[From Bruce Nevin (990811.1816 EDT)]
Mary Powers 9908.11--
Bruce Nevin - I get the idea that language is necessary to communicate a
memory, and that somehow this means to you that it is needed also simply to
reconstruct a memory. ???
Not my suggestion.
I have early childhood memories that are almost
hallucinatory in their vividness - which to me implies that they exist way
below the language levels of categorizing or symbolizing - unless I am
telling someone about them. Incidentally, they all primarily concern
taste/smell modalities, with some vision.
Yes, I have such memories too. A red wagon. The look and smell of the bark
of small chokecherries near our home in Wamesett. The smell and feel of
maple seed "wings" when you split them apart (to stick on your nose). The
remembering includes knowing what it is that I am seeing, smelling, etc.,
that is, it seems to be integrated into a matrix of categories for which
words might be (though aren't necessarily) used, and in my case at least
none of them are earlier than 2 or 3 years of age. You didn't say that your
memories were from infancy, only that they were nonverbal. Fred's red
Pegasus memory was certified by his mother as dating from infancy. Is such
a memory reinterpreted by integrating it with this adult matrix of
categories, and that is the process we experience as thinking about it and
telling about it, or has the memory itself been reconstructed so that it is
stored in association with the adult categorizations? I was proposing the
latter as an explanation for why many people (not all) report that they
remember little or nothing from early childhood, and as an explanation for
why such memories are few, selective, jewel-like in their isolation.
Famously, an scent can evoke a memory of place and particular experience.
If a memory of infant experience were evoked, would it be inexplicable to
the person having the memory, not relatable to other experiences that an
adult knows are like it in various ways, but that an infant wouldn't? Fred
knows that he was looking at a big red horse with wings when he was less
than one year old. At that age, did he control the perceptual categories
horse and wing? He now remembers talking about it at age eight, and his
mother's amazement, and her report of how old he must have been when he saw
it, and the visual image of the red horse is part of his present memory of
an 8-year-old's experience. Even when he was eight, he must have thought
about it for some time, perhaps puzzled about the anomaly of it -- horses
aren't bright scarlet, they don't have wings, they don't appear and
disappear or anyway change greatly in brightness while being perfectly
still in a rampant pose--but the puzzlement and the anomaly itself can
arise only when the image itself is associated with other horses, other
wings, etc., whatever is involved in categorization.
For the infant, the image might have been associated with the efforts of
pulling himself up at the side of the crib, but those associations are
probably not part of Fred's current memory, nor of the eight-year-old's
memory. Instead, there are new associations that contextualize it in a more
complex world of perceptions and abilities to control them. Perhaps he
wished he had a Pegasus to fly around on. Now he knows inferentially that
he was an infant when he saw it, but he does not remember any of the other
perceptions the infant was having at the time. Is it the same memory?
Apologies for the short signature. I usually remember. Discussion of the
datestamp was among the group talking about the 2000 conference.
Bruce Nevin