Jogging the memory

I read in the Fernyhough book which prompted the post at reference 1 about how recent memories can be brought back into consciousness by a pictorial record.

In that post I reported on an attempt to recover old memories, while today I report on the recovery of recent memories.

So many of my posts are about things which happened to me a week or so before the time of the post. Sometimes I have either some notes made at the time or some pictures to help me, and I was struck both yesterday and again this morning by the number of memories which can be brought back to the surface with the help of a short note or a picture.

I am not sure whether the souvenirs one buys at the seaside would have the same effect, particularly those not being keyed in any simple way to the events & experiences of one's time there. What would a glass lighthouse full of coloured sand from the cliffs at Alum Bay do to recover my memories of a visit to the cliffs above the nearby Needles lighthouse?

Nor do I have much idea of how quickly the aforesaid notes will lose their power, although I suspect that another week or so might be enough for most of them. Perhaps policemen are trained to be careful about what they put into their notebooks, so that the notes are subsequently useful in court, perhaps months later.

I associate to a visit to an aunt when we were turning over some family photographs. One shot was of the aunt and her husband together with another couple with whom they had spent quality holiday time, over several years. But all that the photograph prompted was just that; their names and qualities were gone. And I don't remember if she remembered any of the stuff that she must have done with them.

Notwithstanding, it is clear that their are plenty of memories in the brain which are not readily accessible to conscious recall, with or without the help of souvenirs. That is not to say that the memories are not accessible to the unconscious: they might be being regularly scanned to update our general knowledge about the world, but with such scanning not being the same as either recall or index reconstruction.

But perhaps it is like computers with no access eventually being translated into recycle, with the neurons concerned being reassigned - with the odd feature that the indexes are going before the data, rather than with the data. I shall try to think this morning of what it might mean in human terms to lose the data but not the indexes.

No doubt there are plenty of memory scientists out there doing experiments on all this sort of thing.

PS: pursuing the computer analogy, one might delete both indexes and files at the same time, but with the files having a life after death denied to the indexes. They will be lurking in one or more of the many recycle bins around the computer, entirely up for recovery if you know where to look. And then the actual data, the electrical spots on the disc might not be reused for a long time - years even - but there one really is getting into the realm of luck rather than judgement.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/madeleine-moments.html.