Your Creative Memory
by Alan Pritt
If you’ve been searching for information on creative memory, I presume you were looking for one of two things. Either you want to know how to memorise boring things in creative ways, or you want to use your memory as a source of your own creations. Well the fascinating thing is both these topics are interrelated in such a way that training one will ultimately improve the other!
How many times have you heard an aspiring writer say something like: ‘I don’t read a lot because I want to come up with my own original ideas’? This, my friends, is a sure sign that they are going to come up with one of the least original ideas ever.
Why? Because creative ideas are born from combinations of other ideas. And the more references a person has, the more combinations they’re going to come up with. And that increases the odds that the idea is going to be original. And, more importantly, good.
This is creative memory.
As well as creative ideas, memories are also constructs of other memories. This is why we can’t remember anything from our very early childhoods. In these first few years of our lives we haven’t yet constructed basic memories on which to place these larger memories. Instead, the infant brain is busy making distinctions in its environment. For example it must distinguish between the sound of a rattle and the voices coming from its mother. Essentially, when it makes these distinctions, it is using its creative memory to do so.
Take the memorising of a poem as an example. Here is the first stanza of the famous poem by William Wordsworth:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
When memorising such a poem, the first thing an English speaker does is to imagine what imagery the poem is putting across. From a vivid imagining, it is pretty easy to remember the structure of the poem.
Once we have remembered the main structure, we use this as a series of anchor points in which we attach the actual words. We may then pass through the stanza again to correct any errors in our memory. All the while the memory is gradually becoming more precise and stable.
(If you have trouble doing this I will explain, in another article, exactly what mental processes you need to go through in order to make it easier)
Trying to remember a poem which is in a foreign language, however, is much more difficult. With a foreign language you have no previous memories to construct your new memory with. And for a baby this is even more difficult.
If you want a challenge try memorising the above stanza, and then try this one:
Dfhh, dfh diwh lasdk nvnei afdlw
Aefjk dj wewjr faew fasd dsafa
Aaa dafd bieoanb fddlw
Dsafj weirie fdijd dfjie fejafa
Which one was harder to memorise?
The poem about wandering as a cloud is much easier to memorise because you’ve already memorised the poem in little sections (called words). Now all you need to do is connect them together.
Something similar happens with all memories.
When we remember an event, we simply remember the unique facts about that specific memory. The rest is constructed from other memories. When we create something new, we create new facts, and then fill it out with our storehouse of memories.
Imagine that you’re remembering a party. It happened last year and our friend, Jim, was pushed into the swimming pool. Now, when we remember this, we may be using the memory of the house from lots of previous visits, and we will have the image of Jim from all the other times that we met him, and the image of someone falling into a swimming pool may have come from seeing that lots of times on television. Our brain then alters it, and combines things together, in order to make a construction of that unique memory.
This is not too dissimilar to what you’ve just done. Since I’m referring to a party that never existed, in order to understand what I’m saying, you’ve had to imagine it in your head. And your imagining of it was constructed from house parties that you’ve seen before, images of people falling into swimming pools that you already had stored in your head. If I ask you to imagine Jim’s face, do you think of a friend you know called Jim, or just a vague impression of a face, or maybe someone else you know? What you do will be unique to you, but you will have used your creative memory to draw some image from your collection of past memories.
Likewise if I ask you to imagine a dinosaur, what do you imagine?
Is it a tyrannosaurus rex, or a triceratops, or maybe you’ve made up a completely new dinosaur? Whatever it is, you’ve used your memories of dinosaurs from the past in order to imagine something.
This construction of memories (or imaginings) from other memories explains why two people can think they remember a situation perfectly, even though both remember it completely differently. It’s really quite easy to combine two memories of similar incidents together. I myself have remembered stories about my friends, then found out later it was actually something from a film!
You may also have memories, especially childhood memories that you can’t actually remember, but have constructed from photographs or the stories that your parents have told you. Such instances are perfect examples of your creative memory.
There is a way to avoid this, and to convince your friends (and yourself) that you have remembered correctly. Basically you need to associate that memory to other memories by some logical connection. So if we’re trying to remember who pushed Jim into the swimming pool, we just need to think about why he was pushed in there. You might remember that he was just larking around with a friend, until you remember that his girlfriend was arguing with him earlier.
Again, this could be misleading, but your brain makes so many of these connections that they work together to give you the correct memory. (Improving this ability will be covered more fully in other articles.)
This insight leads to two main points…
Firstly, that creative thought is made from a creative memory. So not only is there no such thing as a completely original idea, it would actually be impossible for your brain to think one up. Creative ideas come from connecting previous memory images together, to create something new. So I may have a memory image of a toothpick, and a memory image of a mouse; which I then connect together to create the idea for a mouse walking-stick. (We’re talk about coming up with good ideas another time!)
The second point is that we can use creative memory to alter memories. We can, for example, remember a memory from different perspectives. You may remember, for example, an incident when you had a vaccine shot. You can remember this either from your point-of-view (i.e. you remember it through your own eyes) or from a detached viewpoint so that you can see yourself and your brave face.
In a similar way, we can take something that isn’t particularly memorable, like a phone number, and use our creative memory to change it into something more memorable.
So, all memory is creative memory. Memory is not like taking a 35mm photograph. It’s more of a construction; made from a series of building blocks. And so your memories are never completely accurate depictions of reality.
We can use this knowledge of creative memory in two ways.
1. We can work out ways of making our memories as close to reality as possible.
2. We can realise that something like a telephone number is so unreal anyway, that we may as well change it so that it is as memorable as possible. (But, in doing so, we must never forget the first point.)
And here lies the fun. For memory isn’t just about remembering shopping lists, it’s a whole new art form – a private art form in your brain.
So let’s take our creative memory, and create.
