What does it mean to relive an experience through remembering?
Francesca Righetti (Ruhr University Bochum)
When was the last time you were on a beach? Can you remember it? Maybe you can see the glint of the sun on the water, hear the crash of the waves, feel the warmth of the sand or the sting of salt on your skin.
This is how the remembering experience appears to us. When we remember, it’s rarely about a dry fact. We often get a load of quasi-sensory aspects: images, sounds, bodily feelings, even emotions.
This is why episodic memory has often been defined as the ability to mentally relive a personal experience. It’s what sets it apart from semantic memory, which is our ability to retain facts. You know that Paris is the capital of France? That’s semantic memory. But when you remember your trip to Paris with your partner, that’s episodic memory.
And it’s not just about a visual image before our mind’s eyes. Episodic memory carries the texture of experience: what we thought, how we felt, who we were in that moment. Such a folk understanding will lead us to assume that episodic memory is a sort of faithful replay of our previous experience (often sustained by philosophers like Husserl), or some sort of mental traveling to the previous experience (sustained by Tulving).
However, this folk understanding has also been challenged by discussions about the neurocognitive underpinnings of episodic memory.
Research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology suggests that it is unlikely that episodic memory is a faithful replay of previous experiences, like a movie replaying in front of our mental eyes, reliving the experiences from the first-person visual perspective. In remembering, indeed, we construct “vivid scenarios of the past”, some have argued.
In memory construction, we sometimes fill in gaps. Sometimes we add information that was never there at the moment of the experience. Sometimes, as Loftus showed, we even create memories of events that never occurred.
Even our viewpoint can shift: we often construct past experiences from another visual perspective. You might remember an event — say, your last birthday party - as if you’re watching yourself ‘from the outside’. That’s not how you lived that event the first time: we always experience events from the ‘inside’. Still, that’s how you remember it now.
Thus, much of the recent research on the “reliving” aspect of episodic memory has shifted from focusing on the neurocognitive mechanisms or replaying mental scenes, to asking questions about the phenomenology of memory — the phenomenal qualities (how an experience feels like) that uniquely belong to episodic memory and covey that sense of re-living the past typical of episodic remembering.
But what does it mean, exactly, that episodic memory allows us to relive our experiences?
It sounds simple – trivial, even. However, when we start examining the different subjective dimensions involved in remembering, doubt creeps in. The idea that we can mentally relive past events begins to blur.
Consider different ways in which one might remember a heated discussion with a colleague.
One might say “I remember the fight with my colleague so vividly. I even see the color of the shirt they were wearing”. In this case, one is signaling that they recall what was said and even what the other person was wearing. For them, reliving seems to mean vivid mental imagery.
About the same event, one might also say this: “When I remember that discussion, I find myself angrily gesturing again as if I were in that room again”. Here, reliving seems to involve immersion – one is drawn into the past experience to the point of re-enacting it through gestures, as I claimed in another work.
And again, one might say this: “I feel so angry at her. It’s like I am still fighting again with her in my mind and, I feel as angry as I was during that fight”. In remembering the fight, one relives the emotional aspects of a past event (whether these are new emotions constructed ad hoc or old emotions re-enacted, it is a matter of the debate).
For others, the subjective aspects of remembering have more to do with time: “Remembering feels like stepping back into that moment again—like I have time-traveled”, one might say. In this case, reliving seems to be anchored to personal temporality, the way one subjectively experiences time, as some have argued.
Something even more radical happens in PTSD. When experiencing intrusive memories, subjects experience a strong re-enactment of traumatic events, such that they act and feel as if the traumatic events were happening again. Could it be that the same applies to other, non-clinical, memory cases?
The subjective components of remembering come in many forms. So, what are we really talking about when we speak of reliving the past? Images? Embodied actions and activations? Time? Emotion? All of them? None?
Some philosophers have tried to identify the phenomenology of episodic memory by appealing to the concept of autonoetic consciousness – the self-knowing awareness of remembering (also called autonoesis). About this, Tulving says:
When a person remembers such an event, he is aware of the event as a veridical part of his own past existence. It is autonoetic consciousness that confers the special phenomenal flavour to the remembering of past events, the flavour that distinguishes remembering from other kinds of awareness, such as those characterizing perceiving, thinking, imagining, or dreaming. (Tulving, 1985, p. 3)
Autonoesis has played a central role in the philosophy of memory. Autonoesis has been often identified as a distinctive phenomenological flavour – or “feeling” – that characterizes episodic memory. Contemporary views often interpret autonoesis in many ways: through the lens of metacognition, casting it as a feeling-based process, in meta-representational terms (as in representing not only the content of memory, but also the source of its content,) or as a form of experiential retention, - “the retention of knowledge of what it was like to experience an event”, as explained by Sant’Anna and colleagues.
If we consider the rich variety of ways people can claim to relive memories, it becomes clear that this isn’t a simple, one-dimensional phenomenon. Yet, much of today’s philosophy of memory leans toward reductionist accounts that try to pin down “reliving” to just one thing: a metacognitive feeling, a meta-representation, the retention of the experiential load.
I’ve argued elsewhere that reductionist accounts risk ignoring the layered complexity of self-experience. Not everything we live through stays at the surface of explicit and phenomenal consciousness. Some aspects of experiences are implicit and corporeal. These aspects not just linger below the threshold of introspection but also cannot reliably be studied without raising important methodological issues. And that’s a problem. Because when we try to describe what remembering feels like, these efforts face the challenge of accessing and articulating experiences, rather than merely identifying their representational content.
Do we have methodological and conceptual tools to disambiguate the meaning of “reliving” and investigate it systematically through subjective, lived experiences?
Tulving’s concept of autonoetic consciousness deserves systematic investigation. Not as a passing “feeling of remembering,” but as the very mode of self-consciousness (the way we self-apprehend ourselves in various cognitive activities) through which the remembering experience occurs. This research would benefit from engaging with first-person methodologies. For example, those used in consciousness studies and studies on the phenomenology of lived experience.
The complexity of the experience of re-living the past calls for a methodological shift. What if:
1. The “reliving” aspect of episodic memory is not a single thing, but a multi-layered subjective phenomenon?
2. Such a multi-layered phenomenon can be studied by taking the notion of autonoetic consciousness seriously, by understanding it as a mode of consciousness, rather than a feeling?
Contemporary philosophers of memory rarely engage in a serious investigation of lived experience. Many theories of the flavor of reliving exist, but, so far, no systematic attention to subjective data concerning such a flavor has been paid.
A new kind of project is needed – one that asks old questions with new tools and brings the phenomenology of the lived experience into dialogue with the philosophy and sciences of memory. If so, philosophers of memory should engage with new methodological tools to collect data on the first-person, lived experience of remembering.
This is what I plan to do in the next few years: working on a project that allows us to truly listen subjects’ experiences of what remembering feels like.
