Memory - Of Orange Newts and Pixar
We Conclude With Some Memory Digging (Day 96)
Dear reader,
We’ll conclude our little series on Core Memories today with a story about newts. And also Disney. For the past couple days, we explored how shaky memory can be, whether or not one’s own reality of memory is as critical as the memory itself and whether or not you can implant memories, in children for example. If you’d like to catch up, here are links to the past two essays: Can We Choose to Remember, Led Zeppelin and a Chevy Nova.
Today, a memory story and a surprise twist. What’s your very earliest memory? Thanks for joining us!
~Dan
After all the thought and writing about memory these last few days, I decided to ask Little Bean what was the first thing she remembers. In her nine years, dig deep and tell me what your very first memory is?
She gave this question some thought, then said, “Well, I remember playing in the back yard with two friends and uncle Bob come by and shaking the lilac petals down on us and us laughing.”
This would have been at our old house. One of those friends was born in 2015 and we moved in 2018, so that would have placed Little Bean as 3-4 years old. I felt that was a lovely first Core Memory, rooted in friendship and home and family.
After doing some research on Core Memories, I was surprised to discover that the whole concept of a core memory was a 2015 Pixar Studies creation. The term comes from the movie, Inside / Out, where five personified emotions control the main character’s thoughts. Prior to that, well, it was just memories.
So… is Core Memory even a thing? There’s been some science applied to the concept of core memories, but the conclusions seem like common sense - we can’t predict what will stick, “core” memories are no more accurate than regular memories and children’s memories are notoriously weak.
Later in the day, I casually mentioned Little Bean’s lilac memory to my wife.
“I don’t know if that’s a memory or not,” she said. Turns out, recently, her and my daughter had been looking at old home movies saved on my wife’s phone. One of those videos? Little Bean and her friends under the lilac tree as petals fall on them.
So, was the memory actually just her seeing the video or did the video kick up the memory and she just added some details? Funny stuff, memory.
I decided to try again, only this time to be more specific.
“What is your earliest hiking memory?” I asked her. “Take your time, think about it.”
She paused a long time, before saying, “The newt hike, the hike where there were so many newts and we named them all!”
I smiled. That was one of my favorites as well, a hike out to Balance Rock in Pillsbury State Park on the day after a tremendous rain storm. We counted over a hundred orange newts on the trail that day.
She would have been five and a half. That feels like a pretty deep memory. I pushed her a bit, trying to dislodge some earlier memories and that worked. She did remember petting grasshoppers at Red Hill Fire Tower or the wind atop Mt. Carrigain. Or the split tree at Oak Park.
But the newts was the one she remembered without prompting. A core memory of her and her old man counting newts on a muddy trail on the way to check out a huge rock. Not bad for a memory. Not bad at all.
I was wondering if an event causes a memory that makes you like or dislike something, or are like and dislikes from your great uncles DNA? When I was about 6, I stepped into a lake and my foot landed on a pile of worms (how they got there who knows). I remember it. I do not like worms at all. Did this dislike come from that event?
I think all childhood memories for the most part are good...there's bound to be bad ones as well. Sometimes the bad outweigh the good in retrospect. My earliest memory: I was 5 sitting on my grandfather's big roll top desk, looking through the tiny drawers the desk had and finding the money (coins) he had hidden. That was a very big deal for me!!