Please Rate (Or Else)!
While memory, together with motivation and emotion, is at the center of my research activities, I wrote only one post in two parts related to it in all these years, here and here, in the context of photography.
Time to reflect on memory further.
Memory research is a field that, provocatively phrased, doesn’t even have a physiological spherical cow model yet. All you’ve ever heard about it—sensory/short term/long term, declarative/procedural, encoding, consolidation, retrieval, and what have you—are abstract models without practically any knowledge about the actual physiological processes. So there’s a lot of room for anyone to speculate on top of this terra incognita, which I will happily do in this post and the next.
The first question I like to ask touches upon yet another challenge we know next to nothing about, namely consciousness. Or, more specifically in this context, the idea of oneself as an “I” that grows, changes, evolves, and possibly deteriorates more or less continuously (leaving aside severe disruptions) from the cradle to the grave. From there, the question would be: what else could this “I” possibly be beyond the aggregation of memories? Which, of course, also involves various kinds of bodily memory, from uncontroversial ones like muscle memory up to Damasio’s somatic markers, a hypothesis I am an ardent fan of.
Indeed, I don’t think there’s anything beyond. The primary task of our neurophysiological processes is to process what our various senses—all of them, not just the “traditional” ones—shovel into the pipeline. And what do we do then with all this input? We compare it with our memories aka what we already know and start to collate, integrate, expurgate, and so on, and then maybe add them to our accumulation of memories if deemed worthwhile. (Whereby Bayesian reasoning seems to be heavily involved, i.e., predicting what’s likely to happen next, comparing it with what actually happens, and updating the parameters for the next prediction.)
Let’s take a look at what happens when we process an experience that is not overwhelmingly cognitive in nature (if there is such a thing).
Following Damasio’s temporary definitions, emotions are bodily equilibrium gauges (bioregulatory reactions, in his parlance) that tell us what’s lacking and what’s overabundant (i.e., cold and hungry and thirsty = out of equilibrium; warm and fed and sufficiently hydrated = in equilibrium) and needs to be corrected. Feelings, in contrast, are the mental representations of these emotions, i.e., in my parlance, our conscious experiences of these emotions that take place in the “I” territory. And what happens there, I think, is not pure absorption resembling Zen aspirations (which indeed require the “I” to be emptied out). Instead, a comparison function is triggered that looks at this new experience’s values, checks them against residing memories of freezing cold in a railroad station, hot showers after a daylong ride, skipped meals during crunch time, or food stupors on Thanksgiving, savors them, and finally adds them to the aggregated memories if the experience sufficiently deviates from current baselines. Indeed, humans are compulsive comparers, if you think about it—everything from differently colored M&Ms to relationships is meticulously compared and meticulously rated. Apparently, humans can’t enjoy, or be appalled by, a piece of music, a movie, a game, a rollercoaster ride for what it is according to what they like or don’t like about it without comparing it to other pieces of music, movies, games, rollercoaster rides, respectively; rate the becthulhu out of it on popular websites; and compare their ratings in turn with those of all the other raters.
Thus, in this manner, if we are what we remember—consciously and unconsciously, via recall and recognition, and along various models like those mentioned above—we can ask how our “I”-creating aggregation of memories comes about, which is the topic of the second part that will be coming soon.
For an in-depth introduction to memory research, I recommend Memory, ed. Baddeley, Eysenck, and Anderson, 3rd ed. 2020 or 4th ed. 2025; and if you really want to get into the weeds, there’s The Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies, ed. Tota and Hagen, Routledge 2016. Both should be available in decent libraries.
If you have something valuable to add or some interesting point to discuss, I’ll be looking forward to meeting you at Mastodon!