OBJECTIVE MEMORY
Yesterday’s experience becomes today’s memory. Recall begins with the actual events, which are processed through the mind into consciousness. This operation weaves emotions, biases, previous understandings, and judgmentalism into the true facts.
Conscious recollection is imperfect, at best. Human beings have a poor record of accurately remembering their own personal histories. Why should this be? After all, one lives one’s past; it is there for viewing. What can embellish or deplete this recalling?
There are a multitude of forces in the world and in a person’s nature that influence the process of remembering.
The past resides in a person’s physical structure, including brain and body. Neither of these are static. A woman’s experienced past makes her a different person, moment to moment. A man’s past has affected the body as it grows, learns, and develops. The bottom line is that every experience of every episode of a person’s life becomes incorporated into the totality that adds up to being that person. This is a shifting reality because newness is constantly introduced.
The past that we recall has been filtered through the cerebral cortex, which is also occupied by other insistent forces. Emotions, desires, acquired knowledge, and epiphanies all latch onto memories, introducing unique alterations of these memories. New experiences, bodily changes, environmental encounters, and social and political attitudes modify memories to fit the new you. Aging, illness, tragedy, and glory detract or add to the content of what is recalled. Thus, each of the brain’s forces seeks to append its unique values to the reconstructing memory. The result is reshaping what we recall in ways that range from subtle to totally dissimilar to concealed.
Every experience of our lives shapes our perception of every subsequent experience. This whittles down the objectivity of how we remember past events.
External and maturational realities also alter recall, making it different from the true past event. Aging minds and bodies operate with impaired capabilities. Our brains have gained and lost. Events and other people make an individual different daily. The world itself changes. A person may be content or bitter. A body has periods of infirmity and of being vigorous. These are some of the forces that amend objective memory before it surfaces into our consciousness.
One’s ego and all that makes up his or her personality inevitably alters the content that is summoned when remembering. Personal history informs and changes an individual. We mature, blossom, and flourish from this. Such growth becomes an intrinsic component of the memory as perceived by the brain. When recalled, yesterday consists of the day as modified by the various influences expanding and cultivating our minds.
Subjective characteristics of the human condition influence, modify, and distort the memory as it is drawn into the mind. Similarly, they misrepresent memories stored in the brain. Portions of reality may be erased. Some may be partially or wholly enhanced. What is certain is that we do not consciously recall past events in our lives as they actually happened, no matter how vivid it seems.
Recollections undergo transformations as they pass through the brain from gray matter to awareness. Eventually, it crystallizes into definition and consciousness. Along the way, it loses objectivity, distancing itself from the original reality.
We and the world are different since we lived and stored even our most recent experiences. Thus, the nature of recall undergoes transformation from actual events to perceived background. Our physical, cerebral, and emotional worlds present a multitude of ways for that perceptual discordance to grow.
These are the many forces that affect what we actually perceive when remembering the past.
Potent forces of the brain insinuate bias and knowledge as we remember something. We recall the past with love or fear or anger or something else. As a dormant memory is teased from its storage, it must pass through every subjective influence the brain can offer before reaching the conscious mind. The memory becomes a thought encompassing all these influences.
HOW DOES THIS PERCEPTION GET DIVORCED FROM THE REALITY? WHAT GETS IN THE WAY OF THE FACTS? HOW DOES THIS DATA BECOME CLOUDED?
Like a stream is nourished by stones, vegetation, and other water sources as it flows down the mountain, a memory draws values from the mind as it coalesces into the stuff of the conscious recall.
Neither ended up the same as they began. The stream has become a torrent of a river with abundant baggage accumulated. By the time an event reaches cognizance, its objective content has softened into an occurrence peppered with the wonders of humanity. In this way, objective events are reformulated into opinionated scenarios.
Many people believe their memories are highly authentic. Yet they acknowledge an inability to recall some events at all. Subjectivity is a powerful force that alters how we remember everything.
That potent force of objective memory does not change. It is part of us in life, though we cannot influence it. Though this perfect record of our past is intricately interwoven with and attached to one’s body and mind. It persists unchangeable as an independent entity. With death, it is freed to float within the earth’s atmosphere, accessible by certain people under certain conditions.
Health and Spirit by Dr. Jack Zoldan 