Dunes, Memories, and Machines

Sand dunes move. Did you know that? You probably did.

In desert plains, smaller sand dunes can travel substantial distances overnight. The big ones, sometimes hundreds of feet high, will travel more sedately, maybe 50 yards per year or less, but move they do.

They all retain that cresent-shaped form, their backs always to the wind. The dune changes very little during its travels. It keeps its crescent shape and moves in the direction of the horns, the wind always at its back. A dune today is the dune yesterday and tomorrow as it idles across the desert.

But is it really?

The way the dune moves is the wind blows the sand up the shallow slope on the back of the dune, and then, as each sand grain hits the top of the ridge, it cascades down on the inside of the crescent, and so the whole horn-shaped dune moves forward, almost rolling, so to speak.

We are the dunes, bulling forward, horns extended, not one of us the same as the others, but all a similar sameness that fools the eye. Never mind the others - we're not even the same dune/life that we were last year, last month, yesterday, a nanosecond ago. We think we are, and we look the same, but time gusts against our back, adding and subtracting and rolling grains of our selves as we move across the desert of our lives.

Even the seemingly solid bulwark of our memories are effervescent, shifting and thinning smoke with fabulously short half lives, filled and made complete by fabrication and error, till the only reality of our past is that hard nugget at the center of the remembered thing, still evaporating by halves, but always there...until that day when you meet someone you should know or tell a story you lived or hear a story you should feel, and you discover that an entire piece of your life is gone, and gone forever.

What is the half-life of memory? Well, there are memories and memories.

There seem to be three types. The short-term type is the kind that remembers a phone number or an address, or some other non-important block of data that runs out of usefulness almost as soon as it is once used, or even before. These consist of small neurological changes, chemistry really, that simply fade into nonexistence.

Then there is the longer-term memory, those memories burned in for long storage. These are generally things which have to do with survival and planning. That is to say, they are memories that inform our future, that we use to imagine (for lack of a better word) outcomes based on experience. They are recalled frequently, and seem solid. But in fact, each time the memory is called, there are small changes...the memory is rewritten, modified with epigenetic changes that reflect updated information in the "how do I handle this" repertoire, which is the actual purpose of memory.

The third kind of memory is so-called biographical memory. The "here's the shirt I was wearing when I met her" kind of memory. This is actually very related to the long-term memory, except instead of providing simple blocks of data, it provides a narrative, a way to track our lives as conscious beings thru a time stream, past to present, which narrative allows us to see or conceptualize a future.

The thing is that even those memories change every time they are accessed. All memories do - they are "read" and are destroyed in the reading, and are re-written with the new information/changes incorporated into them. They literally change every time they are used, which means that the stuff you remember the most is almost certainly the stuff you remember least accurately.

It's a survival characteristic, useful to allow us to imagine things and futures and outcomes that haven't happened yet based on experience as seen through current new information.

What, you thought your memories were just a way to entertain yourself with nostalgia and old street addresses and bad breakups and the time your mom blamed you unfairly or the best birthdays ever? We are, at the end of it all, creatures subject to the laws of our world - and a major law is that things that are not of survival value are kicked aside.

Memories have survival value or we wouldn't have any, never mind the rich illusion of memory that we indulge ourselves in.

So, what are the longest-term memories of all, the most accurate, the least changeable? They've looked into that - it turns out it's those memories intimately shared by others. For example, if you and your spouse both remember something, that shared memory tends to be more objectively accurate for both of you. In fact, a common observation is that when one long-term partner passes away, the other often fades, at least mentally, fairly rapidly. Almost as if half his mind is gone...

But does that partnership, that intimate sharing have to be human-only?

I wonder whether our machines aren't becoming our partners - all our data, and pictures, and videos, and gigabytes and terabytes, all those shared memories, accessible at a touch, available through a keyboard and earphones...for the first time in history, it is possible for us to have an instantly accesible life narrative fixed in the ones and zeros of data strings. 

Were we wearing a blue shirt that day?

For all of human history, the only record of the answer was contained in your head, or your partner's, or at best, in a few newspaper archives or fading photographs stored here and there which were, for all practical purposes, inaccessible as part of your personal memory gestalt.

Until now.

On two occasions recently, data which seemed designed to pique my interest in these matters arrived in my mailbox.

My e-mail box, of course. I don't get paper anymore.

In my email box were (on a couple of separate occasions) pictures. One was me with a girl, and some other pictures of that same girl taken in the same period. She's dead now. I have written on her extensively, which some of you know. Others don't, although I'm considering making our story more public.  

The other was me by myself, standing in a park. Me before the girl. Me before the devils and bargains and flaying details of life and the knowledge of Adam's Tree had happened to me. 

Me when I wasn't yet who I was to become.

These pictures were from the vicinity of the early 70's. And I hadn't seen any of them since the day they were shot, had no clue nor idea that they existed, no memory of them being taken. And that stream of data, that machine-stored memory, was suddenly there, staring back at me from the monitor.

And I could feel memories built around that time shift and slide and rework themselves to shed the accretions of false memories and the lies of time to fit the new/old information now in front of me.

Memories and patterns, many long-since forgotten and frozen in the tainted amber of the past, moved and shifted. I suddenly smelled her, the heat of her, her perfume, tasted her, broke into glittering powder and tearing glass shards for her, died for her.

I remember the car in the background of the park picture, a dirty-red VW Bug, the green of the day, the colors of the rows of snapdragons over the shoulder of Snake, a friend I hadn't thought of in years, who was taking the picture.

For a split second in both cases I was there, as literally as I know how to express it, as the long-dormant memory chains associated with those microsecond flashes of time re-read in a real-time deja-vu reliving, re-writing, and settling in as new data.

My partner, the machines, had made my memories more accurate.

A disconcerting feeling, but totally understandable, I think, given our current read on how memory works.

I should write a novel about how our machines are our adjunct memories, constantly correcting our memory errors with the facts of the past - will it interfere with our capability to imagine outcomes in the future, kill the flexibility that is the hallmark and purpose of memory? Will our mnemonic memories stop our progress, sandbag our forward movement, that movement which has depended on our ability to shift and modify our memories in order to adjust how we react to situations?

In Our Next Episode: I have no intimate memories of an achingly hot redhead with tattoos. So I shall have my machine partner remember one for me: