In humans, Memory is not possible without an image. This is, so far, what I have come to, by reading both the facts in scientific journals, and the speculations of some philosophers and thinkers.
In 2006, a book was published by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, entitled In Search of Memory. This is a lengthy account of a singular man’s experience of life in parallel to the development of contemporary neuroscience, and his specific interest in the workings of the brain in relation to experience and its posthumous retrieval. Fascinating.
Kandel and his fellow researchers and scientists operated by trial and error for decades, driven by strong intuition and candles in the dark, experimenting on the bodies of sewagy fauna from rats, to snails, and the giant neurons of squid.
From all this, it was found that memory derives from changes in the synapses of a neural circuit: neurons have arms that either receive or transmit chemical information to one another, and the space between their palms is called a synapse. What we perceive as short term memory stems from functional changes within this system, whereas long term memory is the result of radical and irreversible structural changes (bar accidents or degenerative processes). The events that we live transform how our neural networks act, but also, and most surprisingly, the material, anatomical shape of our brain.
In short term memory, the chemical particles associated with information called neurotransmitters create energy potential within the neurons involved in a neural circuit, something similar to a magnetic field. This lasts only a few minutes in the case of a rat’s uterine wall cells, and more or less for the length of the necessity of that memory in us larger mammals. That’s why if I cannot remember what I had for breakfast on the 12 of June in 1994, there will be no way of retrieving this information unless I draw it by association from any other long term memory I have of that day.
In 70’s London, it was discovered that the hippocampus of a rat registers information not about a single sensory modality, sight, sound, touch or pain – but about the space surrounding it. It’s a modality that depends on information from several senses that are then organised into a map. What the brain stores of an event is just a core memory (an object, a frame, or a representation) from which we can then reconstruct the emotional landscape, atmosphere, details in a map of connections – by chemically adding and subtracting to re-enact the exact neural pathway corresponding to what was experienced at that time.
The brain can’t store time, but it allows to access it.
Parallel to this introduction to Kandel’s work, I’d like to consider Aristotle’s On Memory and Reminiscence. Aristotle wondered if we remember things themselves, or the impression they make on us. In the first case, how can we remember a thing if it is absent at the moment of recollection, and in the second case the question is practically the same, how can we remember or relive that impression without the object that produced it? In year 350 B.C.E. he arrived to the conclusion that memory is ‘the state of presentation, related as a likeness to that of which is a presentation’, and ‘ it is a function of the primary faculty of sense-perception, i.e. of that faculty whereby we perceive time.’ No underground experiments, and a similar conclusion to that of the scientists in London’s rat laboratory just a few decades away.
I am interested in the quality of this entity: the rat’s map, Aristotle’s thing, the core memory from which a pattern of experience can be revived.
Like Aristotle, Giorgio Agamben, in the essay Nymphs, describes the mnemonic image as charged of an energy that is able to move and upset the body. In the first section he concentrates on Domenico da Piacenza, who in the 15th Century wrote a treatise about contemporary dance, and presents a concept that can be useful in this context. Da Piacenza enumerated the fundamental elements of the art of dance, 1) measure, 2) memory, 3) agility, 4) manner, 5) pace and 6) fantasmata – an untranslatable term whose Latin origin is the equivalent to ghost. To describe this sixth element, he uses the metaphor of an eagle scanning for its prey, that looks perfectly immobile in the sky, yet exercising at the same time the elements of measure (of its movement), memory (of its aim), agility and manner, and the pace (of its wing-strokes). This fantasmata is for Domenico da Piacenza the one image captured between two movements that via its internal tension can evoke the whole choreography.
Italian writer Italo Calvino, in his considerations on style in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, also enumerates six principles, this time in relation to writing, that can be made to mirror in this case Domenico da Piacenza’s fundaments of dance: Calvino calls them 1) lightness, 2) quickness, 3) exactitude, 4) visibility, 5) multiplicity and 6) consistency.
In essence, with no scientific evidence if not my own hunch derived from the above, I think that the elements of style enunciated by Domenico da Piacenza and Calvino for their respective disciplines, especially consolidated in the ghost-like attributes of the fantasmata and Calvino’s correspondent of lightness, can be adopted to define and recognise a mnemonic image.
Both lightness and fantasmata are strategies to condense a given event or sequence into something that will act as a summary, avoiding being descriptive.
Description as a literary process, in its preciseness involves an extended account of time and space, the length and richness of the text proportionate to its accuracy.
The mnemonic image, and the ideal that Calvino and Domenico da Piacenza try to pursue, on the contrary are agile compositions. If one tries to remember all the films one has ever seen, it is not surprising and by far easier that we conserve maybe just a clue image for each of them, in which the narration and the spatial elements are condensed. In a second stage, one can reconstruct the entire plot from it.
The essential element that relates the mnemonic image to the fantasmata and to Calvino’s writing is communication – the necessity to produce a functional informational unit that can be accessed and utilised with ease, moulded on memory, direct enough to make an impact: like in the case of advertisement images, that function through evocation and suggestion, aspiring to the exactitude of the mnemonic neural mazes. Biological mnemonic dynamics provide a toolkit for concise information transmission. As we become living databases of images, memory is ultimately the way we perceive and retain the world, a collection of potential mnemonic images.
Written for an exhibition catalogue for artist David Ferrando Giraut, 2010.
MODERN NATURE 