Wonder Waves, written by Brigitte Kratz, reads literature, philosophy, and art for what they can tell us about the inner life. Fragments of Humanity, written by Rachel Parker, reads literature alongside psychology and neuroscience for the same reason. We keep arriving at the same questions from opposite doors, which is how the two of us came to write together.
In our first collaboration, a phrase from a fellow writer sent us off to ask in what ways fiction is, or at least feels, true. The answer we reached raised a second question: If invented things can be true, what about remembered ones?
What follows is the second episode in our shared adventure in curiosity: an alternating essay, each of us responding to the question: Is memory true?
When I was a little girl, I had magic powers.
Once, I leapt from the staircase of my childhood home and took flight, circling the first floor before landing.
My adult self is suspicious of this recollection, of course. Still, I can trace the route I took through the house, past the curved oak chairs of the dining room, the apple wallpaper border of the kitchen, the scratchy blue couch of the living room.
How can I remember something impossible in such vivid detail?
An experience is only ever lived once. As a consequence, there is an inherent gap woven into the fabric of our lives: an unsurmountable distance between what we once perceived, from the inside out, and what we can later only (try to) remember from the outside in.
When we are inside an experience, what we see, sense or feel is mixed and rendered from the ground up, like building and furnishing a tiny room inside our large house of life. When we later remember that same experience, on the other hand, we may “walk” into the existing room again, from the outside in, and maybe move or change some of its furnishings, but we cannot reenter the original moment of its construction.
This is the gap at the heart of the imperfect bi-directionality between life and our memories. And now think of how hard it is to distinguish between what we experienced once, and have since remembered or believe to remember. Memory has an elusiveness that seems inevitable.
At any moment, more is happening around us than the mind can possibly hold.
The neuroscientist Charan Ranganath explains that remembering begins with noticing.1 Of everything a room offers, we take in only a sliver. Maybe we focus on one voice among several, the slant of afternoon light, or the pattern of a rug.
What we pay attention to is mostly what moved us. A moment charged with emotion tells the brain: hold on to this. Intense feelings cause the release of chemicals like noradrenaline and dopamine, substances that boost brain plasticity, making it more open to being changed.2
There is an important reason for this. Memory helps us understand the present and anticipate what comes next. Our survival once depended on it. An animal that remembers where the berries grew, and where the fox waited, lives longer. The past, and the feelings attached to it, becomes something we use to find our way forward.
Much of the rest falls away, and quickly. By one classic estimate, nearly half of what we took in is gone within hours, and most of it within a day. Only fragments of the original experience remain.
Later, when we remember, the mind uses those fragments to build a plausible whole. We may remember the grain of a wooden chair, a pattern of apples, or a feeling of lift, and our imagination fills in the rest.3 Each time we return to the past, the present self enters with us to fill in the gaps. We bring what we know now, what we feel now, and what the years since have taught us. Even our mood on the day of remembering can shade what returns.
Memory is colored by the self doing the remembering.
“Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart,” wrote playwright Tennessee Williams in his stage directions for The Glass Menagerie.
Occasionally, we even catch a glimpse of this revisional agency, at least in hindsight. In The Black Notebooks, Toi Derricotte observed:
“When I read my notebooks over and read episodes that happened years ago that I have come to feel angry about, episodes in which I feel the other person said or did something that wounded me irreparably, I often find it recorded in a slightly different version than the one I had remembered.”
So while the contextual edges of memories may fade, their emotional core often survives as an atmospheric residue that influences our emotional relationship to reality. Over time, the memory may feel more vivid and coherent from the connective tissue of recall, even as it becomes less faithful to the moment itself.
During a visit at my sister’s house near Amsterdam a few years ago, my sister, my then nine-year-old year niece Anna, and I were sitting around their kitchen table looking at old photo albums. Many photos were showing my niece as a baby, toddler or pre-schooler. Anna eating, laughing, playing, or sleeping, at times looking straight into the camera. The images captured her stunning round blue-green eyes, and—since she’s my sister’s only child—Anna was often shown as the only person in the picture. My sister and I were fondly pointing and cooing at this or that when my niece suddenly broke into tears and exclaimed:
“Look! I am alone! I was all alone when I was little, nobody was there with me!”
We tried to console and explain to her what the photos couldn’t show her; that just outside the frame, there was typically my sister or brother-in-law holding the camera at her. But she had been so young, and now her memories of these childhood moments were incomplete, and, in a sense, straight up misleading. An imperfect reconstruction of the original.
Memory and life are inevitably haunted in these ways. Anna, but also you and I, we have all suffered from something irretrievable: a kind of amnesia of childhood and soul,4 or what may be described as the original loss of things.5 Things happen, and what we later play back in our minds, with the distance of a memory, can ever only be a more or less an incomplete re-generated copy of it.
After all, finding our way to remembrance and recontextualising our memories doesn’t typically happen through the thinking mind, but rather through our heart, and our senses such a taste or smell, but also posture, vibe, atmosphere, forgiveness, tenderness—and where we may even feel into the beauty of what has passed and is now absent.
And then, perhaps, the deeper memory practice is less about remembering what happened, and more about re-encountering ourselves as the one to whom it happened,6 and what Joan Didion likely meant when she famously wrote in On Keeping a Notebook:
“Remembering what it was to be me was always the point.”
At some point, I lost my magic powers.
Adolescence trained me to keep my feet on the ground. I began to feel eyes on me—some real, some I invented—and to measure myself by what I thought they wanted. Eventually, all I could see was how far there was to fall. I stopped leaping and shrank ever closer to the earth.
The facts of a life are rarely the truest thing about it. When I return to that memory, I don’t see the dust on the banister or the tangles in my hair that were certainly there. I see a girl at the top of the stairs who did not doubt the air would hold her.
Through the earthbound years that followed, I carried her eyes with me. In remembering her, even if the details were false, I remembered something true:
Once, I could fly.
In four experiments published in 1996, Fergus Craik and colleagues asked people to learn words or word pairs while also performing a visual task. Dividing attention during learning substantially reduced what participants later remembered. When attention was divided during retrieval instead, memory performance suffered much less, although responses on the competing task slowed. The distinction matters: attention helps determine what we carry away from an experience, even before forgetting begins. In Why We Remember (2024), Charan Ranganath similarly emphasizes how attention shapes which aspects of an experience we carry forward.
Craik, F. I. M., Govoni, R., Naveh-Benjamin, M., & Anderson, N. D. (1996). The effects of divided attention on encoding and retrieval processes in human memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 125(2), 159–180.
For Ranganath’s broader account: Ranganath, C. (2024). Why we remember: Unlocking memory’s power to hold on to what matters. Doubleday.
In a 1994 experiment, Larry Cahill and colleagues showed participants a slideshow accompanied by either a neutral or an emotionally disturbing story. Some received propranolol, a drug that blocks beta-adrenergic signaling, before watching; others received a placebo. A week later, the drug had reduced memory for the emotional story without affecting memory for the neutral one. The researchers found that the effect was not explained by reduced emotional responsiveness: participants could still find the story upsetting without receiving the same benefit to memory.
Separate work illustrates dopamine’s role in plasticity. In experiments on hippocampal tissue, Yan-You Huang and Eric Kandel found that activating certain dopamine receptors produced a strengthening of synaptic responses that lasted for hours. These studies examine different parts of the process: chemical signaling can influence both what people remember and the lasting changes through which neurons communicate.
Cahill, L., Prins, B., Weber, M., & McGaugh, J. L. (1994). β-Adrenergic activation and memory for emotional events. Nature, 371(6499), 702–704.
Huang, Y.-Y., & Kandel, E. R. (1995). D1/D5 receptor agonists induce a protein synthesis-dependent late potentiation in the CA1 region of the hippocampus. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 92(7), 2446–2450.
In his 1932 book Remembering, psychologist Frederic Bartlett described remembering as “an imaginative reconstruction, or construction.” He argued that we draw on schemas—organized patterns of past experience—to make sense of remembered details. What returns is therefore shaped by the knowledge, expectations, and attitudes we bring to it.
Decades later, brain imaging would reveal a connection between remembering and imagining. In a 2007 fMRI study, Donna Rose Addis, Alana Wong, and Daniel Schacter gave participants word cues and asked them to recall a specific personal experience or imagine a possible future one. Many of the same brain regions were active in both tasks, with particularly extensive overlap as participants elaborated the details. The finding suggests that some of the neural resources that help us revisit an experience also help us construct one we have never had. People with damage to the hippocampus, who struggle to recall the past, also struggle to imagine new experiences in any detail, as if the loss of one faculty were the loss of the other.
Bartlett, F. C. (1995). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge University Press, chapter 10, especially p. 213. (Original work published 1932.)
Addis, D. R., Wong, A. T., & Schacter, D. L. (2007). Remembering the past and imagining the future: Common and distinct neural substrates during event construction and elaboration. Neuropsychologia, 45(7), 1363–1377.
Hassabis, D., Kumaran, D., Vann, S. D., & Maguire, E. A. (2007). Patients with hippocampal amnesia cannot imagine new experiences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(5), 1726–1731.
In the episode called The Fear of Being Seen: Overcoming Shame, Invisibility, and Social Anxiety from his podcast The Art of Accomplishment, Joe Hudson and Brett Kistler unpack a concept called soul dismorphia, and why we can’t see ourselves clearly due to the fact that we partly forget—due to shame, conditioning, fear, adaptation etc.—our deeper and more essential nature and original way of openness and aliveness.
I’m adopting this wording of “the original loss of things” from Claire Louise Bennett and her book Pond, in which she also uses it around memories, but in a different (but equally fascinating) context: “Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that’s not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream [or added by me: meditate or deeply reflect]. And daydreams return me to my original loss of things and I luxuriate in their fertile primary vision…”
Gurdjieff and his concept of self-remembering. For Gurdjieff, self-remembering is the deliberate act of including oneself in one’s own field of awareness and attention between the observer and the observed.
I love this article. I've studied memory since undergrad and have worked heavily with it in treating post-traumatic-stress-disorder. How you say, "Memory is colored by the self doing the remembering." In treatment, my clients would fear that they would lose their memories and I would say, you don't lose them, per-say, rather your relationship to the memory evolves. Because who they are now begins to heal and evolve so when they look back when no longer identified with fear, they see the person in the memory differently. They see the story from a new perspective which changes the feeling state. Overall beautiful essay on a topic I continue to find fascinating in how it shapes our mental, emotional, and relational lives.
Wow do I love this essay. While reading it I could feel something inside of me being outlined in the shadows, a truth about life that I think I have always intuited, but never full allowed to have its way with me. I don't even know what that truth is, or how I'd put it into words. It has something to do with the relationship between memory, imagination, facts, truth and reality. Something to do with the dissolution of the boundary between all of those concepts, with the realization that they are concepts, not discrete territories or states. It's like we exist in multiple realms, and they're all real. And sometimes it feels to me that the flight around the room is more real than seventh step of the staircase I leapt from.