Memories are made of this

Human memory, it turns out, is less like a meticulous archival librarian and more like a distracted squirrel with access to a filing cabinet and cocaine. Which is why you can recall with crystalline precision the exact pattern of wallpaper in a dentist’s office you visited once in 2009, yet cannot for the life of you clearly remember a single coherent moment from your own wedding, graduation or the birth of a child you love very much.

Cognitive scientists will tell you this is because memory encodes emotion, novelty and meaning rather than Importance™ — but this explanation, while correct, fails to capture the sheer insult of the thing. Because culturally speaking, we are taught that memory is supposed to function like a respectful employee: show up for the Big Days, clock in during Milestones, and at the very least remember where you were when Something Significant Happened. Instead, memory punches out early and spends its energy preserving the exact phrasing of an offhand remark a stranger made that ruined your entire personality for six years.

Take, for example, the way you can remember — without effort, without strain — that mortifying Charlie Brown moment in Grade 3 when you waved back at the little red-haired girl who was not, in fact, waving at you. AAUGH! This memory is preserved in what neuroscientists call “full IMAX surround sound,” complete with slow-motion replay, Dolby embarrassment and a director’s commentary track helpfully asking, Why are you like this, you big doofus? Meanwhile, your high school graduation is stored as a vague JPEG labelled “crowd + robes + hot.”

This is not because the wave incident was important. It was not. It had no bearing on your life trajectory, your career or the continued existence of the species. And yet your brain treated it like a crucial piece of evidence in the case against you as a competent human being. This is because the brain is deeply invested in protecting you from future embarrassment, even if that means subjecting you to nightly flashbacks like a low-budget war veteran whose war was socially insignificant but spiritually devastating.

Major life events, on the other hand, suffer from a phenomenon best described as Expectation Saturation. Weddings, for instance, arrive bloated with meaning before they even happen. By the time the day itself rolls around, your brain is already exhausted from six months of thinking, planning, worrying, performing and wondering whether everyone is judging you (they are). As a result, the actual event is experienced not directly but through a haze of logistics and self-consciousness, like watching your own life through a livestream with bad Wi-Fi.

Small moments, however — those slip past your brain’s defences. The smell of a madeleine dipped in tea. A sentence. The way light hit a countertop at 4:17 p.m. on a Tuesday. You are relaxed. You are unguarded. You are not thinking, This will be important. And so your brain, delighted by the lack of pressure and in a casual search of lost time, stamps it in permanent ink.

There is also the issue of replay. Big events are often considered “complete” and shelved, like a box labelled DONE, DO NOT OPEN. Small moments get reopened constantly. You replay them in the shower, in traffic, at 2 a.m. when your body decides now is the time to solve every bloody unsolvable thing. Each replay strengthens the memory, until the event grows far beyond its original size, like a snowball that started as “minor awkwardness” and is now “core identity feature.”

What this suggests — uncomfortably — is that memory is not concerned with meaning as we define it, but with meaning as you felt it in your nervous system, privately, embarrassingly and often without witnesses. Memory is less a historian and more a gossip columnist for your inner life, keeping detailed notes on every time you felt exposed, surprised, delighted or briefly seen. It also means that a hell of a lot of stuff we remember, or think we remember, didn’t happen quite the way we remember it.

Which is why repeated studies on eye-witness testimony have demonstrated that while such first-person accounts are highly persuasive (to judges, juries and, above all, to the witnesses themselves), it is often unreliable because our memories are so woefully fallible and easily influenced by such factors as biases and stress. The proof is in the ever-expanding roster of DNA exonerations of the wrongfully convicted, sometimes after the innocent have spent decades in jail.

In the U.S., where more than 200 prisoners on death row have been proven innocent since 1973 according to data from the Death Penalty Information Centre (and where another 21 others who were likely innocent were put to death), 47 people were executed last year as the Supreme Court became more active in blocking stays. That was the highest number in 16 years, with Florida (of course Florida) leading the way with 19 executions. There were about 25 executions in the whole country the year before … something to remember as right-leaning red states resume or speed up executions in a country where a bloodthirsty president has accused leading Democrats of “seditious behaviour, punishable by death” for urging the military to obey the law.

But whoa. As in that flashback you occasionally have of standing in front of your school locker in Grade 9 or seeing the faces of people on a passing bus in 1983, I’ve digressed.

When you forget the big moments and remember the small ones, it is not because you are broken. It is because your brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do: preserve the texture of being alive, not the bullet points. It is saving the moments where you were most human — confused, vulnerable, distracted, ridiculous — while politely discarding the ceremonial highlights reel.

This is, admittedly, not great for nostalgia slideshows. But it does explain why the memory that follows you to the grave will not be your wedding vows, but the time you confidently pushed on a shopping mall door that said PULL.