Flashbulb memories

I’ve been wondering on and off for a couple of weeks now about my memory. In particular, I’ve been thinking about how I store information about events that have happened in my life. The scientific name for this type of recall is Episodic Memory.

I used to marvel at one of my friends at school, who had an amazing ability to read and memorise practically every detail in books. I termed this to be photographic memory at the time – in the sort of way that an Aspie would – in other words at that age I would have heard vaguely how some people have ‘photographic memories’, but I would not have read anything about the subject. Which means this was basically guess work on my part based on a loose concept that I didn’t have much actual knowledge of. I do that sort of thing all the time even today as an adult – but I’m getting off track here, so I’ll have to talk about my presenting of guess work as fact another time.

What has really been fascinating me about my memory is just how visual my episodic memory is. Today I’ve stumbled upon this page in Wikipedia, that describes so-called Flashbulb Memory – the way that people will remember some events in their life in a lot of vivid detail. Where were you when you heard about 9/11 or when man first landed on the moon? It seems that these sorts of momentous emotional occasions form very detailed memories in people, and you’ll often be able to describe things in some detail, even many years later.

Where was I on 9/11? I was on a (completely out of character) lad’s holiday in Ibiza. We’d been out for the day, and just as we arrived back at the hotel, one our group got an SMS from his mother saying a plane had hit the WTC and that one of the buildings had fallen down. I was in a hotel corridor when this got read out to me. I remember lots more detail of that evening and the following day. Going to the bar across the road to watch their CNN feed and being amazed that someone caught the moment the second plane hit on video. I saw the tower fall replayed time and again. That night, in the early hours, a drunk man, high on the emotion shouted “Nuclear war!” out of their hotel window. I can hear him, and the echo of his voice to this day. The next day was spent reading newspapers on sun loungers. It was hard to take in what had happened. I was in Ibiza, and had spent the previous week getting very drunk. This kind of sobered me up. Flights were grounded and I was due to go home the following day. What would happen? Would I get home the following day? Anxiety was building up.

I can see all of this.

I see the view from the sun loungers. I can see the newspapers scattered all around us, and the two litre bottles of water we were using to try and rehydrate. I remember the vegetation around the wall-hung TV in the bar. The curve of the wall of the hotel and the noisy nightclub across the way with it’s flashing lights – the neon was light blue in colour.

None of this is surprising – this was one of those world defining flashbulb moments, and I’m sure that a great many people could recall that day in just as much detail as I could.

But it’s not just that day. I remember a visual snapshot of the bar we spent our time in at the airport on the flight out. I remember the boat trip we took and being told to be careful which hand I held my beer in (the wrong hand meant you had to down it – ah the joys of package tours for young people). I even remember many of the sights on the long drunken walk up the bay to our hotel after a night out. Many many aspects of that holiday nearly eight years ago present themselves as quite vivid pictures and videos in my head. But do you know what? I don’t remember is the names of most of those I was on holiday with.

It’s not just that holiday. Lets use my school days as an example. I can see myself churning butter at nursery when I was four. I can see me walking to junior school and swapping football stickers with a friend. I can see his face to this day, but I can’t remember his name. Maybe, just maybe, it was Mark.

I can see the whole route from my house to the junior school as a little real-time video, where I can pan the camera around and zoom in on things at will. I know how many houses there were down the side of the road, where the junctions were, how steep the hills were, how deep the gulley was where the stream went – pretty much everything. I haven’t lived in that house since 1992, and I haven’t walked that school route since 1986, but there it is, still vivid in my head.

I note that a lot of this information is spacial as well as visual. I know how the building blocks of houses and roads and walls all fit together. I don’t remember the names of roads, though.

If I think about it, I can probably do the same visual video trick for most journeys I’ve made repeatedly throughout my life. If I have to give someone directions somewhere then my internal video starts, and I give them the directions by navigating my way visually in my mind’s eye.

Everything that I can think of that I would class as an episodic memory presents itself to me in some form of visual way. The clearer memories are little videos, and those that are fainter are a series of pictures. Occasionally I’ll remember smells and emotions too.

But is this unusual? Clearly I’ve never seen it as such – it’s just how it works for me. The admittedly limited reading material that I’ve digested thus far (three online articles, and a few Wikipedia pages) hasn’t used the word visual at all to describe episodic memory.

So maybe it is unusual.

How about you? Do you see your memories in much the same way as me, or do you experience them in some other way?

Oh – and this, of course, is where my tangent at the top becomes relevant again. Instead of hitting the publish button, I could go away and read up a lot more about memory, and about episodic memory in particular, and then publish, with real facts to back me up.

But I won’t. I’ll leave you with my current decision, based on little evidence that perhaps perceiving my memories in this way is unusual. And doing this says as much about me as telling you how my memory works.

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