Mark Twain once wrote, "The older I get, the more I remember. I'm so old now, I remember things that never happened." You don't have to know many old men to know this is true. Memories are only vaguely related to any event, and context is everything.
Mapping out brain activity, scientists have seen that the context of a memory can actually change the place in your brain where that memory occurs. You may think you're having the same memory of an event, but actually, you cannot. Everytime you remember something, it is different from the time before. There are many reasons for this; your incentive for remembering, your mood, the reactions of others this time and last, a world of changes and refinements you have made unknowingly. Accident investigations reveal constantly, not only the variations in our perceptions, but also the frailty of our memories. As Truman pointed out, the only true history is the one we don't know.
How can this be? When so much of what we are is the sum total of our memories, how can we maintain our sense of who we are when those memories are so fleeting and inaccurate? To me, the answer is clear; humans are also fleeting and inaccurate.
How else to explain the object I have looked at a thousand times and only just now seen? How else to explain why I never fully understood the first classic I read until I had read fifty? We are not static, unchanging beings, and neither are our memories. Dailey showers of information and new associations shape every part of us, even down to a cellular level. Diseases can be considered the combined memory of a body to a certain kind of exposure. Memories pile up and they change. We bury them and they bob to the surface, different somehow because we are changed. As Mark Twain has pointed out, age is part of the equation, but as our memories and bodies point out, mileage, simple life experience, is the other. It would seem to be the most ironic, and yet most hopeful of compensations, that as our bodies diminish, our memories would blossum.
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