As we learned in this module, memory is constructed and is built by the mind, they are not recorded or stored in an archival mind. Our memory is influenced by context, emotion, and our environment.
In the movie “Marjorie Prime,” we are introduced to a woman in her 80s who is being told stories about her past with her deceased husband by a holographic replica of him called Walter Prime. I would consider this movie to be cognitive integration because you have an outside source assisting the main character with her memories and helping her to remember them. Marjorie and Walter Prime feed off of each other’s memories. Walter Prime will tell her a story about her life before her husband passed and brings things back to her memory that she had forgotten, and she will also update his program by telling the holograph something she remembers that he did not know about.
There is a scene in the movie where Walter Prime is telling Marjorie a story about the time Marjorie and Walter (when he was alive) went to the pet store and bought a Black French Poodle, who eventually dies. Shortly after the poodle Toni with an I dies, Tessa Marjorie and Walter’s daughter are born. When Tessa was about three years old, her parents took her to pick out a dog, and she picked out the same black poodle her parents had years before her birth. This dog is named Toni 2, but eventually, the family drops the two and calls her Toni. What strikes me about this story is when Walter Prime tells Marjorie that eventually, memories blurred, and they couldn’t tell the difference between Toni 1 and 2. That, to me is Affect Priming because the dogs are two different animals; however, because of the love that was had for the dog, the emotion blurs the fact that one was owned years earlier and Tessa was not yet born; all they remember is that they dogs are both loved and in their memories have somehow become one. Marjorie remembers one fact, Toni 2 loved the ocean no matter how much it irritated her to have sand in her fur.
Tessa was not very fond of the holograph that played on the memories of her parents and looked like her father. In one scene, she tells her husband that memories are not sedimentary layers in the brain that have to be dug out as he suggests but that they are, according to William James, remembered from the last time you remembered the memory and not the exact moment itself. This is like what we are taught in this module memories can change and still be accurate.
In Star Trek’s “Measure of a Man,” Data is requested to be disassembled so he can be studied for a research project about memory, and he refuses. Data remembers the man who wants to take him apart as Commander Bruce, who was against Data being on the enterprise because he was not part of what makes a sentient being he is an android. This episode is about cognitive offloading, where the Commander wants to test the theory that memory can be downloaded and contained in a separate brain. Data tells the commander that memories have an essence, and he does not believe they can survive his experiment or procedure.
Majorie Prime and Star Trek both show how each regards memory. Some believe that every time you access memory, it is not the memory itself but a recreation of the last time you remembered it, making it a copy of the memory itself. Others believe that memories can be downloaded or dug out when an individual means to access them on purpose or by accident. The question arises in my mind, though, when an individual suppresses a memory, is it not buried deep within their mind? I only ask this question because I watched an episode of NCIS today, and in one of the episodes, a suspect buried a tragic memory, and it took a lot to get her to remember the memory. What then causes the mind to suppress tragic things that occur?
4 thoughts on “That’s Not the Way, I Remember it!!”
Hey Christina,
I definitely agree that in the movie, Marjorie Prime, we see the use of cognitive integration because these holograms are used to help people remember things. However, I would argue that as the movie continued, these holograms were eventually used not to help remember but to not forget. Here is more of the use of cognitive offloading because Tess utilized the hologram to store memories of her mother. She never forgot these memories, but I feel like she used the hologram to make sure she remembered her mother exactly the way she was therefore storing her memories of her. Really as the movie progressed, I feel like the holograms showed how much we really lean on memory.
Alesha Gutierrez
Hi Alesha,
I love your point about how the Primes help people remember, but not forget. We might think about how that relates to our own experiences with keepsakes or other aspects of our environments that we offload our cognition onto. On the other hand, because of Marjorie’s Alzheimer’s, the altered version of the past that she tells Walter Prime might help her to forget what actually happened.
Jessica Hautsch
Hello,
I think its very interesting how you mentioned affected priming of the memory of the dogs. I think it speaks on how all of us views memories. Most of the time we aren’t left with our experiences, rather the feeling of the experiences that linger. Remembering the memory is such a strange but accurate description of recalling events that is shown throughout the first film. Although Marjorie’s retelling is different and she tells many versions of it, it is still real to her and a very real memory.
amyint
Hi Christina,
Yes! It is tempting to think of our memory as an archive, but that’s not actually how it works. Our memories are constructed, not retrieved. And, as your post suggests, these memories are not constructed within an abstracted or isolated mind, but in interactions with our physical and social environments. We remember with and through the world around us. I really like your discussion of Toni One and Toni Two. What is super interesting is how Damien is also integrated into that memory. If you recall, when Marjorie first tells the story, she uses the word “hair” instead of “fur.” This is because she is integrating Damien, who also loved the beach, into the memory.
At the end of your post, you include an interesting reference to NCIS. We didn’t have time to think about repressed memories, but this also reminds me of some of the problems with recovering these repressed memories. In fact, in the 1980s, all of these children came forward with supposedly repressed memories of Satanic memories that they had recovered through theory. The catch? These children were remembering things they had actually never experienced; their minds had constructed the memory at the suggestion of the therapist.
Jessica Hautsch