My earliest memory was when I was a toddler, a lot shorter than my 5'1 mother, who was looking down at me in our kitchen smiling. It was one of those smiles that felt more like a hug – a smile that felt personalized and gift-wrapped for you. She was wearing an apron and oven mitts, baking blueberry cobbler or bread pudding. It was late, and there was chatter in the background. Maybe it was Thanksgiving. Maybe it was Christmas. Or maybe nothing was real and this memory's been reshaped and reconstructed as the years have gone by.
At least that's what Ms. Britto, my AP Psychology teacher told me. She gave the example of a case study, where a woman claimed to have witnessed the 9/11 attacks on her television; yet, she wasn't even home that day.
"They're like clay," she said. "They're shaped by time, stories we've heard, and even our own emotions. They can either be a blend of truth and fiction or maybe entirely fiction."
It's a humbling thought, to realize that the foundation of who you are could be, in part, a technical fault of your mind.
Maybe it was my grandmother who was smiling. Maybe she was wearing her overalls instead of an apron. Maybe it was neither cobbler nor pudding. Maybe it was fried rice. Maybe it was just a regular Tuesday evening. What I know for sure, though, is that that kitchen scene is where love felt the most tangible. Perhaps that's more real than any precise recollection could ever be.
We couldn't possibly remember every detail – our brains process 11 million pieces of information per second. Yet, we never forget the feelings that surround the moment.
I walked out of class that day with thousands of questions: can eyewitness testimonies ever be trusted? Can we ever even trust ourselves? What's the point of "long-term memory" anyway?
But I never asked myself why we remember in the first place, even if it was never real.
If I asked Ms. Britto, she'd probably give me a scientific response. Something about evolution. Something about how strong our neural connections are. But perhaps, at the same time, we cling on to these stories to take a feeling away from it, to smile at her smile, to relish the smell of homemade cobbler, to miss the family Thanksgivings, to hold on to a piece of the past that still feels alive.
Maybe the story's true. Maybe it isn't. But isn't it prettier to think that it is?
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