Map Memoirs - We are what we remember

We are what we remember

Memory, sense of idenity and the value of hindsight

I recently took a graduate course on Cognitive Psychology and the professor opened the unit of Memory with the quote "We are what we remember". I love abstractions such as those. Such a complicated concept ("Who/What am I?") packaged into something so intuitevely simple ("what I rememer").

The rest of the unit was more technical and less philosophical, so I looked online for more inspiration on the subject and I found this beautiful quote by Erik Pevernagie, a Belgian artist:

"We are what we remember. If we lose our memory, we lose our identity and our identity is the accumulation of our experiences. When we walk down the memory lane, it can be unconsciously, willingly, selectively, impetuously or sometimes grudgingly. By following our stream of consciousness we look for lost time and things past. Some reminiscences become anchor points that can take another scope with the wisdom of hindsight."

There's a lot to unpack here, but I'm focusing on two things: the connection of memory to our identity and the value of hindsight.

When we ask ourselves "Who/What am I?", a videography of our past experiences rises to our mind. Even when we focus on the present, the moment we start to think about what we just experienced the present becomes the past. Any experience is essentially a past experience. In fact, memory and identity being two-way tied makes more than intuitive sense. Some researchers go as far as to claim that consciousness itself is no more than a memory system. On this view, our unconscious brain processes perceptions and makes decisions in "real time", while what we call "conscious experience" is actually a memory of those unconscious events, arising roughly half a second later. We never perceive the world directly, we just remember perceiving it.

Another fascinating quality of memory is it being reconstructive, not reproducting. Pevernagie mentions some qualities of the trip down the memory lane, but he doesn't mention that memory recall is influenced by a variety of other factors, such as our motivations, perceptions, imagination beliefs. We never replay an experience of ours in our mind; we reconstruct it. In fact, Map Memoirs is partly based on that; putting your story on a map enhances it, adds more context. Your memory happened somewhere, along with other things around it. Things that you maybe weren't paying too much attention to. When I was on board the Montenegro Express

But Pevernagie does touch the subject from another perspective: The wisdom of hindsight. It's easy to get dumbfounded by hindsight. To become overwhlemed by self-doubt or guilt. "I should have known better", "I wouldn't do X if I knew Y", "It's all clear now, I wish I had acted accordingly". But hindsight, as the view of looking back to things with more wisdom, is rather neutral if you think about it. Naturally we understand something (an event or situation) better after it has happened. The after part adds to our explanatory power of what happened, we understand cause and effect more thoroughly. We can then chose how to internalize this wisdom.

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