I imagine the feelings of two people meeting again after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That’s where the misunderstanding starts: they don’t have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don’t intersect; and even in terms of quantity they are not comparable: one person remembers the other more than he is remembered; first because memory capacity varies among individuals (an explanation that each of them would at least find acceptable), but also (and this is more painful to admit) because they don’t hold the same importance for each other. When Irena saw Josef at the airport, she remembered every detail of their long-ago adventure; Josef remembered nothing. From the very first moment their encounter was based on an unjust and revolting inequality.
Oradour-sur-Glane: Reflections on the Culture of Memorial in Europe
The atrocity of war committed by German forces at the French town of Oradour on the afternoon of 10 June 1944 is well documented. It is not my aim here to echo such accounts by presenting a detailed investigation of the traumatic events, or to seek a way through the veritable labyrinth of national tragedy rhetoric that threatened to over-symbolise Oradour as a victim of war’s brutality, or to indulge in the prolonged mental exhaustion of attempting to ascertain the existential implications of its bitterly lingering aftermath. My aim is rather to simply present my thoughts and observations on an indecently sunny afternoon when I visited the memorial ruins of Oradour some sixty-five years later. But in doing so I shall be obliged to recount to some extent the terrible reality of that day.
After the war President Charles de Gaulle paid a visit to Oradour and declared the ruins a permanent national monument to the suffering of civilians in war. He declared that the site would be sealed off never to be rebuilt and thus remain a reminder to the excesses of totalitarian bestiality. Oradour was to be frozen in time, preserved in the exact state that it was found after the perpetrators had left. Nothing was to be touched or removed and the entire site, virtually unique in the western sphere of the war’s destruction, would be preserved as a nightmarish exhibit for future visitors to pass through and ponder the capacity of mankind to impose murderous destruction on complete strangers with impunity.
Entering Oradour and obeying bold signs to the memorial ruins, I was surprised to find myself in a vast car park, a limitless expanse of tarmac, more suited one would think to a sports complex or shopping mall. There on the sleek asphalt of the car park I observed luxury coaches with their tinted glass and climate controlled interiors spill their chattering cargoes, just as they will now in the newly constructed ‘reception area’ at Auschwitz I in Poland. Cars of suntanned visitors parked obediently between the freshly painted lines, disembarked and moved off all in the same direction, as if drawn by some unspecified magnetic source towards the giant modern bunker of a building that sat in a kind of man-made hollow. I realised as I followed them down the smart new concrete steps to the lower level that this was a relatively new visitors centre, inaugurated in 1999 by President Chirac, a largely superfluous building, the new scourge of every memorial site in Europe, whether merely ruins or formal cemetery. For today it is considered not quite enough to have solely the memorial itself before which to contemplate man’s destructive capability, the intricacies of murderous folly and the resulting nerve straining conclusion. Again and again some shadowy authority slips in between the individual and their private purpose and imposes an artificial construction in their path, which they have to wade through, straddle or circumnavigate before they can get back to the path they thought they were on.
In Auschwitz Museum, for example, one sees such changes as the perceived ‘demand’ or ‘expectation’ of the mass of new visitors delivered to this once remote area. When I visited the snow bound camp in February 1993, in a world before Schindler’s List, it was still petrified in its ex-Soviet austerity. Things seemed little changed from when the camp opened as a museum after the war: the overall effect was unadorned, brutally direct and low key. I remember distinctly that there were only a handful of visitors who had made it out to the site that day on a rickety local bus crammed with country people. I remember during the journey seeing the distinctive old carts and horses waiting at rural cross roads and somehow this backwoods atmosphere was echoed in the museum itself, where only a small amateurish kiosk was in evidence, offering a primitive guidebook whose cover fittingly showed a can of Zyklon B with a sprinkling of pellets and a primitive cafeteria which served soup, dumplings and little else. However, even this seemed indecent given the location. Even sitting sipping a simple bowl of soup seemed in that place repellent, an impertinence, something innately disrespectful. Yet now I learn due to increased visitor demand, a modern pizza restaurant has been installed to sustain those who choose to pass beneath the gate of death.
But this unembellished rawness, this leaving alone and distinct lack of interference did not lessen the tremendous shock of all one witnessed there, it amplified it. But now Auschwitz has like anywhere else felt the first feelers of the intrusive makeover. At Birkenau, the extermination area of the complex, no longer is one allowed as I then did, to enter the ruins of the gas chambers. They are fenced off for fear of further damage. But how does one damage a ruin, in this case a pile of bricks and concrete? One can only contribute to it. But the gas chambers at Birkenau, like the ruined houses at Oradour have become sacred; as they are the only visible existing evidence of the site of the crimes. They must, it is argued, be preserved at any cost, so we will never forget what happened here. The old mantra… now archaeological teams are strenuously engaged in preserving the collapsed remains of rooms in which hundreds of thousands were annihilated, so we will never forget. But one might ask why we need a mound of bricks and sheared concrete barely recognisable as a building to guarantee not forgetting? Are we really any nearer to properly accepting the Holocaust when we gaze stricken with an unavailing numbness at the miserable ruins of the crematoria? When we plod slowly down the fatefully preserved, brief flight of steps into the void of what was the vast undressing room of Krema II? When we descend the same steps thousands never walked back up again and stand in a bare rectangular space littered with rubble trying to imagine the unimaginable scenes enacted there day in day out for two years, what exactly does it mean to ‘not forget’, and to ‘remember’? Furthermore, what does it gain humanity to remember something that cannot be remembered authentically and to its true extent, arguably even by those who were there? To remember events that we are unable to absorb without reducing them through the language of remembrance and the corrosive distance of decades, is to fall short again and again, to circle the crater of a volcano, with our hair and clothes on fire, unable to accept the reality of our imminent incineration.
I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
How Friends Ruin Memory: The Social Conformity Effect
Humans are storytelling machines. We don’t passively perceive the world – we tell stories about it, translating the helter-skelter of events into tidy narratives. This is often a helpful habit, helping us make sense of mistakes, consider counterfactuals and extract a sense of meaning from the randomness of life.
But our love of stories comes with a serious side-effect: like all good narrators, we tend to forsake the facts when they interfere with the plot. We’re so addicted to the anecdote that we let the truth slip away until, eventually, those stories we tell again and again become exercises in pure fiction. Just the other day I learned that one of my cherished childhood tales – the time my older brother put hot peppers in my Chinese food while I was in the bathroom, thus scorching my young tongue – actually happened to my little sister. I’d stolen her trauma.
The reason we’re such consummate bullshitters is simple: we bullshit for each other. We tweak our stories so that they become better stories. We bend the facts so that the facts appeal to the group. Because we are social animals, our memory of the past is constantly being revised to fit social pressures.
The power of this phenomenon was demonstrated in a new Science paper by Micah Edelson, Tali Sharot, Raymond Dolan and Yadin Dudai. The neuroscientists were interested in how the opinion of other people can alter our personal memories, even over a relatively short period of time. The experiment itself was straightforward. A few dozen people watched an eyewitness style documentary about a police arrest in groups of five. Three days later, the subjects returned to the lab and completed a memory test about the documentary. Four days after that, they were brought back once again and asked a variety of questions about the short movie while inside a brain scanner.
This time, though, the subjects were given a “lifeline”: they were shown the answers given by other people in their film-viewing group. Unbeknownst to the subjects, the lifeline was actually composed of false answers to the very questions that the subjects had previously answered correctly and confidently. Remarkably, this false feedback altered the responses of the participants, leading nearly 70 percent to conform to the group and give an incorrect answer. They had revised their stories in light of the social pressure.
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
(via fuckyeahexistentialism)
Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm
Piotr Wozniak’s quest for anonymity has been successful. Nobody along this string of little beach resorts recognizes him as the inventor of a technique to turn people into geniuses. A portion of this technique, embodied in a software program called SuperMemo, has enthusiastic users around the world. They apply it mainly to learning languages, and it’s popular among people for whom fluency is a necessity — students from Poland or other poor countries aiming to score well enough on English-language exams to study abroad. A substantial number of them do not pay for it, and pirated copies are ubiquitous on software bulletin boards in China, where it competes with knockoffs like SugarMemo.
SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?
Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It’s too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.
I imagine the feelings of two people meeting again after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That’s where the misunderstanding starts: they don’t have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don’t intersect; and even in terms of quantity they are not comparable: one person remembers the other more than he is remembered; first because memory capacity varies among individuals (an explanation that each of them would at least find acceptable), but also (and this is more painful to admit) because they don’t hold the same importance for each other. When Irena saw Josef at the airport, she remembered every detail of their long-ago adventure; Josef remembered nothing. From the very first moment their encounter was based on an unjust and revolting inequality.
Forgetting is Key to a Healthy Mind
The act of forgetting crafts and hones data in the brain as if carving a statue from a block of marble. It enables us to make sense of the world by clearing a path to the thoughts that are truly valuable. It also aids emotional recovery. “You want to forget embarrassing things,” says cognitive neuroscientist Zara Bergström of the University of Cambridge. “Or if you argue with your partner, you want to move on.” [For more on emotional memory, see “A Feeling for the Past,” by Ingfei Chen.] In recent years researchers have amassed evidence for our ability to willfully forget. They have sketched out a neural circuit underlying this skill analogous to the one that inhibits impulsive actions. The emerging data provide the first scientific support for Sigmund Freud’s controversial theory of repression, by which unwanted memories are shoved into the subconscious. The new evidence suggests that the ability to repress is quite useful. Those who cannot do this well tend to let thoughts stick in their mind. They ruminate, which can pave a path to depression. Weak restraints on memory may similarly impede the emotional recovery of trauma victims. Lacking brakes on mental intrusions, individuals with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are also more likely to be among the forgetless (to coin a term). In short, memory—and forgetting—can shape your personality.
Nazi Memorabilia Boom
It turns out National Socialism is still worth something in Stamford, Connecticut. A well-preserved two-page statement written and signed by Hitler’s Armaments Minister Albert Speer at the start of the Nuremberg Trials in 1945, for example, is worth $10,000 (€7,500). That price seems like a deal compared to the going price for journals kept by concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele during his exile in South America. A private collector recently purchased them at an auction for nearly $300,000 (€224,000). Even larger bids are expected in Stamford this Thursday, when a portion of Joseph Goebbels’ estate goes up for auction. Items include letters and postcards sent and received by the Nazi propaganda minister during his younger years, as well as school report cards and poems and plays he wrote. There’s even a lock of hair from a former girlfriend, preserved inside an envelope through the decades. These will add up to a spectacular sale in a business with a seemingly endless supply of curios: the trade in historical relics. At a time when many people are turning to material assets, this is a flourishing business, and the most sought-after objects for this sort of investment come from Germany. Nazi documents provide collectors a story unique in the course of world history, with the brand name selling power of world-famous mass murderers. A striking number of recent buyers have been wealthy Russians.
Waves of Memory
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted something else this month. By next spring, they announced, debris from Japan’s tsunami could start washing up along the coast of Hawaii. In two years, it could travel to the West Coast of the United States — to Washington, California, Oregon. For two more years after that, from 2014 to 2016, bits of crushed homes, children’s toys, fishing nets — up to 20 million tons of homeless stuff — could circle back to Hawaii. It might be, researchers say, that for the next 10 years, tsunami souvenirs could hover around coastal landlines, visiting the shores of America again and again. […] For many Americans, the story of the Japanese debris has been more startling than comforting. An ABC News story about the debris ended, “Back here on land in Japan, the search is on for the missing nearly 15,000 people whose bodies have never been found,” prompting the online headline “Thousands Of Rotting Bodies Heading To America.” “All kinds of debris swept up by the tsunami,” reported a furrow-browed George Stephanopoulos, “are now floating in the Pacific and making their way to our West Coast,” and the way he emphasizes “our” makes it pretty clear that Americans are due for an Invasion of the Body Snatchers attack, and that Malibu will soon be occupied by thousands of Japanese zombies.
Sans Soleil (Sunless in English) is a 1983 French film directed by Chris Marker. Sans Soleil is a meditation on the nature of human memory, showing the inability to recall the context and nuances of memory and how, as a result, the perception of personal and global histories are affected. Stretching the genre of documentary, this experimental essay-film is a composition of thoughts, images and scenes, mainly from Japan and Guinea-Bissau, “two extreme poles of survival”. Some other scenes were filmed in Iceland, Paris, and San Francisco. A female narrator reads from letters supposedly sent to her by the (fictitious) cameraman Sandor Krasna. Sans Soleil is often labeled as a documentary, travelogue, or essay-film. Despite the film’s modest use of fictional content, it should not be confused as a mock-documentary; the fictitious content works as a device to assist meaning in the film which, along with its occasionally nondescript movement among locations and lack of character-based narrative, is derived from the juxtaposition of narrative and image.
Hello. I'm Kevin. I'm French and I currently live in Montreal where I study Business and Environmental Science at Concordia University. You'll find here some of the things that I read and find interesting. 
