Oddly Influenced

Welcome to Oddly Influenced, a podcast for people who want to apply ideas from *outside* software *to* software. Episode 51: A nugget about constructed memories

Here’s an anecdote from Suzi Travis, a neuroscientist / data scientist:

“In Australia, we drive on the left side of the road, with the steering wheel on the right side of the car. That’s just the way we do things down here.

“But apart from one embarrassing moment at LAX where I tried to get into the driver’s side of my taxi service (much to the driver’s amusement), the transition to driving on the right side of the road was surprisingly smooth.

“For ten years, I navigated the infamous 405 and 101 freeways, joining the daily crawl that is LA traffic.

“I have wonderful memories of living in the US.

“But those memories are wrong.

“Even though I spent countless hours on those California roads and highways, and despite knowing that I must have been driving on the right side of the road while I lived there — I cannot recall it that way. When I recall any memory of driving on American roads, those memories stubbornly have me driving on the left side of the road, the steering wheel on the right side of the car.”

That’s weird, I thought, until I started examining my memories of driving in Ireland and the UK. Once, out in the Irish countryside, I turned right, but instead of going into the left-hand lane as I should have, I turned more sharply into the right-hand lane, only to realize there was a car coming straight toward me. I’d looked both ways before the turn, and had noticed the car, but disregarded it, “knowing” that it would necessarily be in the lane beside the one I was turning into and thus of no importance. So… I got a shock. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t have much of a visual memory, but I have a distinct mental image of that car coming at me. In it, I’m seated on the left-hand side of the car. I can see the oncoming car above the steering wheel in front of me, in spite of the fact it was an Irish rental car and the steering wheel was on the right, and that’s where I was too. Yet the memory of being on the left remains.

This happens, Travis supposes, because the brain *constructs* memories rather than retrieves them. Remember that Lisa Feldman Barrett likes to think of the brain as discovering and storing statistical regularities in experience. One such regularity is what it looks like to sit behind the steering wheel of a car. Another is what a car looks like head on. Another is what a narrowish country road through vegetation looks like. My visual memory of that incident is plausibly from the brain mixing-and-matching those templates to invent a good-enough image when I asked it for that memory.

In the first version of that memory, the countryside was pretty indistinct. As I was writing this script, I found myself wondering if that road had a low stone wall on the side, of the sort you’ll find in Ireland and the USA’s New England, but definitely not where I grew up. (Let’s put it this way: a kid in my neighborhood could say “Let’s meet at the rock,” and everyone would know what he meant because there was only one naturally occurring rock within walking distance.) Now that I’m thinking about stone walls, my brain has helpfully added one into the memory. (It’s the one nearest my lane – the other side of the road is still indistinct and ambiguous and abstract.) Was the wall really there? Who knows? Does it matter?

Why do I mention this? I started this series by talking about metaphors. I asserted that metaphors are about mappings between high-ish-level concepts, like equating Love to a Journey or a Paint Brush to a Pump.

Since then, I’ve been chipping away at the notion that concepts are these simple, unified, coherent, self-consistent ideas, ones with necessary and sufficient conditions, ones that pick out distinctions inherent in the world out there. Rather, I’m trying to present concepts as *constructions* that the brain makes over time, based on particular experiences, chosen not so much because of fidelity to the outside world but more because, hey, whatever works is worth hanging onto.

The virus I mean to plant in your mind is that if memories aren’t stored as wholes, but rather constructed as needed, might concepts like “Love” or “Elegance” or “Journey” have similar complexity? That is, when we use those concepts while solving a problem or attempting an understanding, are we building the concept-in-use on the fly, from pieces, rather than accessing an already-assembled whole?

≤ short music ≥

Next, I’ll look briefly at Lisa Feldman Barrett’s ideas that emotions like “anger” aren’t fundamentally different than concepts like “Journey.”

After that, I hope to put everything together into a theory of conversation and metaphor-in-practice that might prove useful in your daily life.

Thank you for listening.