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Pushing the bounds of memory through science and technology

By Melissa Hendricks

A rainy April evening finds me cooking blueberry jam—and hoping that my labors yield something more than a few jars of preserves. I wish to summon forgotten or foggy memories of days when I was seven or eight and my grandmother boiled berries and sugar in a heavy kettle on her white cooking range. We slathered Grandma’s jam on homemade challah bread. We spooned it on ice cream. And, when nobody was looking, I even ate it straight with no chaser from a spoon. Mostly, though, I remember the aroma—an intoxicating perfume that could transfix a bustling seven-year-old long enough for her to inhale deeply and ask, “What’s that good smell?”

Simply thinking about making jam begins to rekindle such memories. However, I’d like to do more. I’d like to reconstruct the event and see where it takes me, to see whether the smell of sweet fruit and the taste of sticky jam evoke any fresh childhood memories or new insights into old memories. Could this undertaking transport me to places I hadn’t been in decades? The French author Marcel Proust famously experienced such an event: drinking tea flavored with the crumbs of a Madeleine cookie sent him back to the Sunday mornings of his youth when his aunt fed him tea-soaked Madeleines. Perhaps my jam would be that vehicle into forgotten times of my own past.

To be honest, my motives are a bit more complicated. I’ve been reading a lot about memory recently, specifically about computer whizzes and brain scientists who are exploring how we might push the bounds of memory. The devices and drugs that could emanate from their work might greatly expand our capacity to retain events of our past or to recollect facts more quickly or with greater accuracy. All laudable goals, I think. However, these prospects, frankly, also made me a bit uneasy. And in examining the source of my anxiety, I decided to undertake a low-tech experiment in eliciting memory: my blueberry jam project. I wondered, would my low-tech approach offer something that science couldn’t? I hoped so.

I started mulling the issue of memory after reading about a project Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell is conducting. He is creating a digital archive of his life. Using a digital recorder—a device called SenseCam that can snap a photograph every 60 seconds—and other technology, Bell is digitally logging all that he encounters—people, books, articles, letters, e-mail, phone calls, television programs, etc. “It gives you kind of a feeling of cleanliness,” Bell told Fast Company magazine writer Clive Thompson. “I can offload my memory. I feel much freer about remembering something now. I’ve got this machine, this slave, that does it.”
Another inventor, University of Toronto professor Steve Mann, has created computerized eyeglasses he calls eyetap. A video camera embedded in the glasses records the scene. A computer then wirelessly transmits information about the objects in the visual field. The wearer can read this information through the lens. Mann suggests that such a device could serve as a “visual memory prosthetic,” for example, to help Alzheimer’s disease patients remember names.
On a different front, researchers are now defining the molecular underpinnings of memory. Like the research involving devices, these studies might also lead to new strategies for expanding memory, although in this case those tools might be in the form of a pill. For example, Todd Sacktor and his colleagues at State University of New York Downstate Medical Center reported recently that they had discovered an enzyme molecule that appears to help the brain store long-term memories. In their experiments, the researchers found that they could erase the long-term memories of laboratory animals by injecting the animals with a drug that inhibits the enzyme molecule.
Sacktor now believes he knows how to accomplish the opposite effect. That is, rather than inhibiting the memory molecule, he has a strategy in mind for boosting its activity. He is now testing his hypothesis, searching for drugs that will enhance memory storage in people by stimulating the memory-storage enzyme. One implication of such studies is that scientists will one day have the ability to manipulate memory: to administer drugs that fortify memory or perhaps even to use drugs to delete particular long-term memories.

It is not difficult to imagine how these research projects—Bell’s, Mann’s, Sacktor’s, and others—could improve the lives of people with memory-damaging illnesses. Patients with Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia would benefit enormously from a pill that improves memory or from eyeglasses that could spare them the struggle of trying to remember a friend’s name or the name of a common object. But it is also possible—indeed, likely—that some doctors or consumers will seek such tools to enhance perfectly healthy memories: a high school student seeking any way to boost her SAT scores, a presidential candidate looking for the ability to deliver snappier comebacks on the night of a debate.

Here is where I start to grow uneasy. Give a person with Alzheimer’s disease a pill that would diminish their forgetfulness? Absolutely. I’ve had my share of small mental lapses since passing the threshold into my 40s (forgetting why I just opened the refrigerator; reciting a long string of names—my sister’s, my son’s, my dog’s—to arrive at the one I am seeking); I can imagine that if my memory declined significantly, I’d be first in line for any pill or gizmo that might preserve my gray matter.

But use the same medicine to expand, speed up, or selectively delete portions of a healthy person’s memory? I’m not so sure.

Don’t get me wrong, I do not suggest we establish laws or other restrictions to prevent people from using memory-enhancing tools of any sort. If you want to digitally log your life or pop a memory pill, who am I to stop you? However, I’d prefer (or believe I’d prefer) to stick with the memory I have, as fallible as it is, and to continue to rely on the tools I know best for jogging my memory when it fails—my dog-eared dictionary, Google, time.

I question what might happen if we tamper with the mechanism for remembering that we have had for millennia. A perfect memory might not be such a good thing. Remembering more than is currently possible might clog our brains with so much stuff we couldn’t make sense of it all. Plus, we all have past events we’d rather not remember, right? I fret about the risks and the unknowns, the possible science fiction scenarios that may come to pass.

Hoping for further insight, I call Barry Gordon, a neuroscientist and founder of the Johns Hopkins Memory Clinic, who wrote Memory: Remembering and Forgetting in Everyday Life. It is important to note, says Gordon, that any effort to enhance human memory will be limited by the way human memory operates. Although it is often compared to a computer, the human brain is not a computer. A computer stores information by address. To search for a piece of data, the computer simply looks up the item’s address. And to expand a computer’s memory, you simply add more RAM. In theory, a computer could store a limitless amount of information. In contrast, the human brain organizes information through patterns, or associations, says Gordon. It stores new memories according to how they relate to the existing patterns. So when a new piece of information enters the system, the brain files away that piece of data according to where it fits in its existing pattern. But the brain may have a limit to the number of connections it can make.

Another factor to consider, says Gordon, is the law of unintended consequences. To illustrate one possibility, he refers to the science fiction movie Total Recall. In the film, a character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger battles to tell whether his memories are based on reality or mere fantasies deriving from a memory chip implanted in his brain.

We currently don’t have this struggle, says Gordon, because our brains are good at distinguishing reality from imagination. According to one hypothesis, we’re able to make that distinction because our memory for detail is imperfect. You might remember the outfit you wore your first day of school, but chances are your image is fairly fuzzy, not nearly as sharply defined and detailed as the actual red woolen shirt with the Buster Brown collar. Such fuzziness serves a purpose, says Gordon: it allows your brain to distinguish between reality and imagination or memory. The brain appears to equate fuzziness and lack of detail with memory, but clarity and detail with reality. But suppose memory becomes so perfect that the brain cannot tell reality from a remembered image. We might become like that Schwarzenegger character, struggling to know whether we’re experiencing reality or a hallucination. “We’ll have to design a shield to distinguish memories from actual life,” suggests Gordon.

Manipulating biology comes with a watch-what-you-wish-for clause, he notes. “In biology, there’s always a trade-off. Always.”

I also call Sacktor, the codiscoverer of the memory enzyme, who raises another concern: the possible misuse of findings that come from research like his. One day, a government or other group might use a memory drug to acquire unprecedented degrees of power. A dictator might use drugs that enhance or erase memories for brainwashing or thought control. “I’m quite anxious about it,” he says.

Research on memory and on potential treatments for memory disorders should continue, says Sacktor—the possible benefits are too large not to—but scientists and society should be open to examining the ethical ramifications of this work. “I don’t think the ethical issues for enhancing normal memory have been fully explored,” he says. “I think society will have to judge their appropriateness when the potencies of the drugs are known.

“It’s going to happen,” notes Sacktor. Scientists will develop pills that enhance memory, and drug companies will sell them. “One day, kids will be all excited to go to school, to get new notebooks and pencils and their new pill.”

Perhaps he is right. Would that be such a bad thing? As I wrote this story, I allowed myself to consider how a memory pill might help me as a writer. It might hasten what can be an excruciatingly slow process, I muse. If a pill could make those sluggish hunts for just the right word less sluggish, wouldn’t I avail myself of such a drug?

Perhaps. Maybe once, at least. But I still think I’d prefer the old-fashioned way of remembering things. I still have questions, not so much about what a memory pill might bring, but about what it might take away.

A writer observes the world, but much of what she sees, hears, feels, tastes, and smells quickly fades from consciousness. Brain scientists still cannot tell us why some experiences resurface from the pit of memory and others do not; it is a mystery, and perhaps that mysterious process is what makes art. If we mess with that process, might we sacrifice some portion of our creativity? In trying to save everything and forget nothing, does Bell lose something?

Granted, sometimes that process of remembering fails. We misremember events. We transpose numbers. We change the details. But as I grow older, I find I’m starting to become more tolerant of those mistakes and to wonder if they, too, occasionally contribute to the wellspring of art. We spend a lot of time striving to be the best, the smartest, the fastest, the thinnest, the sexiest. But maybe some degree of creativity has nothing to do with speed or size or any other factor that comes with a superlative. Some portion of creativity may not respond to prodding; it may flow forth only of its own accord.

Several days have passed now since my memory jam experiment. Did my project elicit any repressed memories worthy of a best-selling book? I wish I could say it did. But, alas, no. No new memories sprang forth when I inhaled the vapors wafting from my pot of cooking jam. No sleeping childhood memories awoke as I took a first bite of toast and jam.

I’d like to believe that methodology accounts, in part, for the results of this experiment. My jam making did not replicate the sweet aroma I had imagined and longed for; in fact, my bubbling pot smelled like almost nothing at all. And the finished jam brought disappointments, too. Its flavor was fine, but the berries had lost their juicy plumpness and acquired the dry, chewy texture of raisins. Perhaps I should have minded the cooking pot a little more closely.

The truth is my jam making would not have met my grandmother’s exacting culinary standards. Her jam began with an early morning trip to the blueberry fields, where she spent a hot, sweaty morning picking only the choicest, plumpest, bluest berries. In contrast, my jam-making enterprise, taking place as it did in rainy April, began with a trip to the frozen food section of the supermarket. (Grandma would have been horrified.)

Such inauthenticity may explain why my jam project failed to evoke fresh memories. Indeed, research suggests that our memory of a fact or event works best under circumstances similar to those in which our brain first stashed away the particular piece of information or episode. (If you learn a word while sitting up straight, you’ll have better luck recalling it later if you sit up straight.)

Emotion, too, plays an important role in memory. Trauma seems an especially powerful force for etching deep memories, probably by producing stress hormones that help to etch the memories indelibly. Perhaps my memories of my grandmother’s jam making remain fuzzy and out of reach because they involve pleasant times and a loving, gracious woman. It seems the Mommie Dearest characters leave more indelible impressions.

I’ve also been thinking that memory can be a stubborn creature. When I made my jam, I sought my own Proustian experience. But Proust’s memories welled up and flowed forth spontaneously. I plotted to retrieve the stored events from childhood, and perhaps my too-eager efforts kept them from appearing.

“Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry,” the poet Edward Hirsch wrote recently in The Washington Post Book World. I see the truth in that statement, and I believe it applies to all sorts of creative endeavors, including the art of remembering. Yes, there may be times we need to apply all of our instruments—from Webster’s to pills—to cajole and joggle memory; but I believe we should also cultivate those times that allow unshackled minds to retrieve the loose string of old thoughts and spin it into new shapes. If we try too hard, perhaps we will miss certain memories—and the lessons they can hold.

So today, while driving and pondering nothing in particular, I suddenly started thinking about my grandmother. Nothing earth-shattering or even new, my thoughts instead focused on something about my grandmother I had always known. It had to do with her demeanor, and how she was always such a calm woman. She carried herself with a quiet confidence. And this trait, I now understood, translated into her jam making. Grandma would not have left her boiling jam unattended to check her e-mail and Google a few things. She would not have come back after too long and tried to compensate for her mistake by frantically stirring the jam. Grandma did not multitask. She put the berries and sugar in the pot and let them simmer. Or at least, that’s what I remember.

Tags: melissa hendricks dec 08

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