Memory

Picture Credit: Lakshmi Ambady

Memory is a how the brain and body records experiences, retains them and uses them later to guide behaviour, perception and meaning making. It is the ability of the nervous system to store and retrieve information over time. Memory allows a living organism to learn from the past, adapt in the present and predict the future. But memory is not only stored in thoughts alone. It is stored in patterns of movement, sensation, emotion and physiology. The body in this way keeps records even when the mind does not.

Memory is also two parallel worlds. Two libraries residing in the nervous system operating with different rules and different languages. One library speaks in words, stories, timelines and facts. While the other does not use language at all. It communicates through sensations, reflexes, impulses, emotions and body states. Most of us tend to think of memory as something we remember with conscious awareness, but most of the remembering of what the nervous system does never becomes conscious. In truth, our bodies remember much more than our minds do.

The two parallel worlds of our memories are Explicit and Implicit memory. Let’s delve into them. EXPLICIT memory is a library of stories. It is the conscious, time- stamped, story-like archive. You can point to it, describe it and give it a place. Like – “I remember the first time I kissed a boy,” or “I know the capital of Russia, “or “I remember my first day in school.” All such memories have a place assigned somewhere in your past and hence your mind can go there consciously. Explicit memory can also be sub-divided into two types. First is Semantic memory. This has to do with knowledge and facts. Things you know but without necessarily remembering when or how you learned them. Examples are- 2+2=4, the sun rises in the east, or the word “cat” refers to an animal that’s furry and purrs. This is knowledge without context. Then is Episodic memory which is your personal autobiography. Your lived experiences- the sound of your grandfather’s voice, your first day at a job, the taste of mango. This memory is context with time, emotion and place. Explicit memory develops later in childhood because it requires certain brain structures like the hippocampus (limbic brain) to mature enough to organize time and sequence. This is why most people do not recall early infancy or why trauma in early childhood persist without a narrative because explicit memory makes meaning only through language. It needs words to file way into stories.

And now we have the IMPLICIT memory. The devil in our minds. Older, ancient, deeper and primal. The memory that needs no introduction. No language. Its simply unpretentious. Its raw. As real as it can get. It does not care about time. It does not create stories. It stores patterns, not plots. Examples are- how you learned to walk, how you automatically brace when startled, the way your body tightens around toxic people, the ache of loneliness at night, the impulse to run when someone screams. Implicit also has two sub-types. First is Procedural which are skills and habits- riding a bike, typing on a keyboard, tying a shoelace. Once procedural memories are formed, they become automatic. You cannot unremember how to walk or you cannot unrecall how to tie a shoelace. Then is the Emotional and Somatic memory which are responses and states of the body. Fear responses, defensive responses, somatic reflexes, stress physiology, are all stored in the limbic part of the brain, the brain stem, and the body’s sensory motor networks. Simply put, they are neatly stored in your body. And this is why for most people, implicit memory feels like- “this is who I am,” ‘this is just how my body reacts”, and “this feels safe or unsafe to me.” All this feels like identity rather than memory, doesn’t it?

So, what role does memory play in trauma and trauma healing? Explicit memory understands time whereas Implicit does not. If you were humiliated when you were 8 years old, you may know that it was many years ago, but implicitly your body might still brace when you either hear a loud sound or a situation that resembles that humiliation. And this is the root of trauma. For trauma lives in implicit memory like an unfinished experience the nervous system still believes it is still experiencing in the present moment. The body stores this incomplete response or the incomplete experience in muscle tone, posture, breath, vigilance of shutdown. It is less of the cognitive details and more of the reactions of the body as if the conditions are present. Because Implicit memory is non- verbal, non- linear and not conscious, to access it you cannot ask someone to recall it. It is to be observed-

How they breathe

How they fix their eyes or dart

How their shoulders collapse

How the voice shrinks

How the nervous system tolerates proximity

How the feet and toes move

Somatic Experiencing® operates here. Because just talking to explicit memory(cognitive) cannot rewrite implicit(body) patterns. Healing involves integrating the two libraries. When implicit experience becomes explicit, the history of the body along with its patterns become a part of the mind’s story and this why during therapy people say-

I didn’t know I felt so until I really felt it.

I know it in my head but now I know it in my body.

I always reacted this way, but I never understood why.

Insight without somatic change stays intellectual and psychological. And somatic change without conscious awareness stays incomplete. Somatic Experiencing® therapy and EFT ask both the libraries of the mind and body to speak to one another. We suffer not from what we can or cannot recall but more from what our bodies never got to resolve. To heal we need to traverse the gap between these two parallel worlds we carry with us. We need to simply build a bridge and walk it.

“Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!” ― John Irving, American novelist.