the writing on the wall

In the last few months, I have come across several different pieces discussing the unreliability of human memory, most recently in Jonathan Franzen’s essay, My Father’s Brain (by the way, a fantastic essay):

According to the latest theories, which are based on a wealth of neurological and psychological research in the last few decades, the brain is not an album in which memories are stored discretely like unchanging photographs. A memory is, instead, in the phrase of the psychologist Daniel L. Schachter, a “temporary constellation” of activity—a necessarily approximate excitation of neural circuits that bind a set of the sensory images and semantic data into momentary sensation of a remembered whole. These images and data are seldom the exclusive property of one particular memory.

Hence, I’ve been re-inspired to try and retain my memories through writing (especially given the fragility of my memory in particluar), as Franzen writes later in the essay:

But where Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper.

Yet the inspiration to write has yet to play out in actions. For one thing, I'm a little too overwhelmed to organize my thoughts and put them in writing. For another, I'm unsure of why I value my memories in the first place and feel the need to retain them...Either way, it's interesting to think that by the time I do get around to writing the petty happenings (including those in my head) of this week, my memories will already be inaccurate.