A friend of mine recently commented that his elderly mother tended to repeat the same old memories time and time again. Perhaps, this repetition is a characteristic of many older people and it is hardly a surprising one. By the time people reach a certain age, they've accumulated enough life experience to have plenty of stories to tell about life in the past. My question is this. Why is focussing on past events, rather than present events, so prevalent in these later years? Any answers might, perhaps, help characterisation in our stories.
Apparently, researchers have found that many of the repeated stories old people tell come from the time when the storytellers were in their teens or early 20s. This may well be the period in which these people made many decisions that affected the rest of their lives. Perhaps, we can say that it was a time when values were learned and consolidated and the identity of the adult was formed. However, it is, perhaps, one of the tasks of the elderly to make sense of their lives and this means searching for an overarching story they can tell about who they are and what matters (and mattered) to them.
But what about the accuracy of these stories? Are they just myths rather than personal history? Are they a product created over time and, as time passes, does the story-teller fill in the blanks with events that did not happen? Many people have suggested to me that their elderly parents repeat stories time and time again because they have forgotten that they already told them. But there may be much more to it than that. It could be that older people are seeking a reconciliation with their own identities and sending messages to the next generation. Essentially, the accuracy of the story is not the point. What’s important is the meaning embedded in the story they tell.
Regarding accuracy, we should remember that remembering is always re-remembering, and re-remembering is rather like a game of Chinese whispers in which every small error is probably exaggerated along the chain of remembering. The emotional reaction to the event might be quite accurate but the assembly of the event might not bear much resemblance to how things really were. For example, researchers have observed that memories associated with negative emotions fade more quickly than those associated with positive emotions. This phenomenon is known as fading affect bias. No wonder the past always seems to be rosy!
One particular difficulty with early memories is their susceptibility to contamination by visual images, such as photographs and video. I am sure that several of my childhood memories are actually memories of seeing myself in photos. Furthermore, when we look back into the past, we always do so through a prism of intervening selves. That makes it all the more important for psychologists studying memory to look for confirming evidence when asking people to recall their past lives.
When I stand outside myself and watch myself writing, I see myself doing a similar kind of thing to what we all do when we make a memory. I put together pieces of my own experience, emotions and sensory impressions and tailor them into a story by hanging them on to a framework that fits the needs of the plot.
Perhaps making memories makes storytellers of all of us.
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