Reconstructive Brain

At the same time I took my Creative Writing class last spring, I also was taking a Personal Essay class. It was given by the same Professor, a perfectionist with little patience and no fear of telling a student their writing was garbage. Think Simon from American Idol, and you'll be pretty close to what this man was like. He even had the British accent. But, as rude and tactless as he could be, he cared - more deeply than I think most Professors do. His policy was tough love and for me, it was a blessing. I'll always be thankful for my classes with him. This is one of the self-searching essays I wrote for his class.

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Reconstructive Brain

When I was around the age of six or seven, I was convinced that I had traveled to Oklahoma at some point in my life. My mother had relatives there, people whose names I didn’t know, but I remember pulling up to their home in our car, the driveway tracing a path alongside the brown siding of the house, as is common in suburban settings. We went inside and there were many adults there, but no children, so I sat on a large couch and stared at a glass coffee table with a bowl of candy sitting on it. The candies were the hard, fruity kind, with little plastic wrappers that were twisted closed at the ends. I sucked them slowly, bored with the lack of company.

I wasn’t sure why we had gone to Oklahoma. I knew we weren’t close to my relatives there and I couldn’t remember us ever speaking to them outside of that memory, so I assumed that we had gone to visit because somebody had died. In my limited experience, funerals brought families together, and I endeavored to find out the identity of this deceased relative. I have only a vague recollection of a conversation that must have taken place several times, and I’ll try to recount it as best I can. It is a conversation I remember having with my father mostly, because he was the one most deeply offended by my mistaken recollection, thinking it instead to be a stubborn lie. The conversation always began with a question, as most of my conversations with my parents did, perhaps something like, “Do you remember that time we went to Oklahoma?”

Surely my father would be slightly annoyed, replying that we’d never been there, and I would insist that we had, marveling at his forgetfulness.

“We never went to Oklahoma,” he’d say.

“Yes we did, don’t you remember?” I’d respond.

“No, we didn’t. You’ve never been there,” he’d say.

Things would go on like this for a while, until our exasperation with each other escalated to the point where I’d give up in fear of his wrath, though I remained steadfastly certain that I was right. It seemed impossible to me that my memory of Oklahoma could be untrue, even when it was suggested by my mother that I’d either mistook somewhere I had been for Oklahoma, or that I had dreamed the whole event. The former I knew couldn’t be because, even though I had no memory of anyone calling the place Oklahoma, the whole recollection had been immersed in a vivid sense that this was the place’s location. The latter made no sense because if I had dreamed it, the resulting fuzziness of the memory would have prevented me from believing in its reality so ardently.

Today I know that I was wrong, and that I never have visited Oklahoma.

I am reminded of the incident by a recent job interview I had. Sitting in a large, black, padded chair in a large, clean, white room, behind a long, sleek, black table, I kept attentive eyes on my interviewer, a large, professional, imposing man. For an hour, I was drilled with question after question on how I would approach this or that situation. I was asked to describe times I’d worked in groups, times I’d had trouble working with others, times when I’d taken the role of a leader. At some point, in reply to a question I can’t remember the substance of, I began to describe how I had once worked on a project for college with a partner, and that partner had wanted to fabricate experimental results so that our final answers would look better. My interviewer asked why this was a problem. I told him it was a matter of ethics and I felt that lying about the experimental results would be wrong. My interviewer asked what I did. I told him I confronted my partner. My interviewer asked what my partner said. I told him he agreed not to fudge results anymore. My interviewer asked and asked and I kept answering until I wasn’t sure whether I was making things up or telling the truth. I left that interview in a state of exhausted confusion. What had really happened between myself and my partner? I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember. I realized that I had no way to verify if I had answered my interviewer’s inquiries truthfully or with unintentional lies.

I wrestled with this for some time afterward, and even now I have reached no conclusion on the matter. Trying to sort it all out, I’ve considered several different theories about how memory works. One claims that our memories record every detail of every moment perfectly, and our difficulties with recalling events are a result of forgetting how to find them in our mental filing system. It’s all there. Every bit from the day we were born, and maybe before. I think that unlikely, perhaps because it seems uncanny that my mind may be withholding information from me, layers and layers of inaccessible memory, like a library behind heavy wooden doors for which I have no key. Another theory says that memory is reconstructive, that only selected details are recorded and we fill in the blanks later when we try to retrieve them. If this is true, my reconstructive mind is a great deceiver, and it is constantly fabricating fact.

How unreliable I become in this context, and how autonomous my brain seems. I can’t help but imagine it as a pompous artist, a pen and a paintbrush grasped between its soft gray folds, as it makes up my past, unhindered by the ethics I struggled to explain for my interviewer. With this image of my brain comes a list of questions. What is truth, and what is reliable? What is the past? What is fact? What is history even? Nothing more than the combined effort of many reconstructive memories? I realize now that dabbling with the theory of memory can be quite destructive. By extrapolating only one such theory of the mind, I have managed to mangle my comfortable perception of a certain reality, and I am left now more confused than when I began. My brain can’t be trusted, and I can’t be sure even my name hasn’t accidentally been distorted by my brain’s rampant restorations.

Did I go to Oklahoma as a child then?

It depends on whose reconstructions you trust.

I used to own a book on memory. In particular, it was about improving memory. The advice of this book was to use visualization at a tool to mentally record events and objects. Words and numbers are too abstract for our minds to grasp efficiently, but pictures, those catch its attention. If you need to remember the number “three” for example, imagine a tree. The words are similar enough that remembering the picture of one will remind you of the other. I tried that on several occasions, and it seemed to work, but while I am sure it would be helpful to employ this method more often, unfortunately, I usually forget to. If I still had the book in my possession, I’d go back and reread it since I haven’t perused its pages since I was in high school, but unfortunately I lent it to my high school social studies teacher, and though he claimed to have returned it to me, I don’t recall him ever doing so. Since the book remains absent from my shelf at home, I’ll trust my own reconstruction of the event.

Sometimes my brain refuses to reconstruct. There are people from my childhood that I can’t remember, family members long deceased, and I think I would be content to have some memory of them, any memory of them, even if it weren’t a real memory of them. Occasionally, on a Friday evening, my parents and I will sit and talk about the past, lounging in our small living room, bodies slouched on the couches in lazy sprawls after a long work week. My dad will tell how my mom once tried to go hiking in high heels when they were dating and my mom will tell how they had to chase me through Toys R’ Us the first time I was placed in a baby walker there. These are treasured conversations because they fill in at least some of the blanks in my memory, and if the facts my parents tell me are faulty, I am ignorant of it and therefore content. It is through these conversations that I have drawn a picture of my father’s mother in my mind, a large Italian woman with red hair and loud manners. I am able to know that she loved me very much and that she had waited for my birth with anticipation, because she’d always wanted a girl herself but had instead produced two boys. To my personal credit, I only have a vague sense that I once sat in her apartment and watched her knit, and I wouldn’t be sure how much confidence to put in this memory if my parents hadn’t confirmed that this happened frequently.

In this instance of failing to fully recall my grandmother, I feel my memory has betrayed me. I’ve come to often be distrustful of it as well as distrustful of the memory of others. Often though, memory is the only evidence available, though it seems that human nature fights always to create some further confirmation of what is true. When I was a senior in high school, I would be seized with the impulse to suddenly carve my name in the textured off-white walls of the hallways. At times, I would have been happy to draw even a simple black line because the result would have been the same. I would have left behind some proof, some evidence I had been there, and years later, if students looked at the wall and noticed my mark, they would know that someone with purpose had done it, even if they never in their lives saw my face or heard my name. Proof of my existence was enough.

Since childhood, I have been driven by a desire to do something with a permanent effect. When I was very young I wanted to be famous, thinking that if enough people knew me, I couldn’t be forgotten. As an adolescent, I wanted to do some great scientific work, to discover or invent something that would be referred to long after my death. Now I want simply to write something beautiful. There is something magical about being preserved between lines of text inside a volume that may be placed on a library shelf and ignored for years, until a single person comes by, pulls your book out, and rediscovers you. Libraries fascinate me for this reason. I attach to them the same respect and solemnity I would experience in walking through a cemetery. All those ideas. All those thoughts. All those facts and stories. Intrigued, I’ll grab a book with an interesting title, sit down at a desk, and begin the work of reading. My mind is alive then, filling in the blanks between the words, reconstructing the meaning behind them. I don’t worry about justifying this liberty I take though, because since elementary school I have been taught that reading is a personal experience, seen always through the lens of the mind.

Perhaps memory is similar to reading a good story or a poem. The tangibility of experience is manifested by words on a page and reading them, imagining them, deciding what they mean, is akin to remembering. Before I was old enough to go to school, I used to sit on my mother’s lap on a cloth-covered brown couch looking at the brightly colored pictures of a book that she held before me as she read. I made her read my favorite stories repeatedly, reliving the adventures of Corduroy the Bear and Curious George so many times that I knew them by heart. Once, when she turned the page in an especially adored story, I immediately began reciting the words written there in bold black letters. Astonished, she turned to me with wide eyes and asked if I was reading. I knew I wasn’t, at least not in the way she meant, but staring at those words I knew by heart, I couldn’t really understand the difference. Whether I had read the words exactly or simply remembered them, the meaning to me was the same. That was the part that mattered.

Maybe I’ve never been to Oklahoma, but my memories of it are glazed with feelings of family belonging and childhood curiosity, and when I think about them, I have to smile. That’s what those memories mean to me, and that’s the part that matters.