The Secret Life of Secrets by Michael Slepian

Author:Michael Slepian [Slepian, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

STORIES FROM OUR PAST

The past is so special that sometimes you can feel it in the making. We cherish our memories: a moment with friends, an overseas trip, a wedding. More than fifty years after my grandparents’ trip around Europe, my grandmother could still tell me story after story about their travels, and recount detail after detail about their experiences. Many of her stories revolved around mishaps, such as getting lost or ordering food to unexpected results. But one memory in particular was special: my grandmother sitting beside my grandfather on a hillside overlooking a lake and the lights of the town below. Next to my grandfather on that hillside, newly married, as dusk settled in, she said to herself, “I will always remember this moment.” And she did. She remembered it so clearly that she was able to retell it to me in vivid detail, many decades later. It’s wonderful that human memory can work this way, but why do we hold on to all these details?

If you have ever tried to download a movie for later viewing, you may have noticed just how much real estate it occupies on your hard drive. Why do we devote so much mental space to movie-like versions of our personal memories? Why hold on to all the details, the way my grandmother so vividly remembered that moment on that French hillside—the view, the time of day, even what she was thinking about at the time?

Cognitive scientists have long known that our episodic memories—memories of our past experiences (like that moment on the hillside)—are notably different from semantic memories, that is, knowledge and stored facts (for example, that France is the name of a country). Most notably, memories of a past experience are so rich that they include how you came to have the memory. This is not the case for semantic memories. You know that France is a country and what makes someone a grandmother, but you don’t remember how you came to learn these facts, where you were at the time, and who else was there. Compare this to your memory of your last joyous occasion or celebration. You don’t just remember the facts of it, but you can re-experience the event itself. You also know exactly how you came to remember the event: you were there, experiencing it.

The richness of our memory for past experiences is what enables us to share them with others. And we do. A lot. By one estimate, past experiences encompass 40% of what we talk about. Sharing stories of our past helps us learn from each other and learn about each other, which allows us to get close to one another. In Why We Talk: The Evolutionary Origins of Language, Jean-Louis Dessalles argues that human communication differs from animal communication in exactly this way: we tell each other stories. Other animals do not describe past experiences to each other, but humans do, and we do so frequently.

Humans are natural storytellers. In the second chapter, we

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