Largely formed in childhood, our mind structure usually mirrors that of our parents, mentors, or perhaps other influential adults. In childhood, we absorb all the influences from the people and world around us like a sponge, without thinking about them. Time passes, but memories remain. When we revisit these memories, the strongest ones are those to which we bring associative assumptions, which may be sensory or psychological.
That’s just how our world works. Our brain accepts input and forms associative thoughts around the memory, and these become linked to our unbreakable perceptions embedded in that recollection.
Our childhood memories often weave an enhanced or fictional tale of time passing. This raises questions about the reliability of memory, the power of associative thinking, and believing assumptions to be reality.
1. Our own fondest or most horrific memories: Recall a memory that resonates strongly with you. Is it a sense of place? Or of a person? Perhaps your child as a baby? A house where you lived? Now, think carefully about what else you associate with that memory. Maybe it’s the smell of fresh-baked bread, a garden full of flowers, the way sunlight from the stained-glass window played on the dark wood staircase, the scent of rotting seaweed, a musical performance, your baby’s first smile, or your dying parent’s blessing. What do memories of births, death, divorce, or grave illness carry with them?
2. Memory and Associative Thinking: In each memory, discernible subconscious processes shape your associative thinking. Subtle forces influence how these memories—and even a place, person, or performance that you hold dear—are never isolated. Instead, they are impacted by many other mind-structure inputs.
The Complexity of Memory
3. Associative thinking is never just a reflection in the mirror: Many authors—fiction and nonfiction writers, filmmakers, even those who produce documentaries—attempt to record memories with the goal of representing reality. However, they often create a mere representation of reality. They may not even be aware of doing so, but they work through a lens of melancholy, longing, happiness, or even historical mistakes and misapprehensions. If you watch a home movie or look at photographs, your reaction, and that of others, is rarely just, “Oh, that’s Jake or Jane… next…” Instead, it’s more like, “Oh, that’s Jake, remember when he…?” Or, “Oh, he never did that, he did this…” or something similar.
4. One mind structure that may be more real, reliable, and solid—a sense of place: A place is real, at least in the physical sense. We can see a place, touch it, taste substances from it, smell its scents, and hear its sounds. But can we carry those senses of place with us across years and great distances? Is place a reliable assumption of memory?
Many authors write about a sense of place. If a writer is a conservationist, their depiction—precise and lovingly detailed, like a petit-point tapestry—may serve a purpose: environmentalism or conservation. If a filmmaker makes a film about their childhood on a remote farm, where their father committed suicide and a brother died, they try to share the truth of their remembered childhood. But inevitably, the film will carry an undercurrent of loss and be marked by sadness.
The truth is that time is never lost in the past, but always carried alive in memory. There, events and emotions burn as brightly as they did in their original manifestation. And we can recall what we genuinely believe to be real. But we still have to ask ourselves: Is that unalloyed reality? Perhaps the truth is only present in each passing moment as it happens.
