If any metaphor is going to capture memory, then is more like a compost heap in a constant state of reorganization.27 Just like the garden refuse that you put on the compost heap, experiences are laid down with the most recent still retaining much detail and structure but, with time, they eventually breakdown and become mixed in and integrated with the rest of our experiences. Some events stand out and take a long time to decompose but they are the rare instances. The remainder becomes a mush. When it comes to memory, Dan Simons reminds us that, ‘People tend to place greater faith in the accuracy, completeness and vividness of their memories than they probably should.’28
Our self illusion is so interwoven with personal memories that when we recall an event, we believe we are retrieving a reliable episode from our history like opening a photograph album and examining a snapshot in time. If we then discover the episode never really happened, then our whole self is called into question. But that’s only because we are so committed to the illusion that our self is a reliable story in the first place.
Not Total Recall
In Hollywood’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s brilliant story, ‘We can remember it for you wholesale’,29 Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the role of Douglas Quaid, a freedom-fighter on a Mars colony who has had the false memories of a construction worker on Earth implanted into his brain. The movie adaptation, Total Recall,30 is a roller coaster ride with a plot full of twists and turns. What makes it relevant to the discussion of self is that the identity of Quaid changes as the content of his memory is altered. This is why Elizabeth Loftus was so appalled to discover that she held false memories. It means that we are not necessarily who we think we are. Our identity is the sum of our memories, but it turns out that memories are fluid, modified by context and sometimes simply confabulated. This means we cannot trust them and our sense of self is compromised. Note how this leaves us with a glaring paradox – without a sense of self, memories have no meaning, and yet the self is a product of our memories.
This may be why there is no memory of the infantile self. As an infant we did not have the capacity to integrate our experiences into meaningful stories. We did not have world knowledge. Most important, we did not have an idea of who we were. We did not have an initial sense of self to integrate our experiences. That requires world experience and, in particular, learning from those about us who spend so much time in our company. Somewhere around two years, children start to have conversations with parents about past events. Kids whose parents spend a lot of time talking to them and discussing past events when they were between their second and fourth birthday had much better memories about their lives when they were between twelve and thirteen years old. It is not simply language, but the way parents discuss events with their children. By scaffolding their children’s early experiences the kids were able to organize their experiences into a meaningful story. This is because it is easier to remember stories that relate to us when we become a main character. The adults had the experience and the context to organize the events into a coherence that made sense to the child, which lead to better encoding and storage in their brains.31 One thing we know from decades of psychological research is that meaning and context improves memory.
This is why memory researcher Mark Howe argues that babies who fail the Gallup mirror test lack a sense of self, and so their memories are disconnected events – impressions that do not seem to make sense in any meaningful way.32 In order for memories to possess meaning, they have to be embedded within the self. However, Philippe Rochat, who has made a lifetime study of self development, argues that the mirror test in humans is actually a measure of being self-conscious about how one looks to others.33 He reasons that, at eighteen months, infants are not bothered with what they look like to others and so are not particularly concerned if they have a red smudge on their nose. Somewhere around the second year, children are more concerned with their appearance and how they look to others.
This self-conscious account would explain the surprising finding that mirror self-recognition with the rouge test is not universal. In one study of Kenyan children between two and seven years of age, Rochat found that only two out of 104 children removed a sticker, which previously had been surreptitiously placed on their forehead, when they looked in a mirror. Why? It cannot be that they do not have self-recognition in a mirror. They have seen and groomed themselves plenty of times in front of a mirror. Rather, Rochat argues that, unlike their American counterparts, Kenyan children are not sure what to do in this unusual situation. They don’t know whether they should remove a sticker from their forehead that must have been placed there by the strange Western scientist visiting the village.
This is a fascinating twist on Gallup’s self-recognition interpretation. It may be that passing the mirror test is not necessarily a measure of self-recognition, but rather a measure of embarrassment in the context of others. The mirror test reveals the point at which you become more concerned by what others must be thinking about you. However, before you can be self-conscious, you must first appreciate that others are thinking about you. You need to have a concept of what you are in order to compare that self with the expectation of others. And before you can have that expectation, you need to understand what is on their mind.
Theory of Mind
If we are worried about what others think of us then it stands to reason that we need to understand what’s going on in other peoples’ minds. We need to figure out what they are thinking and for that we need to develop a ‘theory of mind’. This term was originally coined by David Premack who wanted to know if chimpanzees understood that others had thoughts and what those thoughts might be.34
Most of us assume that people do things because they want to. In other words, they have thoughts about goals and intentions that motivate their actions. Again, this is something that is so familiar that we take it for granted when it comes to humans, but there is good evidence that this capacity takes time to develop and may not be shared with all members of the animal kingdom.
Animals can pay attention to humans and their actions, but it is not clear that they understand that others possess minds that support those actions. Animals do not engage with their human keepers in social behaviours such as imitation and copying. And yet, we are inclined to attribute sophisticated mental states to animals. Do you remember the female gorilla, Binti, which saved the little boy who fell into her enclosure at a zoo near Chicago back in1996? We watched in amazement as this wild animal gently picked up the limp body of the three-year-old boy and carried him to the door where the paramedics could attend to him. The world’s press was quick to attribute empathy and care to Binti, but what they did not know was that she had been trained by her keepers to bring a doll to them in anticipation of her possible pregnancy.35
Even our closest primate cousin, the chimpanzee, can be a distant relative when observed in the wild. Jane Goodall, the famous primatologist, observed a chimpanzee named Passion who repeatedly kidnapped the babies of other mothers and, with the help of her own children, consumed them. Despite our inclination to anthropomorphism – the attribution of human qualities to non-humans – we are unique as a species in our capacity to formulate the complex mental states of others that serve as our bread and butter in daily social interactions.