Dag 1467: Memory gongs

I heard a couple of interesting things on radio 4 recently which follow on from my last post (in some respects) and are both related to memory. So it makes sense to make them the subject of my first post of 2008.

chair with cushion - early 1980s

The first of these was the revelation that everybody’s memory is not as good as we may think. An experiment was undertaken by a university professor following the terrorist attack on the twin towers in 2000. The day after the attack he asked his students to write down exactly what they were doing when they heard about it. Some time later (between 6 months and a year) he asked them the same question again. The vast majority of his students wrote down something completely different to what they had originally written. The professor then showed the students, who had put something different down, their original responses and asked them to think about it and then say which of the 2 versions was actually the correct one. Every single student said that his or her more recent account was the correct one.

So that means that there are some things that we will all fundamentally believe happened at a certain time in a certain way, but in reality that may not be the case at all and therefore we just don't know what we can trust in our own memories.

In my previous post there is a photograph of an unfinished painting I painted in the early 1980s. Although I ended up doing more to it after the photo was taken I never actually finished it. I kept it for many years and through many house moves, but I finally took it to the tip about 5 years ago (and yes you are right, I do regret it).

The Cabaret Voltaire fans amongst you will probably recognise the phrase in the speech bubble as coming from one of their songs. It was one that I particularly liked and, although I disposed of all my Cabaret Voltaire records and tapes around 20 years ago (along with most of my record collection - and yes that is another thing I regret) whenever I saw that painting it reminded me of that song. Over the years I forgot the title of the song and occasionally tried to think what it might be. I cam to the conclusion that although I couldn't remember the song title I at least remembered that it came from the Red Mecca album (that I was sure about). I remembered that Red Mecca was the last Cabaret Voltaire album I ever bought as I felt they went downhill after that (or to be precise during that album). I remember buying it from a record shop in Bath. I really liked some of he tracks and didn't like others at all, but I knew that the tracks with the spoken phrase "The third part of your brain, do you know where it is?" was without doubt the best track on the album.

A few years ago I went onto iTunes, out of curiosity, to see if I could identify which track from Red Mecca contained the phrase, but it wasn't in any of the available 30 second clips.

Since then I hadn't given Cabaret Voltaire much more thought until I discovered discogs (see previous post). Since then I have started buying many of the records I used to own (though in CD format this time). When I looked up Cabaret Voltaire I realised I had owned pretty much everything they released in the UK up to and including Red Mecca including their first 7" entitled Extended Play. (In fact it is a shame there isn't an "I used to own this" button in discogs.

But I digress, My first recent Cabs purchase was the box set Conform to Deform. This is from the period just after Red Mecca was made, but I thought I would give it a try and see if I liked it more now than I did at the time. If they had had the other box set Methodology '74 / '78 - The Attic Tapes in HMV Leeds I would have got that instead, but they didn't have much choice so Conform to Deform it had to be. I listened to it a few times and liked some of the tracks, but not others. So I decided I'd start to get some of the good old CV stuff I used to like.

I started off with Mix-Up and enjoyed it very much - I was amazed that I remembered all the songs on it when I first played it. I then wondered what to get next. I knew I had liked Voice of America when I had it on record but I also fancied getting to the bottom of the riddle of which track on Red Mecca contained the phrase I had used in my painting. I ended up getting Voice of America just before Christmas and put in onto my iPod ready for my commute into work the next day. As with Mix-Up it all came flooding back to me on first listening and I remembered just how much I used to like his album.

I was getting close to the end of my train journey when a song started with a loose jangley sort of guitar part that I remembered as being one of the highlights of the album and then to my astonishment I heard the phrase "The third part of your brain, do you know where it is?". I was dumbfounded, how could it be that I had got this so wrong? If someone had tried to have a bet with me over which album contained that phrase I would have staked everything on it being Red Mecca as my memory was 100% sure that it came from that album.

It was only when I listened to the piece on Radio 4 some weeks later that I realised how it had happened, but that made me wonder what other things I feel 100% sure about are also wrong. It is quite possible that I went somewhere with someone back in the early 1980s and my memory of it is completely different to the person who I went with. We might both feel that we were 100% right and therefore the other must be wrong. All sorts of arguments might ensue, but without some third party reference it would be impossible to come to the real truth.

So from now on I can no longer know for sure of anything that happened in the past.

A sponsored walk in the early 1980s - or was it?

The other interesting item I heard on Radio 4 was about split personalities. The thing being proposed was that most people have some form of split personality and there is a scale that runs from people who have only a single personality at one end to people who have a very pronounce split personality at the other. The people at this end are those who are likely to be receiving some sort of mental health treatment.

So most people are somewhere between these 2 extremes and will have two personalities that they switch between from time to time. you might think that for this to be the case everyone would have realised they had these two personalities, but the reason this is not the case is that each person is unaware that this is happening and while they are in one personality they can only access the memory banks associated with that personality so they will have no knowledge whatsoever about the other one. It is only possible for other people to spot this and they would need to be specifically looking for it over some time to have any chance of actually spotting it. However, it was discovered that when someone brain is monitored when the move from one personality to another different areas of the brain start functioning so it can be detected in that way. Most people would probably not have much of a difference between their personalities, which would also make it hard to spot without actually monitoring the brain.

I thought it was interesting anyway.


And to end on another musical topic:

Minimal Synth fans may be interested to hear that the debut single by Strange Devotion will be released shortly on the Berlin based label, Mauerstadtmusik.

It will be a very special limited edition 7" vinyl pressing containing the tracks "Again the new formation" b/w "Danger Line" which have never been released before.