When We Are No More

by Abby Smith Rumsey

  CONJECTURE

  Imagination in adults is quite different from what we find in children. It is more akin to conjectural thinking, the ability to predict based on incomplete information. The capacity for conjecture has been observed in children as young as six months old. They can notice correlations and even infer causal patterns. But a child’s model of the world is full of enchantment and driven by desires. They tend to make predictions that invoke supernatural or magical forces and imagine consequences that are physically impossible. They simply do not know enough yet to make reasonable inferences about cause and effect, even though they have strong instincts about causal patterns. Conjecture requires a well-developed understanding of how the world works, whether you are trying to determine when to start cooking the eighteen-pound Thanksgiving turkey if the guests are to sit down to dinner at six, you set the oven at 450 degrees, lower it to 325 after thirty minutes, and when done, let the bird rest for thirty minutes before carving; how much thrust will send a satellite into high altitude orbit around the Earth; or how changes in mortgage rates will affect the real estate market and the rate of inflation.

  Popular ideas about imagination are not deeply informed by biology, which is rather surprising given how routinely biological models are applied to explain other aspects of human nature. Instead, imagination is commonly and vaguely understood as a special kind of intelligence we use to “think outside the box” or “color outside the lines.” This is why there is a brisk business in books, seminars, and technical manuals purporting to impart rules about how to think without rules.

  This is a peculiar approach. Imagination is, as far as we know, unique to humans. But among humans, it is ubiquitous; we all have it. Imagination does not come with an enviable bonus gene that some lucky individuals are born with. It is an intrinsic property of human memory, the foundation of our mental time travel, capacity for problem solving, and conjectural thinking. Scientists hypothesize that certain animals can solve problems in ways that are similar in kind, if not degree, to humans. Chimps can scoop ants out of a hole with a stick and crows can manipulate a wire into a hook with which they coax some tasty treat from a notch in a tree. Orioles shred plastic bags and use the strips to line their nests. These tasks require the transposition of something the animal knows from one realm into a different scenario to produce the desired effect. But the tasks observed by scientists do not require deep temporal depth perception or mental time travel. Only humans build bridges across deep bodies of water and send their fellow men into the void of space to collect rocks from the surface of the moon, because only we can imagine a series of actions, each with specific consequences, each consequence determining the path of the next step, and the series extending over long periods of time. Such long-term planning is impossible without collaboration among many people who engage in mental time travel together.

  Conjecture requires the ability to “combine images and experiences to construct an infinite number of future situations.” When conjectural thinking is used speculatively about what might happen, we call it prediction or forecasting. In fact, it is the same process as forensic detection, only in reverse. In the context of science and engineering, what makes a prediction plausible is its conformity to natural law. As the scientist Richard Feynman said, “Science is imagination in a straitjacket.”

  The brain is a powerful simulator that runs a constant program of “what if?” scenarios based on its memories and associations. As insomniacs know, the mind’s favorite diet consists of counterfactuals—what might have happened but did not. We can anticipate a possible deviation from routine by rerunning scenarios of the past and altering one factor or another to get different outcomes. People like S. cannot engage in conjectural thinking or play with counterfactuals because they do not recognize a routine or pattern as such. Their disrupted memories cannot create patterns of events or causal models. For S., running scenarios from the past could only generate large amounts of recollected events that then become confused with reality. People who suffer from serious trauma may also have trouble with conjecture, though for different reasons. In their cases, they are stuck in the past. No matter how many times they run through a scenario that is somehow connected to the trauma, even remotely, they always end in exactly the same place they began. The trauma has robbed their memory of its innate plasticity. Many therapeutic techniques revisit traumas to open up the memory and modify the feelings it triggers—in essence, to rewrite the meaning of the remembered event by changing the emotions it arouses.

  DISINTEGRATION: THE STORY OF IRIS MURDOCH

  When describing how memory functions to lay audiences, brain scientists will often say that people are their memories. Our memories are not just an accumulation of data points about the past. They are the very fabric of the self, woven of our experiences, endowing us with time, place, personality, and identity in the world. The healthy mind is a master weaver, always at the loom fabricating and mending, trimming and reinforcing memories to make strong patterns of association readily available in a pinch. But in Alzheimer’s, the weaver has gone mad and the moths have taken over. The fabric of memory disintegrates into smaller and smaller shapes and sizes, facts of a life story fall away with them, and at some critical point, so does the sense of cause and effect, of the self’s continuity over time. No patterns are discernible in the tatters and rags. Meaning has disappeared. Events exist outside the context of time and place. The future is unimaginable and the present utterly without purpose. Whatever enters the consciousness of an amnesiac appears as a scrap of the past suddenly unmoored from its natural harbor in a life’s narrative. It can feel frightening or vaguely sinister, floating before the amnesiac unattached, out of context, mocking with its familiarity but useless, empty of meaning.

  Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) was a prolific writer of fiction and philosophy until she succumbed to Alzheimer’s. As she lost her memory, her imagination atrophied and eventually she lost the ability to create the alternative worlds of fiction for which she was celebrated. The range of her interests, the scope of her imagination, her ability to forge connections between the abstract and the concrete had been Murdoch’s singular gifts as a writer and thinker. But disease defies human logic. It was her very acuity of mind—her Iris-ness—that was torn apart by the brain shredder of Alzheimer’s. In Elegy for Iris, the memoir by her husband, John Bayley, we see her disappear bit by bit. Bayley was able to redeem some of the suffering she experienced by writing so lucidly of the Iris he knew in the various states in which he knew her. He provides witness to the unraveling of the strong fabric of her powerful personality and mind, cherished by so many for its consistency and self-awareness.

  Like S., Murdoch lacked temporal depth perception, though for diametrically opposed reasons. She was trapped in the hell of the eternal present with no exit into the future. For better or for worse, such memory damage in humans does not reduce us to dumb beasts who feel no anxiety. Describing Murdoch’s descent into the dank fog of dementia, Bayley reports that “most days are for her a sort of despair, although despair suggests a conscious and positive state, and this is a vacancy which frightens her by its lack of dimensions.” Her face became a “daily pucker of blank anxiety.” Bayley recounts that for Iris, “Time constitutes an anxiety because its conventional shape and progression have gone, leaving only a perpetual query. There are some days when the question ‘When are we leaving?’ never stops, though it is repeated without agitation. Indeed, there can seem something quite peaceful about it, as if it hardly matters when we go, or where, and to stay at home might be preferable in any case.”

  No matter how old we are, our sense of well-being arises directly from our ability to imagine moving forward, into the future, with purpose, meaning, and some measure of choice over our fate. Because the past is the raw matter of imagination, people with Alzheimer’s exhibit acute degradation of the imagination: no past, no future. Studies have shown that “in humans, the ability to imagine future events and consciously re
collect one’s past (episodic memory) is impaired in patients with damage to the region of the brain known as the hippocampus. Furthermore, new imaging studies show that some of the same brain areas are active during both planning and remembering in normal adults.” The organ responsible for key aspects of memory is also responsible for conjecture and, by extension, key aspects of the imagination. But as S. shows, a richly embodied presence of the past does not constitute healthy memory per se.

  We are like shadow puppets, the light of history illuminating our way by casting shadows of the past on our path, creating the necessary sense of familiarity we need to move forward into the unknowable future. Murdoch had no light from the past behind her to illuminate her way forward. She sometimes spoke of herself as “sailing into the darkness.” What could she have meant, other than that the light of her memories, by which we navigate our lives, had been extinguished?

  CULTURAL AMNESIA

  The loss of collective memory is as devastating to cultural identity as the loss of personal memory was to Murdoch. In the wars of the last century, both civil and international, the destruction of cultural memory became a central strategy in subduing civilian populations. It began in the First World War and was taken up and elaborated by the totalitarian regimes that sprang up in its wake. The Bolsheviks emptied libraries, archives, museums, and churches of holdings that might serve to undermine their political goals and stand as mute witness of past times and past beliefs. These expropriations set the stage for the massive theft and destruction of Jewish and Slavic cultures by the Nazis, the Cultural Revolution of Mao’s China, the destruction of cities during the Khmer Rouge’s aggressive policies to effect agrarian socialism, and the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban in 2001. During the War of 1812, when the Americans burned the parliamentary library in the capital of Canada, it was a big fat Yankee thumb jammed in the eye of the British Empire. It was not an assault on the cultural identity of noncombatants. The destruction of the Library of Congress the next year was simply retaliation. But the bombing of the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo in August 1992 by the Serb artillery was not the destruction of a strategic military target. The library housed irreplaceable manuscripts documenting the Bosnian past. Destroying them was a deliberate attempt to wipe out the Bosnians’ right to exist in Bosnia by wiping out the evidence that they had ever existed.

  There is a deeper meaning for collective memory in the lives of S. and of his doctor, Luria. S.’s tenacious and pointillist memory was a painful yet poetic existential protest against the historical amnesia enforced on Soviet citizens. Luria must have known this when he wrote his book in 1965. S. (1886–1958) and Luria (1902–1977) lived through decades of dislocation and profound historical rupture during the thirty years they worked together, a fact never once acknowledged in Luria’s account, published in the Soviet Union.

  This was a curious time in the history of collective memory. The Soviet state apparatus operated under the radically utopian view that the foreordained outcome of human history is to be the triumph of communism and the withering away of the state. In this view, humans do not create their own futures; they are supposed to fulfill a preordained destiny. The ruling Communist Party was creating its own official past as party propagandists set about staging their own version of the inevitable future. The past had to be so arranged that it looked like there was only one possible outcome. They neglected the fact that history does not proceed in straight lines but in pushmi-pullyu fashion. It likes to go off in several different directions at the same time. Party historians were obliged, then, to launch a full-force assault on the past, erasing inconvenient facts from history books, wiping out people who gave credence to those facts, and fabricating alternative pasts that fit better with the story of history moving inexorably toward communism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is why Soviet citizens joked that in their land the future is certain; it is the past that is always changing. This bizarre temporal dislocation was widespread in Central and Eastern Europe during the decades of Communist rule. As a result, many people could feel cut off from real life, just as S. did. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera had the feeling living under communism that “life is elsewhere.”

  With age we are able to rely less on imagination and more on our experience. We would be fools not to. Yet without our imaginations, we quickly end up condemned to living in a world of old men, people who cannot be surprised, cannot accommodate new information, cannot feel sympathy for those who have not learned the same cruel lessons from life, and cannot summon the naïve optimism necessary to survive in a constantly changing world. Given the increasingly long life-spans of people in developed countries, this problem of the mind closing as we age presents serious challenges. How will society respond flexibly, inventively, optimistically to the increasing pace of change if we lose our imagination?

  If for no other reason than this—to keep pace with ourselves as we rush in pursuit of the next new thing—the cultivation of our imaginations becomes more important with each successive stage of our lives. It also grows more important as the pace of technological innovation accelerates and we are called upon to update not just our software and hardware, but our habits and routines. Reducing unstructured playtime and cutting back on music and arts in elementary education is the wrong preparation for children who grow up in such a dynamic environment. Privatizing culture and entertainment and making it inaccessible to all but the well-off will rob adults of precisely what they need most to remain adaptable and emotionally accessible in a technologically advanced society. More than that, as globalization shrinks the world and makes encounters with people from different cultures more frequent, the cultivation of our moral imagination—the ability to see ourselves in another’s shoes—becomes more important, not less. In the present age, we are told that knowledge is cumulative, expert knowledge abounds, and what counts is to add something useful to the sum of useful knowledge. It is hard to argue for the cultivation of the aesthetic imagination by saying that it is useful because it makes us better friends, mates, parents, citizens, workers. But it does precisely these things because it enhances our emotional intelligence. The aesthetic and moral imagination are intrinsic to the human condition. Without them we are less than human.

  If, like S., we fail to form strong memories because we are constantly distracted, we will not find meaning or develop a sense of narrative in our lives. And if we fail to provide stewardship of our collective memory, we will be like Iris Murdoch late in life, unable to understand where we are in the present, without a past, and bereft of the future. The value of imagination goes far beyond foresight, conjecture, or prediction. It slows us down and gives us what Nabokov calls “consciousness without time.” Now is the time to imagine how we will reconstruct our memory systems to accommodate abundance.

  CHAPTER NINE

  MASTERING MEMORY IN THE DIGITAL AGE

  I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty laying his hands upon it … It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

  —SHERLOCK HOLMES, A STUDY IN SCARLET

  MEMORY AT PRESENT

  Socrates worried that writing produces forgetfulness, for it is an “elixir not of memory, but of reminding.” He feared people’s “trust in writing, produced by characters which are not part of themselves” would erode their character and give people the mere “appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore see
m to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with.” On the other hand, without writing (and photography and sound recording), we would be like Adam and Eve in Paradise: every morning waking up with fading memories of yesterday and no way to plan for tomorrow, let alone the day after tomorrow. Contrary to what Socrates held, we have done well enough in cultures rich with reminding devices, relying on durable media and multigenerational institutions to remember for us. We are Nature’s generalists, ready to fit in wherever we can, adaptable because “our brains are the ultimate general-purpose organs, not adapted ‘for’ anything at all” except for learning to make do in whatever environment we find ourselves in. From cuneiform to computer chip, each innovation in knowledge storage has increased our fitness as a species, helped us adapt to new or hostile climates, find ways to feed our growing populations, lengthen our lives by curing or preventing diseases, and free up space in our brain attics for new questions to ponder.