Thinking About Memory

Memory is a tricky thing.  Few of us have perfect recall, and many of us have deeply flawed memories at the best of time.  Our ability to recall past events changes as we age, and brain injuries, illness, medical intervention, and substances have an impact on how our brain stores and retrieves memories.  I, for instance, am terrible at remembering names and rarely remember small talk.  I often need prompting in social situations, because I remember faces far better than anything else.  (So, if I don't introduce you to someone, it's because I either can't remember your name, or the other person's.)  Yet my early childhood memory is phenomenal, as is my memory of events.  I can remember trivial knowledge, which is great for Quiz night down at the pub, but not so great when I'm trying to remember the little details I need to know for the work I do.  Good thing I keep excellent reference files, eh?

I work with the memories of others.  It's the nature of working with the history of the recent past.  The work I do is heavily infused with oral history and lived experience, but I receive that history second-hand.  For many of the veterans with whom I've worked, the memories of their Second World War are remarkable in their clarity and vividness.  For each and every one I've interviewed, their experience is Truth.  Some will say that they don't remember all the details, some will offer a disclaimer that they "may be wrong, but this is how [they] remember it."  When two veterans recall the same story, they often remember it differently.  Everyone brings their own biases to their experience, too, at the time and again when the event is remembered.  This can significantly alter how something is perceived.  Occasionally, their stories conflict in names, dates, or the sequence of events, but to each, theirs is True.  Yet they can't both be accurate.  Or can they?

How do I, as a curator and historian, parse these divergent oral histories, knowing that our unsteady, inconstant memory makes them potentially unreliable? 

I have been thinking pretty hard about these questions lately. I don't yet have an answer good enough to share, but I am reading about memory and oral history when I have free time. If I am going to progress with that book about Canadians on radar during WWII, I need to figure out how to balance the authority of History with the authenticity of lived experience.