The man points at the ground and says, “Sit down and have a chat, all right? If you’re not in any hurry.”
“What’s the hurry, if I’m dead?” The man sits down resignedly.
“So, how much do you know about memory?”
The man is a bit taken aback by the pop question. “It’s just what you remember, isn’t it?”
“Sort of. I’ll give you a crash course. Generally speaking, human memory can be divided into declarative memory and nondeclarative memory. Declarative memory can be reported, for instance in speech or in writing. And nondeclarative memory is, roughly, what you call the subconscious mind. It’s the memories a person might not even know he has. This is not to say that it can’t be reported, just that usually it is not reported, because you don’t even know about it. Do you follow?”
The man nods, but he does not know why he has to sit here, listening to this stuff.
“Well, these two kinds of memory can be subdivided into three basic types: episodic, semantic and procedural. Remember your son still couldn’t speak until the age of three? Then one day, when he was looking at an insect specimen, he blurted out a complete sentence, didn’t he?”
The man nods again, but is baffled: how can this man possibly know such personal minutiae? At this, he realizes he is not too certain about the timing. When exactly did the event take place? Was Toto three or four? He couldn’t have been older than five.
“This is an event, an episode in your life, and you can report it, so it’s a declarative, episodic memory. Here’s another example: you remember your wife’s and son’s birthdays, don’t you?”
“Of course I remember.”
“Well, that’s semantic memory or factual memory. Even if you forgot something like this you could still look it up, right? It’s on their ID cards, and even if you misremember, there’s still a ‘mismemory,’ right? Basically, if there’s not been any mistake, their birthdays are recorded the same everywhere, because they’re facts. And people have a way of confirming the facts. In the world people have constructed for themselves you can usually look up a fact like that. You still with me?” The man nods.
“But episodic memory is different. The details you remember about any event must be different from the details your wife remembers. Right? For instance, for when you and your wife met for the first time, what exactly did you say to her in the forest? Each of you remembers different details, that’s for sure. You almost ended up getting into a fight over it on many different occasions, didn’t you? You were both remembering different parts of the same episode.”
The man lowers his head and thinks about it. “I get it. What about procedural memory?”
“You’ve climbed this rock wall many times before, haven’t you? If I asked you to look up at the cliff could you more or less make out the routes you traveled?”
I suppose I could, the man thinks, but he isn’t too sure. The man revisits the climbs in his mind. The second time a seasoned rock climber takes a certain route some details from the first time will come back to him.
As if continuing the man’s line of thought, the man with the compound eyes says, “Right. Certain details will occur to you the moment your fingers touch the stone, details you normally couldn’t remember no matter how hard you tried. Sometimes it might even cross your mind that there’s a cleft in a certain rock as you climb. Am I right?”
He looks at the man with the compound eyes in amazement.
“People’s minds are continually weaving the threads of memory together without anyone being aware of it. Sometimes not even you know what you might remember. Even if you climbed this rock wall a hundred times you probably wouldn’t bother remembering the position of every rock and foothold, but your body would remember as a matter of course. If someone moved a certain rock, your fingers and toes would tell you the next time you climbed.”
The man looks in the man’s eyes and seems to see a familiar scene in one of the fine ommatidia. Though overall, the man’s head is no bigger than an average person’s head, nor are his eyes bigger than an average person’s eyes, there were at least tens of thousands of ommatidia in each of his compound eyes, each so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye. But if so, the man wonders, how can he be sure of what he is seeing?
“When it comes to memory, people are no different from any other animal. I’m not kidding. You probably won’t believe it, but actually even a sea hare has memory. Eric Richard Kandel, a scientist famous for his research on memory, started out experimenting with sea hares. Fortunately, he survived the Kristallnacht, the first systematic Nazi attack on the Jews, or he wouldn’t have had the chance to study memory. In a certain sense, maybe it was because Kandel had a profound understanding of what it’s like to have something etched in memory that he was driven to try to understand it.”
The man with the compound eyes said, “Animals like sea hares may not have much episodic or semantic memory, but animals with developed brains have episodic, semantic and procedural memory, just like people. Migratory birds remember the seacoast, whales remember the boat that harpooned them, and seal pups that manage to avoid annihilation will remember the murderous coat-clad, club-carrying creature that chased them. I kid you not, they’ll never forget. But only human beings have invented a tool to record memory.”
The man with the compound eyes reaches down and takes out a pencil he has stuck in a pocket on his pant leg. The pen is broken in two, but there is no doubt it can still write.
“Writing.”
As he says this there are two dull rolls of distant thunder. Dark clouds are shrouding the sky. A change in the weather.
“There was thunder just now: this is a fact. And it’s a fact that we’re talking. But if there’s no one to record what just happened in writing, the evidence of its occurrence will only be found in the episodic, semantic and procedural memory of two people, you and me. But if you represented these memories in writing, you would discover that the mind adds massive amounts of material anytime it weaves an episodic memory. In this way, the world reconstructed in writing approximates even more closely what you call ‘the realm of nature.’ It’s an organism.”
The man with the compound eyes reaches into a rotten log on the ground nearby and, as if performing a magic trick, pulls out a pale, rough thing like the larva of some beetle.
“But the world that people perceive is too partial, too narrow. Sometimes, you consciously, all too consciously, only remember what you want to. Many apparently authentic episodic memories are partly fabricated. Sometimes things that have never happened anywhere in the world can be vividly ‘represented’ in the mind, again by virtue of the imagination. Many people have diseased brains, and some of them even mistake one thing for another, like the man who took his wife for a hat.”
The man with the compound eyes gazes off into the distance. How strange that even though compound eyes do not focus like human eyes, he can still tell where the man is looking. “Similarly, as I was just saying, it’s not just humans who have the ability to remember. And of course it’s not only Homo sapiens who have the ability to make things up. But only you people can turn the contents of their minds into writing, that’s for sure. This larva I’m holding will never be able to recount the memory it will have of being a pupa in a cocoon.”