Free Janus by Arthur Koestler Page A

mnemic residues of books
one has read and whole chapters of one's own life-story. The original
experience has been stripped of detail, skeletonized, reduced to a
colourless abstract before being confined to the memory store. The nature
of that store is still a complete mystery in brain-research, but it is
obvious that if stored knowledge and experience are to be retrievable (for
otherwise they would be useless), they must be ordered according to the
hierarchic principle -- like a thesaurus or a library subject-catalogue,
with headings and sub-headings but also with a wealth of cross-references
to assist the process of retrieval (the former representing arborization,
the latter the reticulation of the hierarchic structure). If we pursue
for a moment the metaphor of a library representing our memory stores, we
arrive at rather depressing conclusions. Quite apart from the countless
volumes that are left to rot away or fall to dust, there is a hierarchy
of librarians at work who ruthlessly condense long texts into short
abstracts and then make abstracts of the abstracts.
     
     
This process of sifting and abstracting actually starts long before a
lived experience is confined to the memory store. At every relay station
in the perceptual hierarchy through which the sensory input must pass
before being admitted to consciousness it is analysed, classified and
stripped of irrelevant detail.* This enables us to recognize the letter R
in an almost illegible scrawl as 'the same thing' as a huge printed R in a
newspaper headline, by a sophisticated scanning process which disregards
all details and abstracts only the basic geometrical design -- the
'R-ness' of the R -- as worth signalling to higher quarters. This signal
can now be transmitted in a simple code, like a message in Morse, which
contains all the relevant information -- 'it's an R' -- in a condensed,
skeletonized form; but the wealth of calligraphic detail is of course
irretrievably lost, as the inflections of the human voice are lost in the
Morse message. The wistful remark 'I have a memory like a sieve may be
derived from an intuitive grasp of these filtering devices which operate
all along the input channels and storage channels of the nervous system.
     
* The psychologist distinguishes on the lower levels of the hierarchy
     lateral inhibition, habituation, and efferent control of the
     receptors; on the higher levels the mechanisms responsible for
     the visual and auditory constancy phenomena, and the scanning and
     filtering devices that account for pattern recognition and enable
     us to abstract universals.
     
Yet even the chosen few among the multitude of potential stimuli incessantly
bombarding our receptor organs which have successfully passed all these
selective filters and have attained the status of consciously perceived
events, must submit, as we have seen, to further rigorous stripping
procedures before being admitted to the permanent memory store; and as
time passes, they will suffer further decay. Memory is a prize example
of the law of diminishing returns.
     
     
This retrospective impoverishment of lived experience is unavoidable;
'abstractive memory implies the sacrifice of particulars. If, instead
of abstracting generalized concepts, like 'R' or 'tree' or 'dog', our
memories consisted of a collection of all our particular experiences
of R's and trees and dogs encountered in the past -- a storehouse of
lantern slides and tape -- recordings -- it would be a chaotic jumble,
completely useless for mental guidance, for we would never be able
to identify an R or understand a spoken sentence. Without hierarchic
order and classification, memory would be bedlam (or the parroting of
sequences learned by rote, and reinforced by conditioning, which is the
behaviourist's model -- or caricature -- for remembering).
     
     
To say it again: the loss of particulars in abstractive memory is
unavoidable. Fortunately this is not the whole story, for there are
several