Memory and Amnesia

The importance of understanding memory includes investigating the flipside of the process, or ways the mind creates and utilizes amnesia. Both are active processes of consciousness that move in directions that are useful given different states and different situations.

In the Western world, memory has come to mean the retention and recall of past mental experiences. These experiences may or may not conform to past physical or interactive events, while they may have been formed in response to such external realities. We have come to understand more lately about the vagaries of memory, and how the storage, encoding, and even drawing up of mental recall affect its contents. The idea of a representational or eidetic memory that corresponds to external detail, for instance, in its use in legal witness, has fallen away.

The idea of memory in the Buddhist world has always had a broader base of meaning. One Sanskrit word, smrti, has been translated as both memory and mindfulness. This implies not just remembering what, but remembering that, remembering that the mind is working, remembering that the mind’s working can be observed. This brings memory into a realm of soteriology. The skill of remembering that this existence is a momentary amalgamation is a base of insight and corrective interaction with life. Mindfulness is crucial to Buddhist development and healing.

Because of this broader base of understanding, Buddhist psychology is not terribly concerned with the Western idea of recall. This psychological function is subsumed more in the idea of perception, which is an infinitesimal step in the interaction of consciousness with objects of experience. In the stages of this interaction, an object impinges into a kind of stream of consciousness and tiny degrees of reactivity lead to an adverting relationship towards the bits of stimuli that are encountered. This kind of orientation includes perception which is described as making a mark on the object, denoting it in the slightest way. It is these marks that make recall possible, and it is these marks, not the original stimulus, that are drawn back up in later mental streams.

How are such marks of recognition stored? This is a mysterious process and it is clear that no particular unitary container has been found. It is possible that the marks reverberate between object and consciousness and leave a reciprocal subtle impact on the psychophysical being involved. Through body and mind, traces of reactivity are left, and in some instances and to some degree, traces of reactivity can possibly be felt from other beings.

The process of conscious perception, with its built-in grains of bias, can build up to human problems on every scale, from habitual misinterpretations in conversation to cultural storage of hate and violence. Part of the mindfulness process dismantles the marks of perception, allowing an awareness that is pure and, if not unformulated, aware of the effects of formulation. This might be seen as a microscopic and purposeful, almost homeopathic, dose of amnesia to clear experience.

But amnesia is more than unmarking and can include false marking. In this sense, it becomes what Buddhism calls ignorance or delusion, and it is a dangerous mental process. In this case, aspects of encountered reality that are aversive and rejectable, for a wide variety of reasons, are dismissed. The realms of defense that Anna Freud described are these same processes. We humans may simply unmark something and deny its existence; we may mark it in a bimodal way and split reality; we may mark it backwards in a mirror and create a reaction formation where we behave in exactly the opposite manner as our feelings would indicate.

Memory as mindfulness keeps an eye on process. Mindfulness can observe how we judge according to a self that is archaic, stylized, overblown, or unnecessary. In this way, it abets a type of forgetting of baggage that is encumbering. This might be an expansion of what Colette Cox meant when she stated, “Mindfulness can be cultivated either by fastening (panidhaya) or not fastening the mind (1).”

The circular reality is that remembering we are constructing our worlds as we move through them helps us forget to erase aspects of the world that are objectionable to the mind. The unmarked world is more deeply experienced and provides mulch for creativity in a way that habit collections of mental impressions do not allow. Experience may be more fully and usefully incorporated when we stay deeply aware, not when we memorize the signs.