
president's praise and his appreciation of Dean's skill. Even in
the latter memory we have an inaccuracy; the president's praise
came much later in the meeting than Dean said.
It took my breath away to compile this side-by-side comparison and then read the senators' questions about this testimony.
In one exchange Senator Howard Baker questioned Dean
closely about several events that never happened.
can you give us any further insight into what the
president said?
BAKER: . .
DEAN: Yes, I can recall he told me that he appreciated how

difficult ajob it had been for me.
BAKER:
Is that close to the exact language?
The Emotional Memory of John Dean / 251

DEAN: Yes, that is close to the exact language. That stuck very
clearly in my mind because I recall my response to that was
that I didn't feel that I could take credit. I thought that others
had done much more difficult things and by that I was referring
to the fact that Mr. Magruder had perjured himself.
BAKER:
All right. Now, tell us about the status of the case.
DEAN: When we talked about the fact that the indictments had
been handed down, at some point, and after the compliment I
told him at that point that we had managed, you know, that
the matter had been contained, it had not come in to the White
House. I didn't say that, I said it had been contained.
What was the president's or Mr. Haldeman's reaction

to that word because that is a rather significant word, I think.
BAKER:
DEAN: Everyone seemed to understand what I was talking

about. It didn't evoke any questions and I was going on to say
that I didn't think it could be contained indefinitely. I said that
is this, you know, there are a lot of hurdles that have to be
leaped down the road before it will definitely remain contained
and I was trying to tell the president that I was not sure the
cover-up even then would last indefinitely.
BAKER:
DEAN:
What was his reaction to this?

As I say, I don't recall any particular reaction.
BAKER: Was there any statement by him or by Mr. Haldeman

at that point on this statement?
DEAN:
No, not to my recollection.
No wonder Dean's recollection on the details is so vague. With

one exception, none of the things Dean testifies to in this passage
occurred. The president's appreciation for how hard the work
had been, Dean's refusal to take credit, Dean's use of the word
contained, Dean's warning of further hurdles down the roadthese never happened. The one thing that Dean says never
happened did happen. Dean said he never talked about keeping
the investigation out of the White House. The transcript shows,
however, that Haldeman did say the indictments had been "kept
away from the White House and of course the president," and
Dean piped in to agree. Dean's one accurate memory is that the
president praised him. Dean keeps returning to this point, and
Nixon did briefly praise his work.
A study of the transcript shows that besides remembering
things that never happened Dean forgot many things that would
have helped his case. Nixon did promise revenge for all the
problems Watergate had brought. "Just remember all the trouble
we're taking," he told Dean. "We'll have a chance to get back
one day." He did describe precisely the purposes of the coverup, telling Dean, "You just try to button it up as well as you can
and hope for the best, and remember basically the damn business is unfortunately trying to cut our losses." If Dean had
quoted this remark in his testimony, it would have caused an
uproar, but he said nothing.
At one point during the meeting Nixon specifically brought
his authority into the cover-up, saying, "This is a big play. He
[Dick Cook, the White House's assistant liaison with Congress]
has to know that it comes from the top. While I can't talk for
myself, he has to get at this and--the thing up." So Dean did
not have to make up evidence indicating the president's role in
the conspiracy.
Dean also omitted a whole raft of thuggish ideas that were
discussed-a fantasy about tormenting Edward Bennett Williams (a prominent Democrat) , strategies for hitting enemies
with civil suits, a judge who whispers helpful things to them,
ways to threaten majority leader Tip O'Neill. These too would
have helped Dean's case, but he left them out.
At the time of the hearings people asked if Dean's testimony
was true or false. Was he a liar? Was his memory accurate? But
these questions are too crude to get at the reality of Dean's
testimony, which had managed to use a wealth of phony details
to describe a real conspiracy. This paradox of truth based on
misinformation points at one of the crucial differences between
the old and new way of thinking about memory . The old idea
assumed that memory was a store of objective information about
the past. Points of view, generalized descriptions , and the nature
of the circumstances all arose from the facts. Those assumptions

made it impossible to suggest that a witness under oath could
have misremembered the facts and still have testified to something true.
The paradox of Dean's testimony challenges us to find a
new way to discuss his memory . The first memory scholar to
try to describe and understand Dean's testimony was Ulric
Neisser, a founding father of cognitive psychology. In 1981 he
published an article about Dean's memory in the scholarly
journal Cognition . Neisser was horrified by the paradoxical
tangle. He found that even techniques for measuring the "gist"
of a conversation showed Dean's memory was almost always
awful, unless Dean reported a conversation that he had actively
prepared for. But at the same time Dean did not invent the
whole situation. There had been a cover-up; he had participated
in it, and Richard Nixon had put himself at the head of it.
Neisser said that Dean told a "higher truth." Let me suggest an
alternate phrase. Dean told a "lower truth." Generalizations lie
at the lower levels of memory ' s steps; the details come higher
up. A person who hears forty binary digits and says, "I heard a
bunch of numbers ," is not wrong, not lying , but his memory has
not climbed as high as the person who can recite those forty
digits. Dean's memory was not the sort that produced episodic
chunks of conversation, but he did not invent his basic premise.
In some respects Dean's memory reminds one of an amnesiac who tends to confabulate the details of his story . The
supposed facts are plausible and the very energy behind their
assertion gives them a certain credibility, but they are fantasies.
One important difference , however, was the coherence in Dean's
story. An amnesiac's confabulation tends to come apart like a
dream whereas Dean's story hung together. Remarkably , however, Dean testified that the coherence of his story did not come
from his own memory for the logic that underlay events. In
response to questioning from Hawaii's Senator Daniel Inouye
Dean said he took the basic structure of his story from the press.
He testified:
254 /
What I did in preparing this statement, I had kept a newspaper

clipping file from roughly June 17 [date of the Watergate
arrests] up until about the time these hearings started when I
stopped doing any clipping with any regularity. It was by going
through every single newspaper article outlining what had
happened and then placing myself in what I had done in a
given sequence of time, I was aware of all of the principal
activities I had been involved in, the dealings I had had with
others in relationship to these activities .
His system used the newspaper clips as reminders. That system

can work, but there is no guarantee that the reminders will
produce accurate recall of the past instead of confabulations. It
does guarantee, however, that one's testimony will not contradict the public record, and one of the strength's of Dean's
testimony was the way it dovetailed with the known facts about
Watergate.
Although this method gave Dean's testimony a coherent
structure, his details were not always logical. After pressing
Dean to account for his memory, Senator Inouye questioned
him on a logical contradiction in the testimony. Dean had said
that at his September 15 meeting the president was fully aware
of the cover-up and Dean's role in it. A study of the transcript
confirms this general claim; however, in his opening statement
Dean also described his second meeting with the president, one
that occurred over four months later, at the end of February
1973. According to Dean's testimony, at this meeting he informed the president of his own role in the cover-up, but the
president denied that Dean had legal problems:
Before departing his office, [the president] again raised the
matter that I should report to him directly and not through
Haldeman and Ehrlichman. I told him that I thought he should
know that I was also involved in the post-June 17 activities
regarding Watergate. I briefly described to him why I thought
I had legal problems, in that I had been a conduit for many of
the decisions that were made and therefore could be involved
in an obstruction of justice. He would not accept my analysis
The Emotional Memory of John Dean I 255

and did not want me to get into it in any detail other than what
I had just related. He reassured me not to worry , that I had no
legal problems .
Senator Inouye repeatedly asked why Dean had thought it

necessary in February to explain his role to the president if Mr.
Nixon had been fully aware of that role the previous September.
Dean had no clear explanation for this inconsistency, and how
could he since what he described never happened? It might be
interesting to speculate on how the course of history could have
changed if the senator had chosen to press the issue. Instead,
Senator Inouye dropped the matter and it did not return.
The transcripts show that the contradiction arose because
Dean's memory for the February meeting was no better than his
memory for the September one. The business about telling Dean
to bypass Haldeman and Ehrlichman did not happen. Dean's
reference to his own problems arose in a different context
altogether:
There is no question what [the people on the
Senate select committee] are after. What the Committee is
after is somebody at the White House. They would like to get
Haldeman, or Colson, or Ehrlichman.
PRESIDENT:
DEAN:
Or possibly Dean-You know, I am a small fish.
PRES: Anybody in the White House they would-but in your

case I think they realize you are the lawyer and they know you
didn't have a (adjective deleted) to do with the campaign.
DEAN:
PRES:
That's right.
That's what I think. Well, we'll see you.
Dean's self-pitying characterization of himself as a small fish

hardly matches his testimony about describing his role as a
conduit for decisions. The exchange was not an effort to make
the president fully aware of things he had not appreciated before.
Instead, it reads like the remarks of a man who has suddenly
become nervous about his own vulnerability.
256 /
While Senator Inouye briefly challenged the internal consistency of Dean's story, Senator Edward Gurney of Florida challenged an aspect of the public record that had not appeared in
the newspapers:
GURNEY: I would like to go back to the Kalmbach meeting
again, when you and he first discussed this cover-up money.
On the 29th, Senator? He was staying at the Mayflower

Hotel ...
DEAN:
Well, the committee has subpoenaed the records of

the hotel. I have a letter here from the Mayflower, and also
from the Statler Hilton. The letter is from the Mayflower Hotel,
"Dear Senator Gurney, the records do not reflect a Mr.
Herbert B. Kalmbach, as being a registered guest during the
period June 1, 1972, through July 1, 1972." Then the other
letter from the Statler Hilton, again addressed to me, "Mr.
Herbert W. Kalmbach was registered in our hotel from June
29-30, 1972." Now, you have testified three times that you
met with Mr. Kalmbach in the coffee shop of the Mayflower
Hotel ...
GURNEY:
I see what you are saying. I have testified the Mayflower

and I am never sure which is the Mayflower and which the
Statler Hilton.
DEAN:
Well, I must say I am reminded of your colloquy

with the chairman yesterday, Mr. Dean, when you said what
an excellent memory you had right from school days.
GURNEY:
At this point Dean's lawyer whispered something that reporter

John Chancellor had just revealed to the television audience,
and Dean said, "I might go back over one point. The name of
the coffee shop at the Statler Hilton is the Mayflower." The
audience burst into applause, tipping its sentiments. Everybody
could understand the confusion between Mayflower Coffee Shop
and Mayflower Hotel.
Senator Gurney saw his fish get away. Given the either/or
discussions of truth and memory, the cross-examination had
failed. The old lawyer's tool of discrediting important memories

by challenging a trivial one did not work. Instead it bolstered
Dean's reputation. But Senator Gurney had hit on a telling
example of the difficulties in Dean's memory. The confusion of
Mayflower Coffee Shop for Mayflower Hotel is a typical recall
error in psychological laboratory experiments, yet Dean was not
participating in an experiment. He had not only the name, but
the experience of the meeting to refer to. Normally, in laboratory experiments, when a memory becomes this much richer,
confusions over meaningless similarities disappear. Dean's
statement was not casually written. He had worked on it for
weeks or perhaps months. Our study of interpretive memory
leads us to expect a conflict in a normal person: The name
Mayflower clashes with the remembered images of the incident.
We should expect a bothered John Dean preparing his statement
to say, "Something is wrong. I keep thinking Mayflower, but it
doesn't feel right." Apparently, Dean was not bothered, or at
least not bothered enough to get that detail right. He seems
content not to press his memory.
In appraising John Dean's memory we must carefully distinguish between memory;s levels. Interpretive memory normally
provides the structure that organizes what we recall, but Dean
took his structure from the newspapers. Interpretive memory
also uses the tension between recall and recognition to get the
details straight. Dean seems not to have had a bothered memory
either. His testimony offers no good evidence that he ever
benefited from memory's top level in preparing his testimony.
Factual memory uses reminders to recall associations.
Dean's newspaper technique relied entirely on reminders, but
we have seen that often he remembered things that never happened. In some cases factual associations were probably
stirred-as in his recall of a discussion about the bugging of
Nixon's 1968 campaign-but the associations became grossly
distorted when placed in narrative form. At this middle level,
Dean's memory was still too unreliable to justify faith in anything he proclaimed as a fact.
258 /
On the emotional level, however, Dean's memory suddenly

became a good one. At this level a perception evokes an emotion, and Dean's memory for the emotions of his meetings with
the president were good. The newspaper technique did not
remind him of trustworthy facts, but the emotions they evoked
were to the point. Emotionally, the September 15 meeting had
brought praise from the president. Dean remembered that pleasure. The implications of the praise-that Nixon understood and
approved of Dean's behavior-were also correct.
The February meeting that so troubled Senator Inouye had
a very different emotional association. By then the Watergate
affair was destroying people who had seemed beyond harm's
way, and Dean expressed anxiety about his own skin. Dean was
correct that the president was not "fully aware" of the situation
as it applied to Dean, if by those words Dean meant that the
president did not yet appreciate the danger to Dean. The president was not as worried about Dean's skin as Dean was. Again,
Dean was correct in his emotional association.
We must be careful. John Dean's memory has not been
evaluated and tested by professionals. We cannot be conclusive.
We can only look for suggestive patterns that might help articulate the workings of his memory. To me, it appears that John
Dean was largely content to settle for the work of emotional
memory. It seems that he could use other memory levels but
often preferred not to. In Part Three we saw that people who,
for pathological reasons, cannot advance beyond emotional
memory suffer from amnesia. John Dean was not a true amnesiac. He did not suffer from their disorientation and there is no
evidence or even any suggestion that he had any brain damage.
Yet his memory for the details of events does come close to
confabulation.
The difference between amnesia and a reliance on emotional
memory is the difference between ability and desire. An amnesiac cannot recall something, no matter how desperately he
might want to and no matter how alert he was at the time of the
original experience. John Dean, however, seems simply to have
been uninterested in the world beyond himself. Like all normal

people, his memory began with the question of what something
meant to himself. But it also stopped there. The curiosity and
insight that send some people higher up the stairs appears not to
have moved him.
Dean's Watergate memoirs are full of passages that support
the view of a man content to live on memory's emotional level.
One example of Dean's distaste for the factual level comes from
his account of the early morning staff meetings at the White
House. The right to attend these sessions was a mark of status,
and Dean wangled that right. At the briefings the cabinet and
departmental leaders reported on their work in progress. It was
a singular opportunity for an ambitious young lawyer to learn
how the republic really works, but Dean found the meetings
boring. They had nothing to do with his direct responsibilities,
and after a while he quit attending them. Like someone habituating to a list of names, Dean switched his attention elsewhere.
It was a definite refusal to enrich his factual memory.
Dean's memoirs also tell a story of his preference for
staying on memory's emotional level. When Dean was first
offered a job in the White House, the president was staying at
his home in San Clemente, California. Dean flew out to Los
Angeles. There he found a helicopter standing by to fly him on
to the "Western White House." The helicopter could have been
an appealing symbol of his new prestige; however, Dean had
ridden in government helicopters several times before and those
times had not been prestigious. Dean says, "I preferred not to
think about those previous trips because now I was relishing the
glamour. " We have seen that associations enrich factual memory, but Dean wanted to keep his associations at bay because
they undercut the supposed glamor of the White House. Here
we see John Dean, "the man with the tape-recorder mind,"
refusing to use memory because it disrupts his fantasies.
One might wonder how Dean ever accomplished anything
if, given his druthers, he preferred to stay on memory's emotional level. His memoirs provide an amazing answer. Like a
bored worker on an assembly line, he was motivated to produce
by a force that came entirely from outside himself. To make sure
260 /
people did their work , chief of staff Haldeman used a technique

known as "tickling," keeping pressure on a person to perform.
A tickler was a person who made sure that assignments were
done on time. The tickler would telephone and demand results.
A staffer might dillydally; the tickler would accept no excuses.
Dean describes this tickler system as a kind of inhuman machine:
The discipline of Haldeman's tickler was unrelenting ... . I
had answered [my first assignment] on time, but subsequently
I spent too much time preparing my answers to a few action
memoranda, let the due dates slide by , and discovered the
consequences . . . . The tickler was . . . probably more
responsible for the chief of staff's awesome reputation than
was his own aluminum personality. It was a self-perpetuating
paper monster, with a computer' s memory and a Portuguese
man-of-war's touch . . . . Once a staff man was nailed with
responsibility for the slightest project, the tickler would keep
pestering until it was fed something .. . . No one could ignore
the tickler.
So there was the White House system. It exerted unrelenting

pressure to produce. The pressure to act came not from Dean's
soul or from his interest in the project, but from the imposition
of fear. Dean was not moved to learn more, but to ease the
pressure he felt. Presumably, the reports he wrote reflected
factual and interpretive memory for the law, but the motive for
reaching those levels came from outside himself.
Dean's memoirs report that he had long preferred to suppress any arousal he felt. The tendency helped him during his
Senate testimony since Dean' s greatest strength as a witness
surely was the cool dispassion with which he spoke. Fewobservers would have called him "emotional," but of course emotional
memory does not mean passionate or excited memory. It means
memory that focuses solely on immediate circumstances and
personal feeling . Factual associations and interpretive perceptions have nothing to contribute to this level of memory. Arousal
The EmotionaL Memory of John Dean / 261
helps factual memory, and observers almost universally noticed

Dean's absence of arousal.
Dean's coldness helped make him seem credible, but if he
really did depend too heavily on emotional memory, this lack of
arousal is probably what tripped him up. Dean's own memoirs
provide some insight into his weakened orientation response.
He describes the first feeler he received from the White House
about ajob, and says of his response, "As always, I was masking
my inner calculations and feelings, this time behind an appearance of friendly sincerity." We cannot be certain that he behaved this way in that interview, but Dean says as aLways,
meaning that he routinely hid his feelings behind a mask. This
attitude corresponds to the public's impression of a cold, perpetually collected man who never wore his heart on his sleeve.
Later Dean refers to his visit to Nixon's "Western White
House" in San Clemente, and he reports, "I decided I had
handled my escalating headiness fairly well. I had been cool,
had controlled my excitement, yet had managed a little hustling." Again, the accuracy of this memory is not at issue, but
the attitude. Dean felt it was important to bury his excitement.
He found he could do it and still function.
Dean speculates briefly about why he routinely suppresses
his own arousal and says, "I suspect it is the fear of failure or
rejection that sets off this defense mechanism in me before any
interview." (Emphasis mine.) At last we see a reason for shunning the world: It can be a place of disappointment and rejection.
To defend against potential pains, Dean hid his excitement from
the world. Some people manage to look calm while drinking in
everything; however, Dean adds, "I wanted to make a mental
adjustment. I would have to collect my thoughts fast, and I
would have to start telling myself I did not even want to work at
the White House." So, Dean's routine was to mask his interest
both from the world and from himself.
Because Dean preferred not to build memory stairs above
the emotional level, it becomes a matter of opinion whether we
should fault him for not remembering the facts and organization
of the events he testified to. Some people will insist these things
should be remembered correctly; others will take a less judgmental stand and say that it all worked out in the end. There is
no reason automatically to denigrate emotional memory and its
categorization of the world as good-for-me, bad-for-me, and
irrelevant-to-me. This focus blinded Dean to many facts but it
let him distinguish sharply between his friends and his enemies.
He understood that distinction well. One rare time the transcripts show Dean balk at a direct instruction from Nixon
concerned the treatment of Cartha DeLoach, deputy director of
the FBI. This conversation took place when the cover-up was
collapsing. The president wanted to destroy the career of Patrick
Gray, acting head of the FBI, and he was not too worried about
how it was done, but Dean feared that if done too crudely
DeLoach too could be destroyed, and DeLoach was a friend of
theirs.
The transcript shows the president's reply to Dean's concern as "{Expletive deleted)."
Dean, however, did not back down, but said he thought
DeLoach was a friend.
Nixon replied, "Nobody's a friend of ours. Let's face it.
Don't worry about that sort of thing. "
And Dean still balked, saying he would explore the matter
further with his advisor, Dick Moore.
Conceivably John Dean could have had a satisfactory career
in the White House. He could have persisted at identifying and
remembering the people who were useful to him. The ticklers
could have gone on teasing reports out of him, and he could
have continued enjoying the flimsy perks and prestige of office
like helicopter rides. But then a crisis developed. Burglars were
caught in the Watergate offices of the National Democratic
Party. Within a short time the press reported that some of the
burglars were linked to employees of Nixon's reelection committee. In the White House there was general consternation.
People of judgment grew panicky and tried to dissociate themselves from the event. Dean's memoirs describe frightened staff
people trying to hide evidence that could connect them to the
episode. But Dean did not panic because, in the words of an old

joke, he did not understand the situation. He thought the burglary could hurt others, but not himself. It is as though he feared
his own excitement and disappointment, but did not fear distant
things in the outside world.
At this point the limitations of emotional memory come
sharply into view. It deals with the world only as the senses find
it. It does not remind us of associated dangers that may arise,
nor does it let us construct likely problems. When Watergate
began, Dean reacted as though his big chance to bolster his
position within the White House had come, but his memory was
too limited for him to adapt to the dangers of the situation.
The bill had come due for all those staircases he had
preferred not to construct. He should have known that the White
House is not a monarchy and behind its glamor stands the reality
of a robust democracy. He should have known too that the
White House's power is severely limited by the various interests
of the people it deals with. Surely that point was made a
thousand times during the morning briefings on White House
work in progress, but Dean paid no attention to those meetings.
So when confronted with one of the most politically dangerous
moments in the history of the White House Dean lacked the
equipment to imagine that danger. Instead, he behaved so
blindly that at first many people were hard put to believe that
the stories of Watergate could be true. Bribing burglars to be
silent and suborning perjury while leaving a telltale trail of
banking documentation seemed too dumb to have been possible.
When it came to answering the fundamental question of what do
I do now, John Dean's memory served him worse than ill. It
ruined him and the people who had sought to use him.
18
THE FACTUAL
MEMORY
OF
Mnemonic systems are typically not particularly helpful

in remembering the sort of information which one requires in everyday life. They are , of course , excellent for
learning the strings of unrelated words which are so close
to the hearts of experimental psychologists, but I must
confess that if I need to remember a shopping list, I do
not imagine strings of sausages festooned from my chandeliers and bunches of bananas sprouting from my wardrobe. I simply write it down.
-Alan Baddeley, The Psychology of Memory , 1976
In 1968 the Russian neuroscientist Aleksandr Luria

published a fascinating little book about the memory of a man
he identified only as S. (S for Shereshevsky, his family name.)
Tovarisch S was born in Russia just before the turn of the
century and came to Luria' s attention when he was already an
adult. At the time of their first meeting S worked as a journalist.
His editor had learned that S never bothered to take notes
because he never forgot anything. Intrigued, the editor sent S to
Luria for testing. Luria proceeded to give the standard memory
span tests-randomized lists of words for recall. To his surprise,
264 /
The Factual Memory of S. / 265
S's memory span did not stop at five, seven, or even fourteen.
It was apparently limitless. Time seemed to have no effect on it
either. Sixteen years after these tests, Luria surprised S with a
request to repeat a list and S did so, perfectly.
Luria himself was one of this century's greatest neuroscientists, some people even say that he was the greatest. His importance rested on a keen eye that let him see the many discrepancies between theoretical expectation and actual experience.
Here, Luria saw that S contradicted the many assumptions about
storage that were favored by the memory theory of his day.
Psychologists in the late 1920s assumed that memories were held
somewhere in the head and that it took time to assimilate them.
Ebbinghaus and his followers thought that memory was seriously constrained by the small number of items it could absorb
during any single experience, yet Luria found that S had an
unlimited capacity to learn details. Luria observed S for nearly
thirty years, and concluded that instead of storage S's "recall
could more easily be explained in terms of factors governing
perception and attention." (Emphasis Luria's.) Of course, attention and recall of perception are the bases of factual memory.
S could recall a list recited a dozen years earlier by an
amazing feat of multisensory association. Luria asked about a
list and S replied, "Oh, yes. You wore a grey shirt. I can hear
you say ... " and out came the list. He saw it and heard it. An
ordinary person might be able to recall an image of someone
and say he wore a green sweater. S could do much more. He
could recall the sweater, the pants, the eyeglass frames, and the
belt-buckle. He saw the person before him with near hallucinatory clarity. Indeed, the richness of S's recall caused him
problems, as Jerome Bruner, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, remarked in his foreword to Luria's book about S. S, said
Bruner, had "a memory of particulars .... But it is a memory
that is particularly lacking in one important feature: the capacity
to convert encounters with the particular into instances of the
general. "
S's inability to generalize was a direct result of his heavy
reliance on a powerful factual memory. In our study offorgetting
we saw that memory for the general is an imperfect memory of

particulars. Generalized knowledge depends on having several
similar experiences to which we did not pay enough attention
for us to remember the details that set each experience apart. If
the memory is too precise, as with me and punctual, we get
beyond generalities. S's associations were so precise that his
memory could seldom divorce an experience from its original
context. Of course, everyone finds that some details from past
experience are irrelevant to the present situation. It takes insight, a climb to interpretive memory, to distinguish between
apt and extraneous associations, but S relied almost exclusively
on factual memory and seldom had the insights that would have
let him use his rich associations for practical purposes.
He even showed this same reliance on factual memory in
his use of language. He understood words purely as triggers for
associated perceptions; a word evoked a concrete image or it
meant nothing. Words strung together in a sentence evoked
multiple images. S did not chunk words into a unified thought.
For example, if I said, "He weighed the salami," S would
imagine a scale and a salami. He would see each item in all its
detail and perhaps even taste the freshly cut salami. This sounds
good; I regret that my own imagination is not so rich, but here
is what such perception did to him when S discussed the phrase,
"to weigh one's words":
Now how can you weigh words? When I hear the word weigh
I see a large scale-like the one we had in Rezhitsa in our
shop, where they put bread on one side and a weight on the
other. The arrow shoots to one side, then stops in the middle .
. . . But what do you have here-to weigh one's words!
S goes wrong when he says, "When I hear the word weigh, I

see a large scale." Weigh is a verb, an action. No particular
thing gets at the meaning. S' s vast powers of factual association
gave him many examples of things being weighed, but his
The FactuaL Memory of S. / 267

complete lack of insight made it impossible for him to understand the metaphorical use of the verb.
Problems of this sort would seem impossible in anyone with
a properly functioning interpretive memory. Luria makes no
direct reference to the Bartlett tradition' s focus on meaningful
memories, but he does report the way meanings confused S's
memory. Luria says that S shared a characteristic that "other
people with highly developed capacities for figurative memory
[recall of perceptions] exhibit: a tendency to rely exclusively on
images and to overlook any possibility of using logical means of
recall." S was largely content with his powerful factual memory
and seldom used chunks. In one experiment he learned a list
that included some names of birds. S was then asked to repeat
only the bird names. If he had had simply to recite the list, S
would have breezed through the task. But now he had to recall
a word and interpret its meaning. This extra memory task made
the challenge so distracting that S could not do it.
This lack of understanding showed itself in another way as
well: S never made the typical errors of people recalling lists.
He did not sometimes recall a synonym instead of the actual
word, did not cluster words by category, and did not recall an
associate like saLt instead of pepper. When Luria first met S,
nearly sixty years ago, the absence of these errors seemed like
signs of an exquisite memory, but today we know that ordinary
people make these errors because they recall things through
their grammatical associations. If S never made these errors,
perhaps he had no great capacity for interpreting an experience.
Further hints at this lack of understanding lay in S's memory for numbers. For most people, strings of numbers are the
hardest things in the world to recall because they are meaningless and random . S thought them easy to remember, but not
because he could spot some secret order to them. On the
contrary, if the numbers had any order, he did not notice. One
time, when doing a memory act on stage, he had the following
numbers to remember;
1 234
2 3 4 5
345 6
4 5 67 ...
Of course he could do it, but he never noticed an order to the

numbers that could enable anybody to recall this list. For most
people, the order pops out at them, but apparently S never
perceived a meaningful chunk.
Luria reports that much of the world was a continual
mystery to S. Typical of his blindness to the meaning of things
was S's response to Luria's first test results. S was amazed to
learn that his memory was unusual. Did Luria really mean to
say that most people could not remember everything they had
been told? By the time he met Luria, S was nearly thirty. It is
true that people tend to assume that what they find easy is just
as easy for others, but long before turning thirty everybody has
seen many people forget, misremember, and say, "Oh, I can't
remember." S grew up in a city and attended school, and yet he
never noticed that other people sometimes had memory problems.
He also had difficulties recognizing some familiar chunks.
Some of his difficulties sound like the same problems that
programmers face in trying to get computers to recognize faces
and voices. A machine may be programmed to respond to
certain spoken words, but if a speaker is emotionally tense or
has a cold or a frog in his throat the machine may not recognize
the spoken words. Similarly, a machine may be programmed to
recognize a face, but if a person shows up with a new haircut, a
slight weight change, or emotions that affect appearance the
machine may fail to recognize the face. S too found that people's
appearance and voice changed so much from one time to the
next that recognition was hard. Instead of saying, "Oh, you
have lost some weight," S was likely to say, "Have we met?"
The richness of S's perceptions kept him focused on his
internal experience. Essentially, he was uninterested in any
external reality. Memory is useful in guiding actions, but S
The Factual Memory of s.
preferred to stay with his perceptions. Most of us need to act, if

only to avoid pain and find pleasure, but S used his visual
imagination to replace action. He said, "If I want something to
happen, I simply picture it in my mind. I don't have to exert any
effort to accomplish it-it just happens." As an example, he
remembered as a little boy wishing he could stay in bed. So he
imagined that the clock showed some earlier time and then he
stayed in bed until his mother came and screamed at him to get
up. This feat subverted his strong powers of attention by giving
himself a private reality to attend to.
Luria says that S's strangeness rested on a peculiarity of
perception known as synesthesia, or colored hearing. Synesthesia occurs when the stimulation of one sense leads to the
perception of other sensations. Many people report that they
feel a relationship between certain sounds and light (e.g., bass
voices, dark shades), but the extent of S's synesthesia was
remarkable. Here is Luria's description of S's sensations as
Luria sounded a single tone:
S [says he] saw a brown strip against a dark background that
had red, tonguelike edges. The sense of taste he experienced
was like that of sweet and sour borscht, a sensation that
gripped his entire tongue.
These synesthesic descriptions sometimes sound like poetry, as

when S said to the Russian psychologist Vygotsky, "What a
crumbly yellow voice you have," but S did not speak metaphorically. When he heard Vygotsky speak, S felt a crumbly sensation and saw yellow.
Apparently, S was synesthesic all his life. He never outgrew
it, and he told Luria of perceiving synesthesic blurs when he
was two or three years old. A "synesthesic blur" was S's
perception of fog- or steamlike puffs that obscured his vision. S
reported, "When I was about two or three years old I was taught
the words of a Hebrew prayer. I didn't understand them, and
what happened was that the words settled in my mind as puffs
of steam or splashes .... Even now I see these puffs or splashes
/ 269
when I hear certain sounds." Rather than an unusually rich

form of perception, S's synesthesia was a sensory handicap.
Like blindness or deafness, it alientated him from certain aspects of experience, but unlike blindness or deafness it provided
a hallucinatory substitute for reality. The blind simply do not
see. S saw what was not there. He also heard, tasted, and felt
things that were not there. These hallucinations distracted him
constantly. He told Luria:
You know there are people who seem to have many voices,
whose voices seem to be an entire composition, a bouquet.
The late S. M. Eisenstein [the Soviet film maker] had such a
voice: listening to him, it was as though a flame with fibers
protruding from it was advancing right toward me. I got so
interested in his voice, I couldn't follow what he was saying.
It sounds fantastic and artistic, but ultimately it was crippling.

The point of Eisenstein's speech lay in his words, not in whatever kaleidoscope S's brain conjured up.
The synesthesia dissociated S from the world about him,
and with no practical guidance from interpretive memory his
dissociation grew increasingly bizarre. One particularly striking
example was in S's remark about music: "You know why they
have music in restaurants? Because it changes the taste of
everything. If you select the right kind of music, everything
tastes good. Surely people who work in restaurants know this."
It is easy to believe that S is onto something very right with this
comment, but then you realize he is speaking literally and, at
bottom, misses the whole point of music in a restaurant. Food
does taste better when you are happy, your company is happy,
and you are surrounded by happy strangers. But S is not talking
about emotion or fellowship. He is talking about what is on his
tongue.
S seems to have been at John Dean's opposite extreme.
Dean was a hard man to arouse. S, on the other hand, was
aroused by everything, perhaps because his synesthesia made
everything so remarkable. His arousal had a different role from
The Factual Memory of S. /271
ordinary attention. Most people come to attention to learn

something about the world, but S often was content simply to
perceive it. The sensuous richness of his perceptions became an
end in itself and disturbed the functioning of all his memory
levels. Emotionally, he was not much interested in the world
around him, yet he wished to revel in his perceptions. That lone
ambition kept him endlessly aroused without leading to action.
For S much of life was one long orientation reaction.
If we accept the old assumption that the purpose of memory
is to recall the past as accurately as possible, we must conclude
that S's memory was a very good one. His associations with
past experiences were so rich and singular that he could remember almost anything. But Luria insisted that despite his wondrous recall S was only a marginally functioning individual. As
a guide to action, S's memory did not work well. Luria reports
that S was an unusually passive man, always waiting for great
things to happen to him but never doing anything to promote
them.
Instead of becoming physically energetic, S became an
athlete of subjective actions. Even his creative and problemsolving efforts relied on perceptual experiences rather than on
symbolic constructions. Mathematics seems completely abstract, but S could solve math problems by imagining them in
concrete form. He conjured up enormous images that were
irrelevant to the mathematics, but which he could manipulate
mentally to solve a problem. If, to be extremely simple, you
asked him, "I have ten kopecks and you take four, how many
do I have left?" S could immediately imagine your hand holding
ten kopecks. He would see the rings on your fingers and the
lines of your palm. He would see the marks on the coins, the
dates, and the places where use had worn them thin. He would
mentally remove four kopecks from that hand and see that six
remained. This technique enabled him mentally to solve problems that, in formal algebra, call for up to two equations. The
solution had a price. Instead of learning the grammar of the real
world, he learned only how to manipulate his private one.
272 /
REMEMBERING AND FORGETIING
These abilities sufficed to let S function, although not brilliantly. He had a wife and child, and he earned a living. Luria
talks only briefly about S's jobs and does not tell why he left
them. It tickles my prejudices to think of a newspaper reporter
in Stalin's Russia who never noticed the implication of anything
that happened around him and who did not understand phrases
like to weigh one's words, but perhaps he was too literal even
for Stalinist editors. He also worked briefly as an efficiency
expert, although from the little Luria tells about that experience
it sounds as though S's ideas were more imaginative than efficient.
Eventually S found work that suited him-working as a
memory expert on stage. Movie fans will remember Mr. Memory in Alfred Hitchcock's The Thirty-nine Steps. A performer
stood on stage while a rowdy audience called out challenges to
his memory. S had a .similar act. In one part of his show,
audiences cried out things for him to remember and later he
would repeat those items in order. Astonishingly, S had invented
on his own the same system of artificial memory that the
ancients used. To help him in his act, S imagined a space (mostly
streets from his childhood) and filled the area with images used
as reminders to recall items on a list or, once, even to memorize
several stanzas of Dante's Divine Comedy in the original Italian,
a language S did not speak. Luria seems never to have heard of
this method before and describes the system in amazed detail.
Although the stage show sounds perfect for him, S found
that he needed new techniques to improve the accuracy of his
recall. He never made the typical errors of recall, but sometimes
he omitted something from his recital. His errors typified problems of artificial memory. For example, if he had to recall an
egg, he might imagine an egg against a white wall, but then as
he "walked by" he would overlook the egg because its color
blended in with the wall. Errors like that were acceptable in
Luria's lab, but not on the stage of a professional Mr. Memory.
Only after he began his work as a stage performer did S begin to
struggle to master his objective actions. In the rough-and-tumble
atmosphere of vaudeville and music halls you have to hallucinate
The Factual Memory of S. /273

pretty hard to tum a flop into success. Boos and catcalls lie as
near as a slip of the tongue, and despite his splendid onstage
memory S felt terrified. In his effort to perform well he slowly
developed a good useful memory.
First S reinvented the classic techniques for recalling the
details of an imaginary perception, practices like including good
lighting in the scene (no dark comers) and keeping the images
big so he could see them easily. These ideas appear in the Ad
Herennium and if either S or Luria had known about that ancient
book S might have improved his act more quickly; however, S
gained one important benefit from finding these secrets by
himself. He had been passive all his life, but now S had begun
seeking ways to improve his public performance. For the first
time in his life he seemed to be asking himself seriously the
fundamental question of what to do.
Something new had come into S's life. He wanted something from the outside world: success as a performer. The story
Luria tells of S' s effort to improve his act describes a person
who slowly learns to use a memory staircase for practical
purposes. First, S reinvented the Ad Herennium's classic techniques for accurate recall. He bothered with these improvements
only when accuracy began to matter to him. Then he gained
control over his powers of selective attention. S had always paid
attention to as much as possible, but he was no Sherlock Holmes
digesting the world in order to discover clues about its secrets,
and when he turned to remembering for practical purposes he
found that the richness of his imagery created problems. Originally S created complex images for his memory walk, but this
work proved too fatiguing. He had to settle for simpler images
in his space. Instead of imagining a rich perception with all its
physical details, his images grew increasingly schematic and
general. Luria reports that S began to get control over his
attention. Originally he was alert to everything and when he
tried to remember only key points he imagined a screen that
blocked most details from view. But eventually he developed the
ability to focus his attention, observing only selected parts of an
experience.
274 /
Gaining control over his attention proved crucial to gaining

control over his act. S's compulsion to perceive everything had
left him with a peculiar memory problem, an inability to forget.
Once a performance ended, S never again needed to know the
lists and charts used in that particular show; however, old lists
haunted his memory and even threatened to confuse his act. He
had to concentrate hard during a performance to remember only
the current list. He tried to develop techniques for forgetting, to
no avail.
He needed to get a grip on his imagination so that he could
recall only what a performance demanded. After he gained
practical control over his factual memory he still needed to
focus his emotional memory so that it served practical rather
than purely sUbjective ends. Instead of the indiscriminate
arousal he had favored in the past, he needed to be alert to the
needs of his performance. As always, a practical emotional
memory depends on having practical desires. As S told Luria:
One evening-it was the 23rd of April-I was quite exhausted
from having given three performances and was wondering how
I'd ever get through the fourth. There before me I could see
the charts of numbers appearing from the first three performances. It was a terrible problem. I thought: I'll just take a
quick look and see if the first chart of numbers is still there. I
was afraid somehow th.at it wouldn't be. I both did and didn't
want it to appear .... And then I thought: the chart of numbers
isn't turning up now and it's clear why-it's because I don't
want it to! Aha! That means if I don't want the chart to show
up it won't. And all it took was for me to realize this! At that
moment I felt I was free. The realization that I had some
guarantee against making mistakes gave me more confidence.
I began to speak more freely, could even permit myself the
luxury of pausing when I felt like it, for I knew that if I didn't
want an image to appear, it wouldn't. I felt simply wonderful.
The story of S's memory is a curious inversion of the more

familiar memory tale. In the ordinary telling we hear about a
person, usually a student, who could never remember anything.
The FactuaL Memory of s. I 275
School was so boring. If the story has a happy ending, the

scholar discovers the joys of learning, begins to pay attention,
and finds that his memory suddenly works perfectly well. S's
story tells of a man who could never forget anything, as the
whole of experience seemed endlessly remarkable. But there is
a happy ending. S discovered the joys of performing and began
to pay attention to what could help his behavior. After years of
remembering everything no matter what, he suddenly found that
he had adapted his memory to the needs of his actions. At last
he had made himself the master rather than the slave of memory.
19
THE INTERPREfIVE
MEMORY OF
MARCEL PROUST
Fragments of existence withdrawn from time . . . this
contemplation . . . was the only genuine and fruitful
pleasure that I had"known.
-Proust, Time Regained, 1927
Early in 1909 a scarcely-known French writer named

Marcel Proust underwent an emotional and intellectual experience that led him to put aside the philosophical essay he was
drafting and begin work on a novel. The new work soon became
the passion of his life. Proust had been a frequent visitor to the
salons of the Parisian aristocrats of blood and aristocrats of the
arts, but he retreated to a sound-proofed room in his home and
wrote. Formerly he had passed his summers by the seaside, but
he reduced that time and eventually abandoned those excursions
altogether. In place of these social habits he wrote and rewrote
his epic. The work grew longer, ultimately tripling in size from
its original draft. The thousands of pages that Proust wrote were
published as seven novels in a series called Remembrance of
Things Past, although a more accurate translation would be In
Quest of Lost Times. The books stand as the greatest literary
expression of the role of memory in a person's life.
276/
The Interpretive Memory of Marcel Proust / 277
The work that Proust wrote in the silent isolation of his

room is difficult to recommend to strangers. Personally, I never
read anything that shocked me more with a continuing recognition of experiences. To me, somehow this bizarre hermit has
touched exactly on my own feeling , observation, and intellect,
but I am a little weird myself. Proust's style runs to long detailed
sentences filled with obscure allusions, like this one:
And Swann felt a very cordial sympathy with the sultan
Mahomet II whose portrait by Bellini he admired, who, on
finding that he had fallen madly in love with one of his wives,
stabbed her to death in order, as his Venetian biographer
artlessly relates, to recover his peace of mind .
Even many people who like these fifty-one words find that
reading three thousand pages of this is like trying to live for a
season on a diet of the world's most exquisite chocolate. This
style of writing also made it difficult for Proust to find a publisher. One letter of rejection complained that nobody wanted to
read thousands of words about the way Proust turned over in
bed. This commonplace view proved correct enough. In my own
days as a bookseller I used to see a steady trickle of sales of
Proust's volume one. Volume two sold a copy every few months.
Volume seven would have been a good place to hide my money.
Nobody ever picked it up , let alone went off with it.
Despite the rather specialized appeal of Proust's style and
setting, people interested in the relation between memory and
life should at least be aware of Proust's epic. He describes the
workings of memory that we have seen in this book, and always
he puts the matter in the context of human experience. That
long account of tossing in bed, for example, is filled with
descriptions of motor associations. Science still does not know
much about motor associations-except that babies soon learn
to suck their thumbs and that even cabbage butterflies hone their
reflexes. Proust knew that at this level memory is pure disorientation and that most people struggle desperately to reorient
themselves:
. .. in my own bed ... I lost all sense of the place in which I

had gone to sleep, and when I awoke in the middle of the
night, not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at
first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of
existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depth of an
animal's consciousness . . . then the memory-not yet of the
place in which I was, but of the various other places where I
had lived and might now very possibly be-would come like a
rope let down from heaven to draw me out of the abyss of notbeing.
So Proust too saw memory as the way to climb toward consciousness and would have understood immediately the implications of S's preference for imagining a different clock while in
bed.
We are lucky in P~oust. Science often runs ahead of language, leaving us unable to find words to discuss the implications
of the new. We saw how computers caught our language by
surprise and left us with confusing puns. But Proust had so
profound an understanding of his own experience with memory
that, as we arrive at our revolution in memory theory, we find a
classic of literature stands ready to help us think and talk about
what we have learned. Through the narrative voice that Proust
calls "Marcel" readers find an account of memory in the life of
an individual, and at the end of his many millions of words the
reader leaves Proust's novels with an unshakable perception of
memory's contribution to the core of all human experience.
Although written between 1909 and 1922-well before Bartlett, Piaget, and Arnold's memory work-the books assert absolutely that memory has many levels and that each level enriches the meaning of one's experience. Proust's account also
distinguishes between "voluntary" and "involuntary" memory.
Voluntary memory is akin to recall, whereas involuntary memory is closer to recognition, especially emotional recognition.
The story in the novels tells of Marcel's climb up memory's
staircase. As the work opens, Marcel is in bed and the details of
his past affect him only in the disorientation that accompanies
his motor associations. Then he eats a madeleine and suddenly

remembers the emotions of his childhood. Before the madeleine,
Marcel had thought of memory as the sterile recall of the pastimages without the essence of experience-but he changes his
mind when he discovers that emotional reminders can move
him. Recognition has made him feel connected to his whole life
and to the places and people he has known.
The encounter with the madeleine is the book's most famous description of memory at work and of Marcel's refusal to
settle for less than the fullness of memory. With his first taste
he undergoes an enormous emotional response and quickly
swallows more tea, but that does not increase his joy. "It is
plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself.
The drink has called it into being, but can only repeat indefinitely, with a progressive diminution of strength, the same
message." Proust here gives us a splendid statement of the
relation between reminder and memory. The reminder is out
there in the environment, and memory cannot work without it,
but the effects of the reminder are nowhere in the reminder
itself. Language that looks to the reminder (sometimes known
as the stimulus, trigger, or even input) to explain the reaction
looks in the wrong direction. Studying the reminder is like trying
to understand a pointing finger by following it to the wrist. You
must forget the hand and look toward where it points.
Marcel refuses to settle for the emotion that the experience
evokes, saying, "I put down the cup and examine my own
mind." Contrast that refusal to settle with John Dean's taste for
embracing positive emotions without prying into their causes.
Marcel describes the source of such hesitation: "What an abyss
of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself;
when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through
which it must go seeking .... Seek? More than that: create. It
is face to face with something that does not yet exist ... which
it alone can bring into the light of day. "
Here at last we have a clear articulation of the fear all of us
know when faced with really having to remember something.
The uncertain discovery of oneself accompanies a climb up
280 /
memory's steps. No wonder John Dean balked at climbing. But

Marcel was made of bolder stuff and pressed on. "I ask my
mind to make one further effort, to bring back once more the
fleeting sensation. . .. Ten times over 1 must essay the task,
must lean down over the abyss. And each time the cowardice
that deters us from every difficult task, every important enterprise, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and
think merely of the worries of today. . . . And suddenly the
memory revealed itself. The taste was that little piece of madeleine which ... my aunt Leone used to give me."
Finally he has climbed to factual memory's level. When we
talk about memory we must never ignore how active a process
remembering is, how tempting it is to avoid its uncertainties.
When we understand that, we can find it easier to think about
John Dean. His contentment with emotional memory seems like
a terrified turning away from an uncertain truth.
Having reached factual memory, a mass of associations
leapt to Marcel's mind and he recalled the images of his boyhood
village. But there is more to remember. "I did not yet and must
long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so
happy. " Before he can climb to that insight he must thoroughly
explore the factual level. There we see the difference between
the memory of S and of Marcel. S was content with the factual
level and did not bother to explore its meaning. Marcel, after
struggling to reach the factual level, explores it thoroughly in
the hope of finding the reason for his emotion.
The madeleine incident comes at the start; the insight into
its source of joy comes at the end. The middle million words
explore experience and memory. It is not easy to speak of a plot
in Proust because the critical changes are usually alterations in
point of view or understanding. Marcel is forever learning that
he had misunderstood matters, so instead of describing events
that change the plot, Proust shows us Marcel learning things
that change his attitude. Barely 300,000 words into the story, a
painter called Elstir spells out for Marcel and the readers just
what kind of adventure story we are reading. "We do not receive
wisdom," Elstir says. "We must discover it for ourselves, after

a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make
for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point
of view from which we come at last to regard the world. "
Marcel's story tells of his long journey toward his own wisdom.
Memory is important in this story because it changes as
Marcel changes. Meanwhile, forgetfulness leads to blunders: As
an adolescent just learning the ways of social custom Marcel
goes to a small party during the course of which he receives a
sealed envelope. He has no idea what to do with the thing and
shoves it into his pocket for surreptitious reading at an opportune moment. Then he forgets all about it and remembers
receiving it only when , back home, he finds it in his pocket.
Opening the envelope he reads the name of the party guest he
should have escorted into the dining room. Oops.
Although the richness of memory is necessary for the
development of a personal vision, the story does not mechanically assume that more memory is best. Marcel refers often to
memory's cruelty in letting us imagine what we do not want to
see or remember some anguish we would prefer to forget. He
also shows how memory can lead us to treat a new circumstance
as though it were an old one and how we must sometimes forget
all of a memory's levels before we can free ourselves of old
habits. His great example of ending a memory is in the loss of
love, when what made him happiest has gone forever. A long
sequence (200 + pages) recounts Marcel's grief at the death of a
lover he calls Albertine. The grief and recovery from it are a
process of memory. At first, everything reminded Marcel of the
dead Albertine. The pattern of raindrops evoked a specific image
of Albertine, and that image triggered desire. The impossibility
of the desire led to renewed sadness and suffering. Then, when
the grief seemed done, when experiences no longer triggered
associated images, or if they did, the images no longer evoked
desire, Marcel found he still had not done with memory. Motor
associations persist. The last thing we forget of love is how to
embrace our lover:

. .. the love of Albertine had disappeared from my memory.
But it seems that there exists too an involuntary memory of
the limbs, a pale sterile imitation of the other, but longer lived .
. . . Our legs and our arms are full of torpid memories.
In this account of the need to retreat from the fullness of

Marcel's memory for Albertine we gain ways of thinking and
talking sympathetically about Dean's contentment with partial
memory. He shunned a rich memory's cruelty.
Albertine' s death is the closest the book ever comes to a
typical plot device. The objective world has changed and the
hero must adapt to that change. In this case Marcel adapts by
forgetting the love he once had. The long descent back down the
staircase has ended his pain, but it has also returned him to that
state of disoriented uncertainty about how to act. Forgetting
Albertine was necessary, but like the time he forgot about the
envelope in his pocket, Marcel does not know what he should
do.
Then one day memory comes to Marcel's rescue. The
story's climax unites three experiences of emotional recognition
and factual recall, one after the other, in such rapid succession
that it seems as though the whole of his life has become a single
chunk of memory. The incidents themselves are each as trivial
as tasting a madeleine. One inCident is the feel of a slightly
uneven stone in the pavement, which reminds him of Venice.
Second, a servant knocks a spoon against a plate and the sound
reminds him of a railway journey. Third, he wipes his mouth
with a stiff linen napkin and he remembers his arrival at the
seaside town of Balbec where he first met Albertine. These
memories bring all levels together. The emotions of Venice,
Balbec, and the railway are included, as are the images associated with each place, and so too are the meanings of those
memories. Despite their intensity, they never disorient Marcel,
never make him lose contact with where he is. Instead, the many
moments of his past have bent around to unite and become part
of the present. He feels again, as he had with the madeleine,
that he has come face to face with a truth, a truth not lessened
by the fact that it is his own truth, one that no one else in the
world would recognize. Marcel has found truth in a madeleine
and in the feel of two paving stones. We readers would not find
truth in either experience, but each of us can find it somewhere,
in something ordinary that reminds us of the reality of our own
experience.
Because truth is based as deeply in its subjective meaning
as in the objective facts of the situation "what another person
sees of a universe ... is not the same as our own." Marcel's
discovery of a world of profoundly individual truths and intimate
meanings could be a terrifying discovery of isolation. As Marcel
says, the expression of one's truth requires "courage of many
kinds, including the courage of one's emotions." He uses that
last phrase in exactly the way we speak of having the courage of
one's convictions. It takes a commitment to the truth of one's
own experience in order to stand by what one feels, just as it
does to stand by what one thinks. Without that commitment a
person cannot go on to the other discoveries that memory
brings, but because of this courage people have found their own
truths and discovered ways to translate their visions into reality:
. . . instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that
world mUltiply itself and we have at our disposal as many
worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different from
one another than those which revolve in infinite space.
Marcel's experience with the moments of his past fades, of

course, but the insight the experience has given him stays. As
Elstir promised a million or so words earlier, the emotions,
facts, and insights Marcel has gained have become his wisdom.
His journey in the wilderness is done.
For memory students, this story suggests a way for us to
start talking about the full experience of memory. The metaphors left over from the artificial-memory tradition are dead for
us. Their modernized clothes in computer-technology jargon are
no more alive. Instead, we must begin to talk of active creation,
of the abyss we face as we explore the darkness within our-
284 /
selves, of the terror over memory's uncertainty, and of the hard

and persistent exploration needed to bring us beyond facts to
understanding.
Most people do not want even to read Proust, let alone be
like him, and it is not a self-evident principle that private truths
are preferable to the wisdom of the group. Neither S nor John
Dean wanted such a private revelation, but in Proust's life and
memory we see a clear illustration of the human possibility of
discovering and developing one's own insights and understanding.
Proust's friends and acquaintances during his long literary
apprenticeship would probably have been startled to think he
would become memory's most articulate prophet, for Proust
recalled details imprecisely. He filled his books with quotations
cited from memory, and he almost always got the quotation
wrong. Today, we tend to think that anyone who remembers
even that there is a verse to quote has a good memory, but
Proust was schooled a century ago, and by those standards his
recall was not of the best. He forgot people's names and the
details or even the broad outlines of important events. Proust
acknowledged his poor memory, but he found a silver lining to
the cloud, asserting, "Infirmity alone makes us take notice and
learn .... A little insomnia is not without its value in making us
appreciate sleep .... An unfailing memory is not a very powerful
incentive to the study of the phenomenon of memory."
If we think of memory as a guide to action instead of a
storehouse of information, however, Proust's life shows that he
had a splendid memory. John Dean's memory gave us an example of someone leaping without looking. In S we saw the opposite problem: endless looking without ever leaping. Proust developed the whole ability to look, remember, and then leap in a
successful way. All three levels of memory served him well.
Like Dean, Proust's emotional memory was in fine order.
He knew his likes and dislikes, and he acted upon them. From
an early age Proust wanted to be a great writer and made that
ambition the focus of his life. Of course, original writing cannot
rest on emotional memory alone. The expression of a personal

vision demands higher levels than this one.
Like S, Proust was also a great observer. His factual memory was subject to the many errors that come from the intrusions
of meaningful associations, but he paid attention to many things
and had the reputation of taking in every detail around him.
Originally he limited his observations chiefly to the social world.
During the 1890s he was found regularly attending and observing
the most exclusive salons of Paris. At the tum of the century,
however, Proust was inspired by reading the art critic John
Ruskin to take the buildings and places of the world with the
same seriousness he had taken society, and he began paying
close attention to the details of everyday experience. The result
of all this looking appears in the endless detail of his writing. It
is hard to believe that S himself could have told a story more
rich in precise and intricate detail.
Unlike Dean and S, however, Proust also understood the
implications of events around him. His interpretive memory was
in fine shape; yet it took him a long time to begin his great
project. Insights can be entirely personal, but many of them
make people more like everybody else. For example, in the case
of the boy who had an insight that let him say wait for it to dry,
the development enabled the child to think more like other
English speakers. Proust as a boy and adolescent absorbed the
richness of French culture and knew he wanted to be a writer,
but it took him a long time to develop a unique wisdom. He
published a volume of stories when he was in his twenties, but
he was more ambitious than productive. Like many young
writers (and not a few older ones) his ambition to write a great
book was clearer than what his subject matter should be.
He was particularly hard pressed because the literary theories of his day did not grant much authority to the emotional and
interpretive levels of memory in which Proust excelled. French
philosophy especially has long made great distinction between
mind and body, intellect and passion. The novelist who dominated France when Proust came of age (1890s) was Emile Zola,
a writer who focused on detail with a scientist's precision, but
Zola believed that emotion and meaning were completely divorced from the facts of one's own life. There was no room for
sUbjectivity in his psychology.
The leading French philosopher of that era was Henri
Bergson, a teacher of Proust and husband to one of Proust's
cousins. Bergson believed in the importance of subjectivity, but
his philosophy was the flip side of Zola's. For Bergson too , the
mind and body were divorced, but whereas Zola had concentrated on the body, Bergson's philosophy focused on the mind.
For Proust, who observed facts as deeply as Zola, but who
also credited emotion and interpretation with as much importance as did Bergson, the question of what to write about
seemed endlessly difficult. He was equally interested in mind
and body and needed to find a way to contain the two at once.
Thus, the story of his life into his late thirties is a tale of endless
preparation. Proust wrote constantly, but published only a little
of it. He practiced and perfected his style. He observed, observed, observed. But his subject continued to elude him. He
made several false starts on his novel and after long efforts at
writing put the drafts aside forever.
Late in 1908 he began writing a philosophical essay, Contre
Sainte-Beuve. In it Proust articulated his theory that novels
should present the remembered details of everyday life. It is in
these details, he argued, that we can find the deep truths to
which habit makes us blind. In hindsight it seems that Proust
had already found his subject-memory and the everyday-but
he still had not found a way for his artistic imagination to chunk
the pieces together. Then in January 1909 he had some tea and
a biscuit (transformed into a madeleine in his story) . That
afternoon Proust underwent the experience that proved to be
the turning point of his life. Emotion and detail came together,
and he had his subject. He knew how to talk about intellect and
passion at the same time. The two are united by the experiences
that give them their personal meaning. For Proust, imagination
and memory had suddenly become the same thing.
SOURCE NOTES
AND
INDEX
Sources
A. The Top Twenty-five
Any further reading about memory should begin with the
following books . Each is the product of intense thought and
inquiry.
Anderson, J. R. & Bower, G. H . (1973) . Human associative memory. Washington: Winston.
Aristotle. The Treatises. Including On memory and reminiscence.
Arnold , M. B. (1984) . Memory and the brain. Hillsdale , NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates .
Augustine (1961) . Confessions. Trans. Pine-Coffin, R. S. New York: Penguin
Books.
Baddeley, A. D. (1976). The psychology of memory. New York: Basic Books.
Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bolles, E. B. (1982). So much to say. New York: St. Martin' s Press.
Breuer, J. & Freud, S. (1895) . Studies on hysteria. Trans. A. Strachey & J.
Strachey. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of
Sigmund Freud, ed . J. Strachey, vol. 2, 1955. London: Hogarth Press.
Ebbinghaus, H. (1913). Memory, trans. D. H. Ruyer & C. E. Bussenius. New
York: Teachers College Press.
Erdelyi, M. H. (1985). Psychoanalysis: Freud's cognitive psychology. New
York: W. H . Freeman.
Freud, S . (1898) . The psychical mechanism offorgetfulness. In The standard
edition, ed. & trans., J. Strachey, vol. 3, 1955 . London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1910). Five lectures on psycho-analysis.ln The standard edition,
ed. & trans., James Strachey, vol. 11. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud , S. (1959) . An autobiographical study. In The standard edition, ed . &
trans., James Strachey, vol. 20. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud , S. (1960) . The psychopathology of everyday life, trans. A. Tyson , ed.
James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton.
James , W. (1890). The principles of psychology. New York : Henry Holt.
/289
290 / Sources
Klatzky, Roberta L. (1980). Human memory: Structures and processes. New
York: W. H. Freeman .
Kolb, B . & Whishaw, Ian Q. (1985). Fundamentals of human neuropsychology. (2nd edition) New York: W. H. Freeman.
Nauta, Walle J. H. & Feirtag, Michael (1986). Fundamental neuroanatomy.
New York: W. H. Freeman.
Olton, D. S., Gamzu, E. & Corkin, S. (eds) (1985). Memory dysfunctions: An
integration of animal and human research from preclinical and clinical
perspectives. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 444.
Piaget, J. & Inhelder, B. (1973). Memory and intelligence . Collab. with
Sinclair-de Zwart, H., trans. A. J. Pomerans. New York: Basic Books.
Proust, M. (1981). Remembrance of things past, trans. C. K. S. Moncrieff &
T. Kilmartin. New York: Ramdom House.
Sacks, O. (1985). The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical
tales. New York: Summit Books.
Spence, J. D. (1984). The memory palace of Matteo Ricci. New York: Viking
Press.
Squire, L. R. (1986) . Mechan\sms of memory. Science, 232,1612-19.
Yates, F. A. (1966). The art of memory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
B. Chapter Notes
These notes are organized by chapter in the hope that readers
can obtain information quickly without having to do too much
searching. Partial references, in the form of Name (date), are
listed fully either at the top of the entry for that particular
chapter or in part A (The Top Twenty-five) of these listings.
Some chapters also include "see also" listings for further
reading.
PART ONE-THE REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS

PERSONAL
Chapter i-Does Memory Matter?
4-Hume, D. (1902). Enquiries concerning the human understanding and
concerning the principles of morals. ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, section vi, part i, p. 241.
4-man who could recite Virgil backward , cited in Yates (1966) ,
p.16.
Sources / 291
5-memory is of little value , Norman , D. A. (1969) . Memory and attention : an
introduction to human information processing. New York: John Wiley &
Sons, p. I.
7-lawyer's introductory image, quoted in Yates, p. II .
8-use of paper in fourteenth-century London , Coleman, J. (1981). Medieval
Readers and Writers : 1350-/400. New York: Columbia University Press,
p. 161.
9-Peter of Ravenna's popularity , Yates (1966), p. 112.
II-Augustine on paradox of memory , Augustine (1961) , p. 225.
14-Bacon's rejection of memory , Spence (1984), p. 13.
15-Freud's personal reference, Freud (1960) , pp. 24-25 .
17-the discussion of the evolution of recognition takes its examples from
Wilson , E. O. (1975) . Sociobiology: the new synthesis . Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: ants , p. 203; fish, p. 203; auks
and terns, p. 204.
20-newborn elephant quotation , Douglas-Hamilton, I. & O. (1975) . Among
the elephants. New York: Viking Press, p. 90.
20-account of N'Dume in quicksand, Ibid. , p. 92.
21-kitty-cat quote , Becker, J. D. (1973). A Model for the encoding of
experiential information . In Schank, R. C. & K. M. Colby (1973) . Computer models of thought and language. San Francisco: W. H . Freeman
and Company, p. 398.
Chapter 2-Memory at Work

See: Bower, G. H. (1981). Mood and Memory. American Psychologist, 36:
129-48.
Cohen, N. J., Eichenbaum, H., Deacedo, B. S. & Corkin , S. (1985). Different
memory systems underlying acquisition of procedural and declarative
knowledge. In Olton et al (1985).
Chapter 3-Emotional Memory

30-Proust's sudden exquisite pleasure, Proust (1981), vol. I, p. 46.
31-Arabs look up hatreds in memory, Schank, R. C. (1982). Dynamic
Memory: a theory of reminding and learning in computers and people.
New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 116.
33-Proustian experience among rabbits , Ketty, S. S. (1976). Biological concomitants of affective states and their possible role in memory processes.
In M. R. Rosenzweig & E. L. Bennett (eds) . Neural mechanisms of
learning and memory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 323.
292 / Sources
36-Little Albert study, Watson , J. B. & Rayner, R. (1920). Conditioned
emotional reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology , 3: 1-14.
38--cabbage butterfly memory , Lewis, A C. (1986) . Memory constraints and
flower choice in pieris rapae. Science , 232: 863-65.
39-theory of circular reactions is developed in, Piaget, J. (1952). The)Origins
of intelligence in children, trans ., M. Cook. New York: International
Universities Press. See also: Piaget, J. (1951). Plays , dreams, and imitation in childhood, trans., C. Gattegno & F. M. Hodgson . New York: W.
W. Norton. Piaget, J. (1954). The construction of reality in the child. New
York: Basic Books.
See also: Evans, R. I. (1968). B. F. Skinner: the man and his ideas . New York:
E. P. Dutton & Co.
Chapter 4-Factual Memory

See: Lynn, R. (1966) . Attention , arousal and the orientation reaction . Oxford:
Pergamon Press.
48-Fan effects discussed in Reder, L. M. & Wible, C. (1984). Strategy use in
question-answering: Memory strength and task constraints on fan effects.
Memory and Cognition.
48-importance of attention, James (1890) , p. 427.
49-definition of attention , Ibid., p. 403.
49-for good memory of high arousal words, Kleinsmith, L. J. & Kaplan , S.
(1963) . Paired associate learning as a function of arousal and interpolated
interval. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65: 190-93 ; for corroborating
research
see
Kleinsmith ,
L. J. & Kaplan, S. (1%4). Interaction of arousal and recall interval in
nonsense syllable and paired-associate learning. Journal of Experimental
Psychology, 67: 124-26; Walker, E. & Tarte, R. D. (1963). Memory storage
as a function of arousal and time with homogeneous and hetrogeneous
lists. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 2: 113-19; Corteen,
R. S. (1969) . Skin conductance changes and word recall. British Journal
of Psychology, 60: 80-4; Butter, M. J. (1970) . Differential recall of pair
associates as a function of arousal and concreteness-imagery levels.
Journal of Experimental Psychology, 84: 252-56; McClean, P. D. (1969).
Induced arousal and time of recall as determinants of paired-associate
recall. British Journal of Psychology , 60: 57-62.
50-for a survey of the nature of the orientation reaction, Lynn (1966).
50-Pavlov on the origin of inquisitiveness, Pavlov , I. P. (1927) . Conditioned
reflexes. Oxford: Blackwell. p. 12.
51-differences in habituation, Lynn (1966), pp. 6-7.
51-main sources on recency effect, Glanzer, M. & Meinzer, A. (1967). The
effects of intralist activity on free recall. Journal of Verbal Learning and
Verbal Behavior, 6: 928-35 ; Craik, F. I. M. (1968) . Two components in
Sources / 293
free recall. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 7: 996-1004;
Craik, F. I. M. & Levy, B. A. (1970). Semantic and acoustic information
in primary memory . Journal of Experimental Psychology, 86: 77-82.
53-result of incidental learning, Baddeley, A. D. & Hitch, G. (1976). Recency
reexamined. In S. Dornic (ed), Attention and Performance , VI.
58-screen memories, Freud, S. (1899). Screen memories. In The standard
edition, ed. & trans., James Strachey. vol 3. London: Hogarth Press.
58-own voice does not confuse auditory prompt recall, Bryden,
M. p. (1971). Attention strategies and short-term memory in dichotic
listening. Cognitive Psychology 2: 99-116.
59-experiment on recency effect counting 20 backwards , Tzeng,
O. J. L. (1973). Positive recency effect in delayed free recall. Journal of
Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 12: 436-39. (1973).
61-chunks of unanalyzed famous cliches, Rubin, D. C. (1977). Very longterm memory for prose and verse. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal
Behavior, 16: 611-21.
61-child's alteration wait for it to cool, Clark, R. (1974). Performing without
competence. Journal of Child Language, I: 1-10.
See also: Brown, J. A. (1958). Some tests of the decay theory of immediate
memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 10: 12-21.
Chapter 5-Interpretive Memory

See: Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some
limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review,
63: 81-97.
Thlving, E. & Donaldson, W., eds. (1972). Organization and memory . New
York: Academic Press.
67-Bartlett' s claim that memory and imagination are an expression of the
same activities, Bartlett (1932) , p. 214.
68-study of order of approximation, Miller, G. A. & Selfridge, J. A. (1950).
Verbal context and the recall of meaningful material. American Journal of
Psychology , 63: 176-87.
70-confused recognition becomes unconfused in organized settings, Mandler,
G., Pearlstone, Z., & Koopmans, H . S. (1969). Effects of organization
and semantic similarity on a recall and recognition task. Journal of Verbal
Learning and Verbal Behavior, 8: 410-23.
70-grammatical organization makes confused recognition unlikely , Lachman,
R. & Thttle, A. V. (1965) . Approximation to English and short-term
memory: Construction or storage: Journal of Experimental Psychology,
70: 386-93.
7 I-harmony between recall and recognition, Mandler, G. (1972) . Organization
and recognition. In Thlving & Donaldson (1972).
294 / Sources
72-Piaget's first principle, Piaget & Inhelder (1973), p. 8.
72-the process of lumping, Tulving, E. (1962). Subjective organization in free
recall of "unrelated" words. Psychological Review, 69: 344-54.
73-pairing imposed on random lists, Jenkins, J. J. & Russell, W. A. (1952).
Associative clustering during recall. Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychology, 47 : 818-21.
73-first lab evidence of superiority of recognition, McDougall, R. (1904).
Recognition and recall . Journal of Philosophical and Scientific Methods,
1: 229-33.
74-amnesiacs better at recognition, Hirst, W. , Johnson, M. K., Kim, J. K.,
Phelps, E. A. , Risse, G., & Volpe, B. T. (1986). Recognition and recall in
amnesics . Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning , Memory , and
Cognition , 12: 445-51.
74-experiments with poorer recognition than recall, eg., Bahrick,
H. P. & Bahrick, P. O. (1964). A reexamination of the interrelations among
measures of retention . Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 16:
318-24.
74-recognition confused by context but recall isn't, Tulving E., & Thompson,
D. M. (1973). Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic
memory. Psychological Review, 80: 352-73; Watkins , M. J. & Tulving, E.
(1975). Episodic memory: when recognition fails. Journal of Experimental
Psychology : General, 104: 5-29; Wiseman, S. & Tulving, E. (1976).
Encoding specificity: Relation between recall superiority and recognition
failure. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 2: 349-61; Tulving E. & Watkins, O. C. (1977). Recognition failure of
words with a single meaning. Memory & Cognition, 5: 513-22.
75-chess study, De Groot, A. D. (1965) . Thought and choice in chess . The
Hague: Mouton: De Groot, A. D. (1966). Perception and memory versus
thinking. In B. Kleinmuntz (ed.). Problem solving. New York: Wiley;
Simon. H. A. & Barenfeld, M. (1969). Information-processing analysis of
perceptual problems in problem solving. Psychological Review, 76: 47383; Simon, H . A. & Gilmartin, K. (1973). A simulation of memory for
chess positions. Cognitive Psychology , 5: 29-46.
75-0thello perceived like chess, Wolff, A. S., Mitchell, D. H. & Frey , P. W.
(1984) . Perceptual skill in the game of Othello. Journal of Psychology,
118: 7-16.
76-Piaget's second principle, Piaget & Inhelder (1973) , p. 19.
78-for classic paper on chunking see Miller (1956).
86-spatial memory related to foraging requirements, Dale, R. H. & Bedard,
M. (1984). Limitations on spatial memory in mice. Southern Psychologist,
2: 23-6.
88-remarks by boy who saw but did not understand cork, Piaget & Inhelder
(1973) , p. 244.
89-Piaget's third principle, Ibid. , p. 385.
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9O-recognition favors the plausible, Reder, L. M. & Wible, C. (1984).
Strategy use in question-answering: Memory strength and task constraints
on fan effects. Memory & Cognition, 12: 411-19.
9O-poor recognition for "irrelevant" facts, Dellarosa & Bourne (1984) .
See also:
Bahrick, H. P., Bahrick, P. O. & Wittlinger, R. P. (1975) . Fifty years of memory
for names and faces: a cross-sectional approach. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: General, 104: 54-75.
Bousefield, W. A. (1953). The occurrence of clustering in recall of randomly
arranged associates. Journal of General Psychology, 49: 229-40.
CotTer, C. N., Bruce, D., & Reicher, G. M. (1966) . Clustering in free recall as
a function of certain methodological variations. Journal of Experimental
Psychology, 71: 858-66.
Cohen, B. H. (1963). Recall of categorized word lists. Journal of Experimental
Coltheart, V. & Winograd, E. (1986). Word imagery but not age of acquisition
atTects episodic memory. Memory & Cognition, 14: 174-80.
Graesser, A. II & Mandler, G. (1978). Limited processing capacity constrains
the storage of unrelated sets of words and retrieval from natural categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory,
4: 86-100.
Graf, P. & Mandler, G. (1984). Activation makes words more accessible, but
not necessarily more retrievable . Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal
Behavior, 23: 553-68.
Mandler, G. (1980). Recognizing: the judgment of previous occurrence . Psychological Review, 87: 251-72.
Mandler, G. (1985). From association to structure. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, II : 464-68.
Mandler, G. & Dean, P. J. (1%9). Seriation: development of serial order in free
recall.
Journal
of
Experimental
Psychology ,
81:
207-15.
Mandler, G. & Rabinowitz, J. C. (1981). Appearance and reality: Does a
recognition test really improve subsequent recall and recognition. Journal
of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning & Memory, 7: 79-90.
Mandler, G. & Shebo, B. J. (1982). SUbitizing: an analysis of its component
processes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, II: 1-22.
Paivio, A. (1%9). Mental imagery in associative learning and memory. Psychological Review, 76: 241-63.
Rubin, D. C. & Friendly, M. (1986). Predicting which words get recalled:
Measures of free recall, availability , goodness, emotionality, and pronouncability for 925 nouns. Memory & Cognition, 14: 79-94.
Thlving, E. (1972). Episodic and semantic memory. In Thlving & Donaldson
(1972) .
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Williams, K. w., & Francis, T. D. (1986). JUdging category frequency: automaticity or availability? Journal of Experimental Psychology : Learning,
Memory, and Cognition, 12: 387-96.
Chapter 6-The Arts of Memory

See:
Bowers, K. & Dywan, J. (1983). The use of hypnosis to enhance recall.
Science , 222: 184-85.
Orne, M. T., Soskis, D. A., Dinges, D. F. , & Orne, E. C. (1984). Hypnotically
induced testimony. In Welles & Loftus, eds.
Wells, G. L. & Loftus, E. (Eds.) (1984). Eyewitness testimony: Psychological
perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
93-Borges on blindness, Gargan , E. A. (1986). Jorge Luis Borges, a master
offantasy and fables, is dead. New York Times, June 15, p. A30:4.
95-poll of college students on memory , Orne et al. (1984) , p. 175.
96-hypnosis technique requires continual reinforcement, Ibid.
97-subjects remember day of week of old birthdays, True, R. M. (1949).
Experimental control in hypnotic age regression states . Science , 110: 583-
84.
97-four-year-olds don't know the day ofthe week, Orne et al (1984) .
97-hypnotist communicated answer to subjects, Ibid.
97-hypnosis ceases to aid memory in interviews, Ibid.
98-hypnosis radically alters a person's willingness to voice a memory,
Bowers & Dywan (1983).
98-recalled version of Village Smithy, Stalnaker, J. M. & Riddle,
E. E . (1932). The effect of hypnosis on long-delayed recall. Journal of
General Psychology, 6: 429-40.
98-hypnosis does not work better than repeated recall, Nogrady , H ., McConkey, K. M. & Perry , C. (1985). Enhancing visual memory : Trying
hypnosis, trying imagination, and trying again. Journal of Abnormal
98-repeated recall improves memory, Erde1yi , M. H. & Kleinbard, J. (1978).
Has Ebbinghaus decayed with time?: The growth of recall (hypermnesia)
over days. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and
Memory, 4: 275-89.
99-repeated recall followed by hypnosis leads to confabulation, Bowers &
Dywan (1983).
99-hypnotized witnesses are unusually confident about their memory of
event, Orne et al. (1984).
Sources I 297
99-hypnotism can plant memories, Perry, C. & Laurence, J (1983). Hypnotically created memory among highly hypnotizable subjects. Science, 222:
523-24.
99-memory is an imaginative construction, Bartlett (1932), p. 214.
loo-precepts for good memories require good memories, Spence (1984), p. 4.
102-artificial memory is too carnal, from Yates (1966) .
104-experiment on types of meaningful associations, Bower, G. H. & Winzenz, D. (1970). Comparison of associative learning strategies. Psychonomic Science, 20: 119-20.
106-story of Simonides of Ceos opens Yates (1966), pp. 1-2.
107-Ad Herennium on bizarre images, from Yates (1966), p. 8.
109-insight leads to memory of list, Katona, G. (1940). Organizing and

memorizing. New York: Columbia University Press.
109-Descartes on memory, in Yates (1966), p. 373 .
See also: Brown, R. & McNeill, D. (1966) . The "tip of the tongue" phenomenon. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 5: 325-37.
Geiselman, R. E., Fisher, R. P., MacKinnon, D. P. & Holland, H . L. (1985).
Eyewitness memory enhancement in the police interview: Cognitive retrieval mnemonics versus hypnosis . Journal of Applied Psychology, 70:
401-12.
Hall, David F. , Loftus, Elizabeth F., & Tougignant, Japes P. (1984) . Postevent
information and changes in recollection for a natural event. In Wells &
Loftus (1984) .
Loftus , E. F. & Greene, E. (1980) . Warning: even memory for faces may be
contagious. Law and Human Behavior, 4: 323-34.
Malpass , R. S. & Devine, P. G. (1981). Guided memory in eyewitness identification. Journal of Applied Psychology, 66: 343-50.
Shepherd , J. w., Davies, G. M. & Ellis, H. D. (1978). How best shall a face be
described? In Grunberg, M. M., Morris, P. E. & Sykes, R. N. (eds) (1978).
Practical aspects of memory . London : Academic Press.
Shepherd, J. W. & Ellis, H. D. (1973) . The effect of attractiveness on recognition memory for faces. American Journal of Psychology, 86: 627-33.
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Wells, G. L. & Hyryciw, B. (1984). Memory for faces: Encoding and retrieval
operations. Memory & Cognition , 12: 338-44.
Wells, G. L. & Loftus, E. (1984) . Eyewitness research: then and now. In Wells
& Loftus, Eds. (1984).
Wells, G. L. & Murray, D. M. (1984). Eyewitness confidence. In Wells &
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PART
Two-THE BIOLOGY OF MEMORY

Chapter 7-Newfound Surprises
117-Lashley's despair of learning, Lashley, K. S. (1951). The problem of

serial order in behavior. In Jeffress, L. A., ed. (1951). Cerebral mechanisms in behavior: The Hixon symposium. New York: John Wiley. p. 480.
119-John's idea is set forth in John, E. R. (1967). Mechanisms of memory.
New York: Academic Press.
I2I-For Pribram's theory and its development see: Pribram, K. H. (1971)
Language of the brain: Experimental paradoxes and principles in neuropsychology. Englewood cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall; Pribram, K. H. (1980).
Mind, brain, and consciousness: The organization of competence and
conduct. In Davidson, R. J. & Davidson, M. (eds) The psychology of
consciousness. New York: Plenum Press; Pribram, K. H. (1982) . Localization and distribution of function in the brain. In Ohrbach, J. (ed)
Neuropsychology after Lashley. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
122-Atkinson-Shiffrin model of memory presented in, Atkinson,
R. L. & Shiffrin, R. M. (1968). Human memory: A proposed system and
its control processes. In Spence, K . W. & Spence, J. T. (eds) The
psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory,
vol. 2. New York: Academic Press.
See also: Bloom, F. E., Lazerson , A. & Hofstadter, L. (1985). Brain, mind,
and behavior. New York: W. H. Freeman.
Hall, Stephen S. (1985) . Aplysia & Hermissenda. Science 85. May:
30-39.
Klopf, A. H. (1982). The hedonistic neuron: A theory of memory, learning,
and intelligence. Washington: Hemisphere Publishing Corp. [Note: I
include Klopf's book even though it has much of the crackpot about it,
because it introduces the idea of the neuron changing its behavior rather
than changing a storehouse.]
Knudsen, E. (1983). Early auditory experience aligns the auditory map of
space in the optic tecum of the barn owl. Science, 222: 939-42.
Lashley, K. S. (1929). Brain mechanisms and intelligence: A quantitative
study of injuries to the brain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nolen, T. G. & Hoy, R. R. (1984). Initiation of behavior by single neurons:
The role of behavioral context. Science, 226: 992-4.
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Chapter 8-The Organ of Memory
See:
Alkon , D. L. (1984). Calcium-mediated reduction of ionic currents: A biophysical memory trace. Science, 226: 1037-45.
Reinis , S. & Goldman, J. M. (1982). The chemistry of behavior: A molecular
approach to neuronal plasticity . New York: Plenum Press.
123-list of ways neuron might change in Woody, C. D. (1982). Memory ,
learning, and higher function: A cellular view. New York: SpringerVerlag.
125-basic work on synapses, Eccles, J. C. (1964). The physiology of synapses. New York: Springer-Verlag.
126-sea anemone 's doorbell, Nauta & Feirtag (1986), p. 8.
127-Freud to Fliess, Freud, S. (1902). Extracts from the Fliess papers. In
The standard edition, ed . & trans ., James Strachey, vol. l. London:
Hogarth Press, p. 234.
127-Breuer's argument on the separation of neuron and memory, Breuer &
Freud (1895), p. 188n.
128-book-Iength plasticity lists , e.g., Reinis & Goldman (1982) .
128-for a discussion of internal neuron changes and implications, see Black,
I. B. (1984). Intraneuronal mutability: Implications for memory mechanisms. Brain, Behavior & Evolution , 24: 35-46; Finger, S. (1984). Symposium discussion: Paradigms, methodologies, and memory mechanisms.
Physiological
Psychology ,
12:
89-91 ; Kolers, P. A. & Roediger, H . L. (1984). 'Procedures of mind. Journal
of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 23: 425-49.
129-each neuron is distinct quote, Reinis & Goldman (1982), p. 110.
\30-percent of barrier neurons in humans, Nauta & Feirtag (1985),
p.38.
130-for survey of sea-snail research, see Alkon (1984).
See also: Dumont, J. P. C. & Robertson, R. M. (1986). Neuronal circuits: An
evolutionary perspective. Science, 233: 849-53.
Chapter 9-Memory Circuits

139-trillion cells in brain, Nauta & Feirtag (1985) .
139-basic discussion of brain based on Ibid., Bloom, F. E., Lazerson, A., &
Hofstadter, L. (1985). Brain, mind, and behavior. New York: W. H.
Freeman ; Thompson, R. F. (1985). The brain: An introduction to neuroscience . New York: W. H. Freeman & Company.
140-size and recency of cerebral cortex, Nauta & Feirtag (1986), pp. 46-8.
300 / Sources
143-split brain study, Gazzaniga, M. S. (1970). The bisected brain . New
York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
143-split-brain failure in jigsaw puzzles, Arnold (1984), p. 268.
144-return of respectability of subject of awareness, Burghardt,
G. M. (1985). Animal awareness: Current perceptions and historical
perspective. American Psychologist, 40: 905-19.
144-for fuller information on sensory maps see: Hubel, D. H. & Wiesel, T.
N. (1977). Ferrier lecture: Functional architecture of macaque monkey
visual cortex. Proceedings oj the Royal Society oj London, Series B, pp.
I-59. See also: Cornsweet, T. N. (1970). Visual perception. New York:
Academic Press; Van Essen , D. C. & Maunsell, J. H. R. (1983). Hierarchical organization and functional streams in the visual cortex . Trends in
Neurosciences,
370-75.
147-Korsakoff recognition improves, Warrington, E. K. (1985). A discrimination analysis of amnesia. In Olton et at. (1985).
147-memory circuits theory based on Arnold (1984) .
150-cats learn milk but not shock, Arnold (1984), p. 252.
154-thalamus active during memory, John, E. Roy (1967). Mechanisms oj
memory. New York: Academic Press, p. 234, 419.
156--effects of bilateral hippocampus destruction in animals, Arnold (1984),
pp. 314-5.
I58-amygdala and orientation reaction, Ibid., pp. 223-5.
158--evidence for separate motor memory region, Englekamp, J. & Zimmer,
H. D. (1984). Motor programme information as a separable memory unit.
Psychological Research, 46: 283-99. Zimmer (1984) .
158-cerebellum controls learned eye-responses, Thompson, R. F. (1986). The
neurobiology of learning and memory. Science, 233: 941-47.
158-action offrontallobotomies, Valenstein, E. S. (1986). Great and desperate cures: The rise and decline oj psychosurgery and other radical
treatmentsJor mental illness. New York: Basic Books.
158-the role of frontal cortex has been widely explored. Some important
sources: to disprove role in intelligence, Hebb, D. O. (1939). Intelligence
in man after large removals of cerebral tissue: Report of four left frontal
lobe
cases.
Journal
oj General
Ps y chology,
21:
73-87; planning of motion, Roland, P. E., Larsen, B., Lassen , N. A., &
Skinhoj, E. (1980). Supplementary motor area and other cortical areas in
organization of voluntary movements in man. Journal oj Neurophysiology, 43: 118-36; spontaneity, Jones-Gotman, M. & Milner, B. (1977).
Design fluency: The invention of nonsense drawings after focal cortical
lesions. Neuropsycholgia, 15: 653-74.
158-same point in frontal cortex controls outcome of motion, even if process
of arrival differs, Arnold (1984) p. 185.
160-speech by person sorting cards, Kolb & Whishaw (1985), p. 430.
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162-for other work on memory circuits see: Deutsch, J. A. (ed) (1983). The
physiological basis of memory, 2nd ed. New York: Academic Press;
Squire, L. R. & Butters, N., eds. (1984). Neuropsychology of memory.
New York: Guilford; Brookhart, J. M. & Mountcastle, V. B., eds. (1987).
Handbook of physiology: The nervous system. Bethesda, MD: American
Physiological Society.
163-Memory not an isolated process, Arnold (1984), p. vii.
See also: Cowan, W. M. (1979). The development of the brain. Scientific
American, September, pp. 106-17.
Crick, F. H. C. (1979). Thinking about the brain. Scientific American, September, 241: 219-232.
Chapter JO-Memory Studies Today

I64-Squire, L. R. (1986). Mechanisms of memory. Science, June 27, pp.
1612-19.
165-memory stored as changes, Ibid. , p. 1612.
165-discussion of the history of the word memory in computers is based on
Shurkin, J. (1984). Engines of the mind: A history of the computer. New
York: W. W. Norton.
166-first reference to computer memory, von Neumann, J. (1945). First draft
ofa report on the EDVAC. In Stern, N. (1981). From ENIAC to UNIVAC:
An appraisal of the Eckert-Mauchly computers. Bedford, MA: Digital
Press, p. 183.
167-Eckert quote, Shurkin (1984). p. 172.
I67---computer as brain metaphor, Ibid., p. 184.
168-theory of functional similarity, Putnam, H. (1975). Mind, Language and
Reality: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2. Philosophy and Our Mental Life.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
169---creation combines chunks, see e.g., Guilford, J. P. (1959). Three faces of
intellect. American Psychologist, 14: 469-79; Koestler, A. (1964). The act
of creation. New York: Dell Publishing Co.
I7I-memory drugs may be on market in 1980s, Begley, S., Springen, K.,
Katz, S., Hager, M., & Jones, E. (1986). Memory. Newsweek, September
29, pp. 48-54.
I7I-body promotes amnesia for childbirth pain, Weingartner, H. (1986). The
roots offailure. Psychology Today, January, pp. 6-7.
In---caffeine research, Snyder, S. (1986). Broadcast interview concerning
caffein and memory. "Nightline," ABC television.
In-nicotine helps memory, Peeke & Peeke (1984). Attention, memory, and
cigarette smoking. Psychopharmacology, 84: 205-16.
302 / Sources
In-vasopressin speeds up factual learning, Koob (1985) . Koob , G. F.,
Lebrun, c. , Martinez , J. L. , Jr., Dantzer, R. , LeMoal, M., & Bloom, F.
E. (1985). Arginine Vasopressin, Stress, and Memory. In Olton et al.
(1985).
In-drug helps memory in males, Beckwith, Till, & Schneider (1984). Beckwith, B. E., Till, & Schneider, V. (1984). Vasopressin analog (DDAVP)
improves memory in human males. Peptides , 5: 819-22.
175-Neisser, U. (1976) . Cognition and reality: Principles and implications of
cognitive psychology . San Francisco: W. H . Freeman. "Villains of piece,"
p. 10; "Consciousness is . .. mental activity ," p. 105.
See also: Arnsten , A. F. T. , & Goldman-Rakic, P. S. (1985) . Catecholamines
and cognitive decline in aged nonhuman primates. In Olton et al. (1985) .
Ghoneim , M. M., Mewaldt, S. P. & Hinrichs , J. V. (1984) . Behavioral effects
of oral versus intravenous administration of diazepam . Pharmacology ,
Biochemistry & Behavior, 21 : 231-6.
Osborn, C. D. & Holloway, F. A. (1984). Can commonly used antibiotics
disrupt formation of new memories? Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society ,
22: 356-58.
PART THREE-THE FORGETTERY
Chapter ii-Ordinary "Forgetting"

See: Crovitz, H. F., Cordoni , C. N. , Daniel, W. F., & Perlman, J. (1984) .
Everyday forgetting experiences: Real-time investigations with implications for the study of memory management in brain-damaged patients.
Cortex, 20: 349-59.
Neisser, Ulric (1976). Cognition and reality: Principles and implications of
cognitive psychology . San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.
179-people often forget intentions, Crovitz et al. (1984).
182-Freud on forgetting intentions, Freud (1960), p. 153.
183-Freud believed every incident was stored as memory , see e .g. Freud, S.
(1900). The interpretation of dreams. In The standard edition , ed. &
trans ., James Strachey. vol. 4. London: Hogarth Press, p. 20.
183-search for attention filters was futile, Neisser (1976) p. 80.
I84-next-in-line effect, Bond, C. F. (1985). The next-in-Iine effect: Encoding
or retrieval deficit? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48: 85362.
187-automatic action requires disengagement from reality , Lashley, K. S.
(1951) . The problem of serial order in behavior. In Jeffress , L. A., ed.
(1951) . Cerebral mechanisms in behavior: The Hixon symposium. New
York: John Wiley. [paper presented orally in 1948].
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187-basic nature of absentmindedness , Reason, J. (1984). Absentmindedness
and cognitive control. In Harris, J. E. & P. E. Morris, eds . (1984).
Everyday memory , actions and absentmindedness. London: Academic
Press.
188-lion learning to hunt, Bartlett, D. & J. (1975). The Lions of Etosha: King
of the Beasts. Survival Anglia Ltd . [Film] Productions.
189-pitching control depends on concentration, Kaat, J. (1986). Texas Rangers vs. New York Yankees telecast, May 4.
190-for a discussion of shadowing, see Neisser (1976) Chapter 5.
192-absent-mindedness is common, Crovitz et al. (1984).
Chapter 12-Forgotten Chunks

198-sample of R. H.'s speech, Goodglass, H ., Gleason, J. B., Bernholtz, N.,
& Hyde, R. N. (1972). Some linguistic structures in the speech of a
Broca's aphasic.
Cortex , 8 :
191-212. (Extract on
p. 195.)
199-experiments suggesting aphasics may have limited chunking abilities,
Gutbrod , K., Mager, B. , Meier, E. & Cohen, R. (1985). Cognitive processing of tokens and their description in aphasia. Brain & Language, 25:
37-51.
199-right brain aphasia, Zaidel, E. (1978). Auditory language comprehension
in the right hemisphere following cerebral commissurotomy and hemispherectomy : A comparison with child language and aphasia. In Caramazza, A. & Zurif, e.b. (Eds) (1978) . Language acquisition and language
breakdown: Parallels and divergencies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
200----<:olor agnosia vs . color aphasia, Kolb & Whishaw (1985), p. 215.
200-agnosias for faces and illness, ibid., p. 214.
202-word-deaf children ignore television soundtracks, Friedlander, B. Z.,
Wetstone, H. S., & McPeek, D. L. (1974). Systematic assessment of
selective language listening deficit in emotionally disturbed preschool
children. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 15: 1-12.
202-Dr. P's description of a glove, Sacks (1985), p. 13 .
203----<:hild whose language did not move beyond factual memory, Blank, M.,
Gessner, M., & Esposito, A. (1979). Language without communication:
A
case
study .
Journal
of Child
Language,
6:
329-52.
204-for survey of forms of dyslexia see Coltheart, M. (1981). Disorders of
reading and their implications for models of normal reading. Visible
Language, XV: 245-86.
See also:
304 / Sources
Critchley, M. (1962). Dr. Samuel Johnson's aphasia. Medical History, 6: 2744.
Goodglass, H., Klein, B., Carey, P. & Jones, K. (1966). Specific semantic
word categories in aphasia. Cortex, 2: 74-89.
Weingartner, H. (1985). Models of memory dysfunctions. In Olton et al. (1985) .
Chapter 13-Amnesia
See: Hirst, W. (1982). The amnesic syndrome: Descriptions and explanations.
Psychological Bulletin, 91: 435-60.
Warrington, E. K. & Shallice, T. (1972). Neurophysiological evidence of visual
storage in short-term memory tasks. Quarterly Journal of Experimental
Psychology , 24: 30-40.
21 I-memory consolidation can persist for years, Squire (1986) .
212-adrenalinlarousal experiment, Christianson, S-A et al. (1984). Physiological and cognitive determinants of emotional arousal in mediating amnesia.
Umea Psychological Reports, 176: 19.
213-for Freud on repression see especially Freud, S. (I914a). Remembering,
repeating and working-through. In The standard edition, ed. & trans.,
James Strachey, vol. 12. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (l914b). The
history of the psychoanalytic movement. In The standard edition, ed. &
trans., James Strachey, vol. 14. London: Hogarth Press.
214-K. F. 's forgetting of complex instructions, Warrington & Shallice (1972).
215-the basic story of H. M. is set forth in: Milner, B. (1959). The memory
deficit in bilateral hippocampal lesions. Psychiatric Research Reports. pp.
43-58; Milner, B., Corkin, S. & Teuber, H-L. (1968). Further analysis of
the hippocampal amnesic syndrome: fourteen-year follow-up study of H.
M.
Neuropsychologica,
Vol. 10, 215-34.; Milner, B. (1970). Memory and the medial temporal
regions of the brain. In Pribram, K. H. & Broadbent, D. E. (eds). The
biology of memory. New York: Academic Press.
216-Ribot's conjecture, Hirst (1982), pp. 453-4.
216-retrograde amnesia is a failure of cues and severity is time dependent,
Riccio, D. C. & Richardson, R. (1984). The status of memory following
experimentally induced amnesias: Gone but not forgotten . Physiological
217-general memory in amnesics is nearly normal, Schacter, D. L. & Graf,
P. (1986). Effects of elborative processing on implicit and explicit memory
for new associations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition, 12: 432-44.
217-amnesics quickly generalize from lists, Warrington & Shallice (1972).
217-amnesics forced recognition is good, Hirst (1982) p. 442; Hirst, W.,
Johnson, M. K., Kim, J. K., Phelps, E. A., Risse, G. , & Volpe, B. T.
Sources / 305
(1986). Recognition and recall in amnesics. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 12: pp. 445-451.
218-H. M. and stylus maze, Milner, B. & Taylor, L. (1972). Right-hemisphere
superiority in tactile pattern recognition over cerebral commisurotomy:
evidence for nonverbal memory. Neuropsychologia , \0: 1-15 . See also:
Milner, B. (1966) Amnesia following operation on the temporal lobes . In
C. W. M. Whitty & O. L. Zangwill, eds. Amnesia. London: Butterworth.
218-typical causes of amnesia, Corkin, S, Cohen, N . J., Sullivan,
E. v. , Clegg, R. A. , Rosen, T. J., & Ackerman, R. H. (1985). Analyses of
global memory impairments of different etiologies. In Olton et al. (1985).
See also: Parkin, A. 1. (1984) . Amnesic syndrome: A lesion-specific
disorder? Cortex, 20: 479-508.
219-Korsakoffpatient fears hand, Klatzky , R. L. (1984) . Memory and awareness: An information-processing perspective. New York:
W. H. Freeman and Company, p. I.
219-Korsakoff patient's emotional growth , Sacks (1985), chap. 2.
219-similarity between infant and amnesic memory, Moscovitch , M. (1985) .
Memory from infancy to old age: Implications for theories of normal and
pathological memory. In Olton et al. (1985), p. 78.
See also: Graf, P. & Schacter, D. L. (1985) . Implicit and explicit memory for
new associations in normal and amnesic subjects. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Learning, Memory , and Cognition, II: 501-18.
Chapter 14-Forgetting to Remember

See: Freeman, L. (1972) . The story of Anna O. New York: Walker.
224-rate of fugue in South Pacific, Fisher, C. (1945) . Amnesic states in war
neuroses: The psychogenesis of fugues. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 14:
437-68. p. 437.
224-story offugues of A.B., C.D., 1.1., ibid.
225-<:ase of Louise L's fugue, Venn, J. (1984) . Family etiology and remission
in a case of psychogenic fugue. Family Process , 23:
429-35 .
226-James on fugues , cited in ibid., p. 435 .
227-story of Anna 0, Breuer & Freud (1895).
227-Bertha Pappenheim's letter, Freeman (1972), p. 234.
230-Breuer's work with Anna 0 failed to help her, see Jones, E . (1953) . The
life and work of Sigmund Freud. Vol. I. New York: Basic Books ; and
Freeman (1972).
Chapter 15-Forgetting and Old Age

232-Alzheimer' s disease readily misdiagnosed, Filinson, R. (1984). Diagnosis
of senile dementia Alzheimer's type: The state of the art. Clinical Gerontologist , 2: 3-23 .
306 / Sources
233---elderly learn artificial memory, Robertson-Tchabo, E. A., Hausman, c. ,
& Arenberg, D. (1976). A class mnemonic for older learners: A trip that
works! Educational Gerontology , I: 215-26.
234---elderly people's memory for recent events as good as memory for events
from long ago, Kahn, R. & Miller, N. (1978). Adaptational factors in
memory function in the aged. Experimental Aging Research, 4: 273-89.
234-prompt recall is stable among elderly, Schaie, K. W. & Geiwitz. (1982).
Learning and memory: Old dogs, new tricks! In Schaie,
K. W. & Geiwitz, J., eds. (1982), Readings in adult development and
aging. Boston: Little , Brown, p. 297.
235-patients who complain of memory problems show more depression than
patients who do not complain, Kahn, R., Zarit, S. H., Hilbert , N. M. &
Niederehe, G. (1975). Memory complaint and impairment in the aged: The
effect of depression and altered brain function. Archives of General
Psychiatry, 32: 1569-73.
236-recall declines with age, recognition stable, Schonfield, D. (1965). Memory storage and age. Nature, 28: 918.
See also:
Perlmutter, M. (1980) . An apparent paradox about memory aging. In Poon, L.
W., Fozard, J. L., Cermak, L. S., Arenberg, L. W. (Eds) (1980). New
directions in memory and aging: Proceedings of the George A. Tal/and
Memorial Conference. Hillsdale, NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Yarmey, A. Daniel (1984). Age as a factor in eyewitness memory . In Wells &
Loftus , Eds. (1984).
PART FOUR-THE EXPERIENCE OF MEMORY

Chapter 16-Memory and Life
245-the most common standardized memory test is the We chsler memory
scale . Cleveland : Psychological Corporation .
247-lions do not recognize gazelles in trees, Schaller, G. B. (1972) . The
Serengeti lion : A study of predator-prey relations. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Chapter 17-The Emotional Memory of John Dean

For the text of Dean's testimony and Watergate tapes see:
Gold , G. (Gen ed) (1973). The Watergate hearings : Break-in and coverup. New
York: Bantam Books.
Sources / 307
Gold, G. (Gen ed) (1974). The White House transcripts. New York: Bantam
Books.
249-testimony-transcript comparison , Gold (1973), p. 277; (1974) ,
pp.57-69.
252-Baker-Dean exchange, Gold (1973), p. 355.
254-Nixon vows revenge, Gold (1974), p. 58.
254-Nixon on coverup' s purpose, Ibid. , p. 66.
254-Nixon gives his authority to coverup, Ibid., p. 67.
255-for Neisser's study of Dean, see Neisser, U. (1981). John Dean' s memory: a case study. Cognition 9: 1-22.
256-Dean on his newspaper memory method, Gold (1973), pp. 331-2.
256-Dean's original statement on late February meeting with Nixon, Ibid. , p.
287.
257-Nixon and Dean on ambition of Senate Watergate Committee, Gold
(1974) , p. 92.
258-Dean/Gurney exchange over Mayflower Hotel , Gold (1973),
pp. 357-9. Dean found morning briefing dull. Dean, J. W. III (1976). Blind
ambition : The White House years. New York: Simon and Schuster, p. 65.
261-Dean put memory of other helicopter rides out of mind , ibid., p. 14.
262-Dean on the tickler, Ibid., p. 65.
263-Dean habitually masked his emotions, Ibid., p. 12.
263-Dean could control headiness and keep hustling, Ibid. , p. 14.
263-Dean suppressed interest before any interview, Ibid., p. 15.
264-Dean's defense of DeLoach, Gold (1974) p. 108.
264-frightened staff after Watergate, Dean (1976) note especially p. 113.
Chapter J8-The Factual Memory of S

Entire chapter based on Luria, A. R. (1968) . The mind of a mnemonist: A little
book about a vast memory, trans . L. Solotaroff. New York: Basic Books.
267-S 's memory based on perception and attention, Ibid., p. 62 .
267-S's problem with remembering learning generalities, Bruner's foreword
in Luria (1968), p. viii.
268-weigh one's words, Ibid., p. 120.
269-S did not look for meaning behind memory, Ibid. , p. 58.
269-S overlooked logic, ibid.p. 98.
270-S was surprised to learn his memory was unusual , Ibid., p. 8.
270-S did not notice order in numbers , ibid., p. 59.
308 / Sources
270-S was poor at interpretive recognition, Ibid., p. 64.
271-S could picture things in mind and they happened , Ibid., p. 139.
271-synesthesic description , Ibid., p. 23 .
271-crumbly yellow voice , Ibid., p . 24 .
27 I-nature of synesthesic blurs, Ibid., p. 22 .
272-Eisenstein' s voice, Ibid. , p. 24.
272-music in restaurants , Ibid., pp. 81-2.
275-S was unusually passive, Ibid., pp. 151-2.
275-S reinvented artificial memory system of s pace s, Ibid ., pp.
41-45.
276-the secret of forgetting is in desire , Ibid., p. 72.
Chapter 19-The Interpretive Memory of Marcel Proust

279-Sultan Mahomet II , Proust (1981) , vol. I, p. 386
280-disorientation in bed, Ibid., vol. I, pp. 4-5.
281-the full scene of the madeleine , Ibid. , vol. I, pp. 48-5\.
282-Elstir on search for point of view , Ibid., vol. I, p. 233-4.
283-dinner party gaffe , ibid. , vol. I, pp. 588, 619.
283-cruelty of memQry, Ibid. , vol. III , p. 569.
284-memory of arms and limbs, Ibid., vol. III , p. 716.
285-revelations on Marcel' s time regained , (" what another person sees . .. "
etc.) Ibid., vol. III , p. 932.
286-bad memory encourages study of memory, Ibid. , vol. II , p. 676.
288-Contre Sainte-Beuve (1909) , English text as By Way of Sainte-Beuve
(1958) . Trans. Sylvia Townsend-Warner. New York: Random House.
INDEX
Absentmindedness, 185, 191-192,
236
Active/passive model of memory,
16-17
Adaptive memory, 20-21
Ad Herennium. 6, 7, \07-108,273
Affective circuit, 149
Affective memory/association, 34
Agnosia, 200
color, 201
facial,201
word deafness, 202
Alcohol, amnesia and, 218-219
Alkon, Daniel, 130-\32, 135-\37,
142
Alzheimer's disease, 232-233
Amnesia
alcoholic cases and , 218-219
case of H. M.'s surgery, 119120,215-218
case of K. F. 's motorcycle accident , 214-215
confabulation and, 208-209
description of, 207-208
disorientation and, 2\0-211
repressed memory and , 211-214
retrograde/retroactive, 215-216
symptoms of, 209-210
Amygdala, 158, 162
Anna 0., case of, 227-230
Anosognosia, 201
Ants , recognition and, 18
Aphasia, 200-201
Archimedes , 169
Arginine vasopressin , 172
Arnold, Magda, 137, 146-147, 162163,174
Arnold's circuits, 146-149
Arousal
John Dean and, 260-261
factual memory and, 48-54
Artificial memory , 5-8, 9, \0
senility and, 233-234
Associations
after-the-fact, 53-54
arousals and, 49-50
the brain and , 141
memory and positive, 24
motor, 37-38
Atkinson , Richard, 122
Attention
action without, 186-187
amygdala and , 158
factual memory and, 42, 48-49
forgetting and missing, 183-191
interpretive, 188
making adjustments in, 188-189
memory and paying, 24-25 , 27
Augustine, Saint, 4, 11, 12
Awareness, 143-144
Babbage, Charles, 167
Bacon, Sir Francis , 14
Baker, Howard , 250-251
/309
310 I Index
Bartlett, Frederick, 15-16,67-68,
116,174-175
Behaviorism, 32-33, 35-37
Bergson, Henri, 286
Biology, memory and, 17-22
Birds, recognition and, 19
Bisected Brain, The, 143
Borges, Jorge Luis, 93
Brain
function of the, 141-146
split-brain patients, 143
structure of the, 139-141
Breuer,Joseph,127,227,229,230
Bruner, Jerome, 265
Caffeine, memory and, 172
Cartesian memory , 108
computers and, 110-111
Chemical memory, 170-173
Chemistry of Behavior, The, 129
Chess masters, memory of, 75-76
Children
causes and effects for memory
and,71-72
emotional memory and, 39-40
factual memory and, 43, 57, 5962
memory and, 16-17
problems with linguistic development in, 203
understanding and memory in,
77-78
Chomsky, Noam, 32-33
Chunking
definition of, 81-82
description of digit, 78-79
description of spelling and, 80
fallibility and , 83-85
inability to form chunks, 195
inability to recognize chunks ,
195-196
recall and recognition and, 82
spatial,86
trickery and, 81
Circuits
affective, 149
Arnold's, 146-149
for emotional memory , 149-153
for factual memory, 153-157
for interpretive memory, 157-162
Papez, 150
recall, 153-154
Circular reactions, 39
Claparede, Edouard, 219
Cognition, 253
Cognitive psychology, 175
Color agnosia, 201
Computers
Cartesian memory and , 110-111
problems with equating human
memories and, 165-170
Concentration, importance of, 188191
Confessions , II
Contre Sainte-Beuve , 286
Coordination, the brain and, 143
Cortex
frontal, 158-162
perceptual, 140-141 , 147, 162
Cronkite, Walter, 190
arousaland,260-261
Baker's questioning of, 250-252
coherence of Dean's story, 253-254
comparison of Dean's testimony
with the facts, 246-250, 254255
confusion over Mayflower Coffee
Shop and Mayflower Hotel,
256-257
emotional memory of, 258-263
factual memory of, 257
Gurney's questioning of, 256-257
Neisser on, 253
reminders used by , 254, 257
Dementia, 232
Depression, 235
Descartes, Rene, 109
Desire
emotional memory and 34-37
memory and, 27
Distraction, self-concerned , 184
Douglas-Hamilton, lain, 20
Index / 311
Drugs to improve memory , 170-173
Dyslexia, 204-206
Ebbinghaus , Hermann, 13-14, 6667, 103, 116
Eccles, John, 125
Eckert , Presper, 167
Eisenstein , S. M., 270
Elephants , recognition and, 20-21
Emotional memory
artificial intelligence and, 31
behaviorism and , 32-33 , 35-37
in children, 39-40
circuit for , 149-153
of John Dean, 246-263
desire and, 34-37
developing, 38-41
experiment with rabbits , 33-34
failure of, 220-230
Freudians and, 31-32
motor associations and, 37-38
Proustian recognition and, 30-34
storage of, 30-32
Emotion and Personality , 147
Engram, 135-137
ENIAC, 167
Epilepsy patients, failure of memory in, 199
Erasmus, 9
Evaluation system, 147, 162
Experience , flow chart showing,
142
Facial agnosia, 201
Factual memory
after-the-fact associations and ,
53-54
arousal and , 48-54
attention and, 42, 48-49
in children, 43 , 57, 59-62
circuit for, 153-157
drugs and, 172
experiences and , 54, 56-58
failure of, 194-195,207-219
generalized versus specific , 4547

recency effect and , 51-53 , 58-59
recognition and recall and , 4448,51
self-serving memories and, 58-59
senility and, 236
of Shereshevsky , 264-275
smell and , 44-45
Fallibility of memory , 83-85
Fan effect, 48
Fish, recognition and , 18
Flashbulb memories, 54, 56-58
Forgetting
amnesia, 207-219
description of ordinary , 180
fugues, 220-227
hysteria, 227-230
missing attention and, 183-191
missing reminders and , 182-183
normal, 191-193
old age and , 231-237
pathological , 180
transitory, 25
Freud, Sigmund, 14-15
agnosia and, 200
Anna O. and , 227
forgetting and, 182-183
neurons and, 127
repression of memory and , 213
screen memories and, 57-58
stored memory and, 31-32
Frontal cortex , 158-162
Fugues
case of Louise L., 225-227
description of, 220-222, 223-224
other names for, 223
soldiers and, 223 , 224
Gazzaniga, Michael , 143
Gestalt psychologists, 108-110
Goldman , Jerome , 129
Grammar, lost, 197-199
Greeks , memory to the, 3
Gurney, Edward , 256-257
312/ Index
Habituation, 50-51
attention and, 187
neurons and, 125-126
Haldeman, Robert, 260
Hippocampus, 150, 156-157, 172,
215, 232
H. M. patient, 119-120, 156, 157,
215-218
Hume , David, 4
Hypnotism, 94
crime solving and, 95-96, 99
drawbacks of, 99
effectiveness of, in improving
memory, 98
power of suggestion, 96-97
self-, 222-223
Hysteria, case of Anna 0.,227-230
Ideokinetic apraxia, 196-197
Imagination, 154-156
Inouye, Daniel, 253, 254, 255
Insight
definition of, 63, 64
memory and, 28
missing, 203-206
Interference, 186
Interpretive memory
chunking, 78-82
circuit for, 157-162
confused recognition and, 73-74
construction process, 76-77
effectiveness of, 85-87
fallibility of, 83-85
grammatical order and, 68-69
lumping of words into subjective
organization, 72-74
organization of memories, 67-72
perception and, 75-76
Piaget and, 87-89
of Proust, 276-286
recall and recognition and, 6566,69-71,73-74,89,91
senility and, 236-237
understanding and , 77-78

use of stories to test, 67-68
Interpretive memory, failure of, 194
difference between objective reminders and SUbjective purposes, 196-197
inability to form chunks, 195
inability to recognize chunks,
195-196
lost grammar, 197-199
lost meaning, 199-202
missing insights, 203-206
James, William, 48-49, 102-103,
183,226
John, E. Roy, 119-120, 170
Kaat , Jim , 189
K. F. patient, 214-215
Korsakoff's syndrome, 218-219
Language, learning, 26-27,32-33
children and, 60-62
grammatical order and, 68-69
lost grammar, 197-199
Lashley, Karl, 117-118, 128, 135,
136-137, 187
Limbic system, 147
Linguistic development, problems
with,203
Loci, method of, 6-7,117
Louise L., case of, 225-227
Luria, Aleksandr, 264-275
"Magical Number Seven, Plus or
Minus Two, The ," 78
Mandler, George, 70
Man Who Mistook His Wife for a
Hat, The, 219
Meaning, lost, 199
agnosia, 200-202
aphasia, 200-201
Mechanical memory, problems with
equating computer and human
memories, 165-170
"Mechanisms of Memory," 164
Mechanisms of Memory, The, 119
Index / 313
Memory
active/passive model of, 16-17
adaptive, 20-21
artificial , 5-8, 9, 10, 223-234
biology and, 17-22
chain of, 23
chemical , 170-173
emotional, 29-41, 149-153
evaluating, 242-245
factual,42-62 , 153-157, 264-275
image, 7-8
interpretive, 63-91,157-162,
276-286
mechanical, 165-170
natural , 17-22
personal reference and, 15
primitive , 19
recognition/perceptive, 17-18
repressed,211-214
rote, 10, 102-105
thoughts/imaginative figuring
and,87
versus creativity, 4
Memory . Learning. and Higher
Function. 123
Memory, ways to improve
Cartesian memory, 108-111
drugs, 170-173
hypnotism , 94-99
mnemonics , 106-108
reminders/perceptions. 99-101
rote memory, 10, 102-105
Memory and Intelligence. 16
Memory and the Brain. 147
Mental imagery , use of, 101
Middle Ages, memory in the, 8
Miller, George , 68, 78
Mnemonics, 106-108
Motion, perception and, 145
Motivation and Emotion. 175
Motor associations, 37-38
Neisser, Ulric, 175-176,253
Nervous system, memory and the ,
142
Neurons
Alkon on , 130-132, 135
Breuer on, 127

electrical charge in , 124-125
Freud on , 127
functional changes of, 123-124,
139
habituation and, 125-126
of sea snails, 129-132, 135
Neuropsychology
Atkinson-Schiffrin design for
memory storage , 122
localized functions of the brain,
119-120
problem of memory storage , 117119
statistical storage, 119, 120-121
storage as a hologram, 121
Newton, Isaac, 118
Next-in-line effect, 184
Nicotine, memory and , 172
Nixon, Richard M., 247, 248-249,
252,255,262
Optical aphasia, 198
Oral traditions , 93
Organization, interpretive memory
and, 68-70
Orientation reaction, 50, 51
Paper, introduction of, 8-9
Papez Circuit , 150
Pappenheim. Bertha, 227
Pavlov, Ivan, 50, 53-54
Perceptions
defining, 144
improving memory through, 99101
interpretive memory and , 75-76
motion and, 145
recognition and, 145-146
visual, 144-145
Perceptual cortex, 140-141 , 147,
162
Perkins, William, 102
Personal reference, memory and ,
15
Peter of Ravenna, 9
Phoenix. The. 9
314 I Index
Piaget, Jean, 16-17
causes and effects for-memory in
children and, 71-72
construction process of memory
and,76-77
emotional memory and, 39-40
factual memory and, 60
interpretive memory and, 87-89
memory improvements and, 96
Plato, 30-31
Pribram, Karl, 121
Primitive memory, 19
Printing press, introduction of the,
9
Proust, Marcel
Contre Sainte-Beuve. 286
memory of, 284-286
motor associations and, 277-278
Remembrance oj Things Past, 29,
276-286
Proustian recognition, 30-34, 150
Psychology, 103
Puritans, memory to the, 10
Ravel, Maurice, 195
Recall and recognition
chunking and, 82
difference between, 10-12, 74
factual memory and, 44-48, 51
interpretive memory and , 65-66,
69-71,73-74,89,91
organization and, 69-70
senility and, 236
Recall circuit, 153-154
Recency effect, 51-53 , 58-59
Recognition/perceptive memory, 17
in ants, 18
in birds, 19
in elephants, 20-21
in fish, 18-19
perceptions and, 145-146
Reinis, Stanislav, 129
Remembering, 67
Remembrance oj Things Past, 29
emotional recognition and factual
recall in, 282-283
ending a memory in, 281-282
factual memory in, 280

forgetfulness in, 281
public reception of, 277
reminder and memory in, 279
voluntary and unvoluntary memory in , 278
writing of, 29-30
Reminders/perceptions , 99-101
forgetting and missing, 182-183
Repressed memory, 211-214
Rhetoric, 6
Ribot's conjecture, 216
Romans, memory to the , 5-7
Rote memorization, 10
disadvantages of, 105
effectiveness of, 104-105
habituation and , 103-104
James and, 102-103
Perkins and, 102
Ruskin, John, 285
Sacks, Oliver, 202, 219
Schaller, George, 245
Schank , Roger, 31
Schiffrin, Richard, 122
Science, 164
Screen memories, 57-58
Sea snail neurons, study of, 129132,135
Self-serving memories, 58-59
Senility, 231
absentmindedness and, 236
Alzheimer's disease and , 232-233
artificial memory and, 233-234
dementia and , 232
depression and, 235
factual memory and , 236
interpretive memory and, 236237
long- and short-term memories
and,234-235
recall and recognition powers
and,236
strokes and, 232
Sensory-motor stage, 39-40
Shadowing, 190-191
Shallice, Tim, 214
Index / 315
Shereshevsky, factual memory of
Tovarisch
inability to generalize, 265-266
lack of associations, 267-268
lack of recognition, 268
metaphorical use of words, 266267
problem-solving, 271-272
stage show of, 272-275
synesthesia, 269-270
Simon, Herbert, 75
Simonides of Ceos, 106
Skinner, B. F., 32-33, 73, 116, 176
Sociobiology, 17-18
Squire, Larry, 164-165, 173, 175
Spatial memory , 86
Statistical storage, 119, 120-121
Storage of memory
Atkinson-Schiffrin design, 122
of emotional memory, 30-32
John on, 119-120
Lashley on, 117-118, 128
Pribramon,121
Reinis and Goldman on, 129
Squire on, 164-165, 173, 175
statistical, 119, 120-121
synaptic, 128-129
Strokes, 232
Synapses, storage and, 128-129
Synesthesia, 269-270
Thalamus, 154
"Tickling" technique, 260
"Tip of the tongue" phenomenon,
93-94
Trigger-memory-action flow chart
definition of, 142
to describe basic memory, 147148
to describe emotional memory,
149, 150, 152
to describe factual memory, 155
Unconditioned behavior, 36
Understanding
interpretive memory and, 77-78
memory and, 28
Vision, 144-145
Von Neumann, John, 166, 167-168
Warrington, Elizabeth, 214
Watson, John, 36
Wilson , Edward, 17-18
Wisconsin card-sorting test, 160161
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 24
Woody, C. D., 123
Word deafness, 202
Zola, Emile, 285
286

Edmund Blair Bolles
Remembering is an act of imagination. There, reduced to
a single sentence, is the principle that underlies this book.
For several thousand years people have believed that
remembering retrieves information stored somewhere in
the mind. The metaphors of memory have always been
metaphors of storage: We preserve images on wax; we
carve them in stone; we write memories as with a pencil on
paper; we file memories away; we have photographic memories; we retain facts so fIrmly they seem held in a steel trap.
Each of these images proposes a memory warehouse where
the past lies preserved like childhood souvenirs in an attic.
This book reports a revolution that has overturned that
vision of memory. Remembering is a creative, constructive
process. There is no storehouse of information about the
past anywhere in our brain. . . .

Remembering and Forgetting

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Remembering and Forgetting

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REMEMBERING

Copyright 1988 by Edmund Blair Bolles

Printed in the United States of America

Many of the important ideas in this book

Remembrance oJ Things Personal

Does Memory Matter?

The Biology oj Memory

11: Ordinary " Forgetting"

The Experience of Memory

Memory and Life

Memory and Imagination

Remembering is an act of imagination. There, reduced

xii I REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING

that," says you, and a moment later comes, in triumphant

Introduction: Memory and Imagination / xiii

Shortly before beginning to write this book, I traveled

xiv / REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING

Introduction: Memory and Imagination / xv

side in a unified psychology of memory. Such harmony has

xvi / REMEMBERING AND FORGElTING

Introduction: Memory and Imagination / xvii

In ancient and medieval times memory certainly drew

REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING

People today commonly agree with the spirit of the Scottish

Does Memory Matter? / 5

Basic beliefs, such as the notion that somehow we file

The Artificial Use of Memory

REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING

Artificial memory was not unnatural; it systematized and

Does Memory Matter? / 7

REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING

relevant images began by recalling the identifying label. Possibly

The Revolt Against Memory

Does Memory Matter? / 9

10 I REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING

Memory's defenders could also see flaws in the wisdom of the

Does Memory Matter? / 11

tion. Theories of artificial memory did not stress these elements,

Augustine did not necessarily refer to artificial memory in this

REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING

duction of associations formed in the past is always its defining

Does Memory Matter? I 13

us to maintain our sense of the distinction's reality. Memory

Science Rediscovers Memory

14 / REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING

sented himself with lists of nonsense syllables (e.g., gek, nim),

Does Memory Matter? / 15

studying memory per se, he became interested in failures of

You do not have to be much of a Freudian to suspect that

REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING

tradition that the function of memory is to recall the past as

Does Memory Matter? / 17

growing children. Then, at the end of his life, he investigated

The Natural Use of Memory

18 / REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING

to recognize one's fellows. Wilson found animals without such

Does Memory Matter? / 19

when the young are really present. Recognition is irrelevant to

REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING

Genes still control most bird behavior, but by the time we

Does Memory Matter? I 21

dangerous lake bed. Elephants do probably sometimes forget,

REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING

individuals. Memory changes the equation. Individuals can cope