Perspectival Forgetting
Megan Entwistle (Washington University in St. Louis)
How we change over time has an impact on how we remember our personal pasts. Some of our memories come to mark important moments in our life narrative. Some fade away into non-existence. And many others get re-written or re-interpreted.
I’m interested in a type of case that’s familiar, yet underexplored. Sometimes, your memory itself hasn’t changed shape. You remember the episode clearly enough; the relevant facts about what happened, what you did, what you felt, are still there.
But you remain estranged from your memory in a crucial respect: you can’t get back ‘inside’ it, or access the feelings or attitudes that were central to your experience at the time.
For example, imagine that you were expecting a promotion at work. The morning before the big announcement, you felt hopeful and full of excitement as you talked about it with a friend. But you don’t get the promotion. Later that day, after the disappointing news sinks in, you now have difficulty remembering ever feeling hopeful, or even believing that you would get the promotion. You can remember having that conversation earlier that morning, and that you felt hopeful, but in another sense you have forgotten what that experience was like for you at the time.
Episodic Memory
Ordinarily, re-inhabiting a memory comes for free. We get thrown back into the past via mere environmental triggers or associations (think Proust’s madeleines). More actively, reminiscing with a friend about a shared experience, or being asked to recount your day, is usually enough to conjure up a vivid replay of the remembered episode.
Indeed, ‘replaying’ the past seems so ubiquitous (with some exceptions: aphantasia) that many scholars treat the phenomenology as distinctive to episodic memory as a class. Part of what makes a memory episodic rather than semantic is that the state of episodic remembering is itself qualitatively similar to the past experience. You take a beautiful hike, and afterwards you can visualize the scene at the summit, conjuring up the sense of awe you felt while standing there. That’s very different from remembering the fact that you went on a certain hike, that it was beautiful or that you went with so-and-so. In general, it’s possible to recount the details about a remembered experience without being mentally transported back.
‘Going back’ is, of course, a metaphor. But what it’s trying to capture, in my view, is the form of mental representation involved in episodic memory. When you successfully remember episodically, you represent the world as though from your former perspective, seeing or feeling whatever it was you saw or felt at the time.
The Complexity of Perspectives
What’s in a perspective? We have a good grip on the notion of a visual perspective: what an object looks like to a viewer depends on how the viewer is spatially situated in relation to that object. When we imagine the object from a different angle, we calibrate relational properties like distance and depth to the new vantage point. And we use imagined visual perspectives to answer certain questions, such as whether the couch you liked in the store would fit well in your living room.
Episodic remembering, when it has a visual component, recruits the same cognitive capacity to project into a different point of view. Only here, the target viewpoint is moreover indexed to a specific time and place in the past. When we succeed in visually remembering, we represent what something looked like as though we were seeing it again (though ‘observer memories’ are a fascinating exception; see an earlier blogpost on this topic).
But visual (and, more generally, perceptual) contents aren’t all there is to an experience, and so aren’t all there is to remembering an experience.
At any given time, your total perspective on the world will be structured by various attitudes of yours. There’s what you value or care about—and that influences what you notice in your surroundings. There’s what you tend to get angry about, or take pleasure in—and that partly determines how you emotionally respond to a situation. And there’s what you know. If you only later discover that the snowy expanse you walked across earlier was a thinly frozen lake, you won’t feel appropriately afraid until after the fact.
When we focus on these more personal elements of a perspective, it’s easy to see that the experiential gap between you now, the rememberer, and you then, the subject of the memory, covers more than distinct spatiotemporal locations. Some crucial perspectival differences will emerge over time from changes in your values, emotional sensibilities, or beliefs about the world. These transformations, both large and small, can reconfigure how you experience something.
Perspective Shifts
If someone you trust betrays you, you might both come to see them in a new light and experience future relationships differently.
If your career path proves challenging, you might recognize some truth in your college advisors’ early warnings, and find yourself espousing that same paternalism towards your own students.
If you become a parent, you might experience reserves of energy and patience that you didn’t know were possible for you before.
A crucial part of understanding where you’re at now is in relation to where you used to be—i.e. in recognizing that you’ve changed. And this requires, usually, the role of memory (though long-term friends help with this, too). You remember being a certain person, and you can compare who you used to be to the person you are now.
But that’s not all. With transformations to you also come transformations to your memories. Or more specifically: transformations in how you are able to identify with the main character of the memory. Can you still ‘replay’ the events through their eyes?
Remembering as Empathy (for your past self)
When we’ve undergone a perspective shift, replaying the past experience is no passive matter. It requires cognitive effort. Something akin to what we do when we try to see the world through the eyes of another person.
Set aside memory for a moment. Suppose your friend is a jazz pianist. They’re trying to describe what they find so exhilarating and rewarding about performing live. You, by contrast, tend to get stage fright. You want to understand your friend’s experiences, beyond simply taking their word for it. What can you do? Imagining yourself “in their shoes” won’t do the job, since picturing yourself up on their stage would just evoke familiar feelings of clammy hands. And that’s certainly not what performing feels like for them.
What the task demands is you try on their perspective, by bracketing your own. This doesn’t mean you start with a blank slate. By recruiting the right bits of information—what you know about your friend’s personality, plus your own experiences of exhilaration on the soccer pitch, say—you can assemble together an imagined experience of enjoying being up on stage. And if done well, this act of imagining might afford new insights into your friend’s mental life.
The task I’ve just described has many names: empathy, perspective-taking, experiential imagining. There are many open questions about the underlying capacity, including what limits there are to imagining future experiences, or to imagining across large experiential gaps (e.g. Can a cis male imagine the perspective of a transfem?).
Whatever the barriers might be, what’s striking is that many of the same perspectival differences between two numerically distinct people can also show up between one person and their past self.
Let’s go back to our piano example. Maybe, when you were younger, you too loved going up on stage. The clammy hands were a much later (and unfortunately permanent) development. So, just as you needed to bracket your current clammy-hands perspective to imagine your friend’s experiences on stage, you similarly need to bracket your current clammy-hands perspective to remember the experiences of your younger self. In this respect, empathy and memory exhibit an important symmetry: both require an act of imaginative perspective-taking to succeed.
And sometimes, our attempt at such imaginative perspective-taking fails. One reason why this can happen is that our current, actual perspective dominates our attention in a way that makes it hard to bracket. In the example of lost hope that I gave in the beginning, what’s salient to you after the big announcement is your feeling of disappointment. What dominates your attention is the fact that you didn’t get the promotion at work. This makes it harder for you to bracket your knowledge of that fact and re-inhabit the perspective of your past self just hours before, who looked forward to the big announcement with excitement.
So, there’s a perspectival divide you find yourself unable to cross. On my view, that’s what it is to forget what something was like. You’ve forgotten what it was like to feel hopeful about the big announcement because, for now at least, you can’t quite empathize with your past self.
Does this mean that forgetting is sometimes just a problem of imagination? I think the answer is, ‘Yes.’ In fact, a growing body of research conceives of forgetting as an active process central to emotional regulation, rather than as the passive loss of information. But whereas much of that research, dating back to Freud, concerns things that we don’t want to remember, what I’ve drawn attention to here are episodes from one’s past that we are perfectly willing but somehow unable to re-inhabit, because we struggle to identify with that past version of ourselves.
