The Evolution of Consciousness: Representing the Present Moment by Paula Droege

Author:Paula Droege
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury

5

Extending Consciousness in Time

I could no longer stop anything. Not the vehicle she

had been driving, nor her slow, endless leave-taking as

we watched her body fold in on itself. We were drifting.

William J. Doan, Drifting

In the remarkable play Drifting, William J. Doan recalls his experiences at the time of his sister Samantha’s traumatic brain injury. Drawings and journal entries are interwoven with narrative and film to bring the audience into Doan’s memories. They slide in time from the recent past, now several years after his sister’s death, and back to his childhood, regularly revisiting the pain of injury and loss in the immediate aftermath of the accident. The disjointed, multilayered production has an oddly immersive effect. The standard dramatization of memory depicts events as a sort of theatrical re-creation as if they were present, perhaps indicating the past with a time stamp (ten years earlier) or period clothing. In Drifting by contrast, I truly found myself drifting along with Doan as he sifted through events. Each memory has its own temporal order, but the smooth sequence gets interrupted by other memories with their particular place in time. Doan is driving and thinking about Samantha, when he remembers their conversation about whether or not he still goes to Mass, which reminds him of when they were younger and used to go mushroom hunting.1

This is how memory works. The brain is not a video recorder of experience, storing the track for later playback. Familiar and important elements of experience are somehow encoded in a way that allows reconstruction. We use these elements to produce a sense of past events and our selves in time. Memories result from the capacity to leverage ourselves out of the present moment to be conscious of past experiences. But if consciousness is a representation of the present moment, as this book has been arguing, how can there be consciousness of the past? The aim of this chapter is to resolve this apparent contradiction. In conscious memory2 a representation of past events becomes part of the representation of the present. Rather than traveling back in time, we bring the past experience into the present. Conscious memory is an experience about the past that is also experienced as happening now. The ability to consciously remember our past experiences and imagine possible future experiences requires a representation of oneself as the person one is in the present (quietly sitting in an armchair) and also a representation of oneself as the person one was or will be (remembering last summer at the beach and anticipating next week’s return trip). Conscious memory and imagination connect our past and future selves to the present by means of embedding representations of past and future events into the representation of the present moment. Even when these representations are mistaken, as memories and dreams notoriously are, the production of a temporally extended self serves the valuable function of maintaining an identity in time. Even if I falsely remember only sunny days, when it actually rained almost every

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