[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 154 (Thursday, December 14, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11782-S11784]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

                                 ______
                                 

                                 MEMORY

 Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, as the Roman statesman, Cicero said 
``Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.'' I believe we as 
humans often take our ability to remember for granted. Throughout the 
past century, we have been blessed with many scientific innovations and 
discoveries. Large strides have been made in the medical area that have 
helped to improve the quality of life for all the people of the world. 
Memory is an essential function of our human experience. The loss of 
memory is certainly a tragedy. Thankfully, there are those who are 
conducting research who endeavor to understand the memory process and 
seek to solve memory disorders and loss. For instance, last year 
Congress appropriated $17.7 billion to the National Institutes of 
Health to fund scientific research. A portion of that funding is used 
for studies working to gain a better understanding of memory.
  I have recently read an essay entitled ``Musings on Memory'' by Dr. 
Morris Martin and was intrigued by the author's insights on memory. 
This essay was read before the Literary Club of Tucson, Arizona, on 
November 20, 2000. Dr. Martin is a professor of history having taught 
at Princeton University. He received his degrees from Oxford in 
England. His essay explores the many aspects of memory and the 
importance it has played throughout the history of the world. I would 
like to share his wisdom with my colleagues in the Senate and ask that 
the article be printed in the Record.
  The article follows.

                           Musings on Memory

                           (By Morris Marton)

       Elephants, they say, never forget, and maybe amoebas 
     remember in some amoebic fashion. But that, is beyond my 
     scope. Human history, personality, our rich individuality, 
     all derive in some measure from memory. The Greeks, as usual, 
     got it right. Certainly by the time of Hesiod around 700 B.C. 
     with that instinct for clarification that distinguishes them, 
     the Greeks had drawn up the family tree of Memory. Mnemosyne, 
     Memory, was the wife of Zeus and the mother of the Muses--
     Poetry, Literature, Music, Dance, Tragedy, Comedy etc. all 
     nine of them, which of course, makes Memory the mother of 
     Culture. Being the wife of Zeus also made her respectable, an 
     Olympian goddess. But her origins go further back beyond the 
     Olympians, to her brother Kronos, the chief of the 
     disreputable Titans, whose very shady origins lie somewhere 
     among the very unGreek Hittites of Asia Minor. Her father was 
     Uranos (Heaven) and her mother was Gaia (Earth) and further 
     back than that no one can go. It was the Greek way of saying 
     what today's scientists say that Memory derives from the 
     neural connections that pass from the primitive limbic area 
     to the hippocampus via the amygdala. They use Greek words, 
     but the Greeks said the same thing more simply and much more 
     picturesquely.
       Memory for them went back to the Earth Mother and was the 
     womb of Culture. It is the original collector and transmitter 
     of experience. Before writing culture depended on tremendous 
     memories. We know of the Bards who traveled from village to 
     village rewriting those tales of valor or of wondrous events, 
     which became the Iliad and the Odyssey. Milman Parry, the 
     American scholar, threw light on this when in the Thirties he 
     discovered the practice still alive in the Balkans among the 
     Serbian Muslims. Memory is still the backbone of tradition 
     among the Indian Brahmins who memorize tens of thousands of 
     lines of the Bhagavad Gita or the Ramayana, or of ribbis who 
     memorize the Torah.
       Memory was Queen until Writing was invented. Again the 
     Greeks with uncanny precision traced writing back to Egypt, 
     though the Chaldeans of Ur anticipated the Egyptians in 
     making scratches on baked tablets. Plato in the person of 
     Socrates tells how Thoth, the Egyptian god who invented 
     writing, was reproached by Thamus, the king of Egypt, ``This 
     discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in he learners' 
     souls, because they will not use their memories; they will 
     trust to the external written characters and not remember of 
     themselves . . . They will be tiresome company, having the 
     show of wisdom without the reality.''
       So fast forward to our own day. The written or printed word 
     has taken the place of memory for a majority of our needs. 
     The computer has added a further layer of incompetence to our 
     thinking. ``It's on the net, I don't have to remember it.'' 
     That is the mantra today of too often. It was the written 
     word that started mankind on the downward slope to Lethe or 
     Forgetfulness


                personal memory; its length and validity

       In terms of personal historical memory, how far back can we 
     moderns remember? We all have examples of this on which you 
     might ponder. For instance my father on his 90th birthday in 
     1962 gathered his four sons and their wives around him in his 
     much-loved garden in Kent and reminisced about his father and 
     grandfather. We were transported back to the Battle of 
     Waterloo in 1815, the funeral of the Duke of Wellington in 
     1851, tales of London life and family anecdotes which would 
     have perished with him a few years later, but for Cadmus' 
     invention and my wife's shorthand. Those memories are now 
     recorded and can be passed on to future generations. How far 
     back can such memories go? I remember meeting a delightful 
     old lady in the Forties who told me proudly that as a baby 
     she had been held in the arms of President Lincoln. Search 
     your own minds for the earliest event, which you can remember 
     in this way, personally or anecdotally. And remember that Roy 
     Drachman lunched with Wyatt Earp!
       However, I think I can cap anything you may come up with. 
     In February of this year 2000 the London Times recorded the 
     following. It described a man now living who as a child made 
     a disparaging remark about Oliver Cromwell. A lady present 
     said firmly, ``Never speak ill of that great man. My 
     husband's first wide's first husband knew Oliver Cromwell and 
     liked him well.'' At the dawn of this new century someone 
     living today can recall a single matrimonial generation 
     linked directly with the mid-17th century. How can that be? 
     The remark was made in 1923 by a lady born in 1832. At the 
     age of 16 (i.e. in 1848) she had married an 80-year old man 
     named Henry. Sixty-four years earlier in 1784 young Henry had 
     married for reasons, which remain obscure, an 82-year old 
     woman. Her first marriage, in 1720 was to an 80-year-old who 
     had served Cromwell before his death in 1658. We have a 
     memory going back 342 years from the present day. It should 
     be a warning to us not to disregard oral traditions, which 
     can stretch over what appear to be impossibly long 
     generations.


                              group memory

       Communal or tribal memories can be even longer. Our common 
     law reflects a time when memory was the official legal 
     linkage of the centuries. Blackstone in his Commentaries 
     dealing with land tenure says that some claims can go post 
     hominum memoriam. Or ``Time whereof the memory of man runneth 
     not to the contrary.'' Tribal memories run very deep. They 
     became tradition. Then they can illuminate or bedevil the 
     present. They can make Fourth of July picnics or they can 
     raise the Confederate Flag. Irish Protestants refight the 
     Battle of the Boyne of 1690 each marching season to the 
     dismay of those who would build a new future for Ireland. 
     Serbs fight for Kosovo, recalling the battle in 1389 which 
     was actually a defeat but which has been transformed into a 
     victory in national memory. Sixhundred years later this 
     memory gave the emotional surge to the Serbian claim to the 
     Province of Kosovo which involved twenty nations in 
     contesting it. Sentiment in the heart often transforms memory 
     in the head. This year the British celebrated the 60th 
     anniversary of the ``Miracle of Dunkirk'' while the French 
     looked on with a jaundiced eye, as being in their memory the 
     betrayed of France by a retreating ally.
       Now let us turn to the relation of Memory to the writing of 
     History.
       History and historical writing begin as Memory plus 
     editorial slant. The good historian will do his best to be 
     aware of his bias. Herodotus is known as a father of History 
     since he collected the stories told him by all and sundry, 
     but often added a skeptical comment or two here and there to 
     the effect ``I find this hard to believe.'' Thucydides was

[[Page S11783]]

     the first scientific historian to evaluate memory. He wrote, 
     ``I have described nothing but what I either saw myself, or 
     learned from others of whom I made the most careful and 
     particular inquiry. The task was a laborious one as 
     eyewitnesses gave different accounts of the same occurrence, 
     as they remembered or were interested in the actions of one 
     side or another.'' Many centuries later the German historian 
     Ranke decided to write history ``wie es eigentlich geschah.'' 
     (As it actually happened). It turned out to have a very 
     Prussian tinge.
       Judges know the unreliability of witnesses to the same 
     event. Each sees something; no one sees everything. Time 
     edits memory to fit bias. Selected past memories shape our 
     present thought and behavior. The generation of the 
     Depression of the Thirties switches off electric lights, 
     keeps its credit cards in balance, thinks waste is wicked--I 
     can hear my mother saying it--spends cautiously and generally 
     disapproves of the openhanded expenditure of today. And 
     believes it the one true way of life, so strong is the 
     imprinted record of the past on memory and behavior.
       When historians turned from personal memory to contemporary 
     written records they felt they moved a large step nearer to 
     authenticity. I spent much time examining Greek inscriptions, 
     gravestones, temple financial records on almost illegible 
     pieces of marble, with the feeling that I was in touch with 
     historical facts. But I found they also needed a lot of 
     interpretation! In this connection and to show what original 
     and unusual truths we learn from ancient records, may I 
     recall, as I remember it, the earliest Egyptian papyrus. It 
     is said to read ``The times are very evil. Children no longer 
     obey their parents. And the price of wheat is outrageous.'' 
     Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose!


                         memory and the senses

       On the personal level the senses are often the emotional 
     adhesive that enables us to retain past events in our 
     consciousness. Our first paycheck. Our first baby. I remember 
     my first girl friend, though I cannot recall our first kiss. 
     Whenever I hear Bach's Mass in B Minor I experience again the 
     shiver of excitement that was mine when I first heard the 
     Sanctus in the old Queen's Hall in London. ``Music when soft 
     voices die, Vibrates in the memory'', says Shelley. ``Odours, 
     when sweet violets sicken. Live within the sense they 
     quicken.'' The smell of fresh bread recalls the French-Swiss 
     bakery where I bought our breakfast ``brotchen'' when I was 
     living in Bern. The smell of garbage brings back a picture of 
     the vast dump outside New York City as I passed it frequently 
     on the Turnpike driving in from Princeton. In the intricate 
     mechanism of memory all the senses play their part as glue 
     and as signals of familiarity. You will supply examples from 
     your own experience.


                          photographic memory

       Have you ever met anyone with a really photographic memory? 
     Thomas Babington Lord Macaulay, the Victorian historian, was 
     said to be able to read a page of print and to recall it 
     perfectly from one reading. Saint Augustine writes with 
     admiration of a friend who could recite the whole text of 
     Vergil--backwards! Not a very enlightening party trick. There 
     is a recent example in the story of The Professor and the 
     Madman. You remember Sir James Murray, the first editor and 
     father of the Oxford English Dictionary had a brilliant 
     reader who supplied him with examples of literary usage. It 
     was years before they met. Only then did Sir James find that 
     the reader was confined to a mental Hospital as a hopeless 
     schizophrenic but with a remarkable almost photographic 
     memory.
       Such ability may well be a disadvantage. The capacity to 
     forget is almost as important as to remember. Otherwise we 
     would be cluttered with useless facts and unable to 
     distinguish significant from worthless. Simonides offered to 
     teach the statesman Themistocles the art of Memory, 
     Themistocles refused, ``Teach me not the art of remembering 
     but the art of forgetting'' was his reply. ``For I remember 
     things I do not wish to remember, but I cannot forget things 
     I wish to forget.'' William James, in more modern times said, 
     ``In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as 
     important a function as remembering.''


                         how to improve memory

       For those of us with lesser capacity, there have been 
     throughout history methods of strengthening and supporting 
     memory. Myself when young, and probably all of us, learnt our 
     multiplication tables by rote. I was also introduced to 
     English history by memorizing the Kings and Queens of England 
     in a rhyme:

     ``William the Conqueror from Normandy came,
     His son William Rufus while hunting was slain,
     Henry the First was for wisdom renowned,
     Stephen instead of Matilda was crowned * * *
     The Magna Charta was signed by John,
     Which Henry the Second put his seal upon etc. etc.

       You I trust were brought up on

     ``In 14 hundred and 92
     Columbus sailed the ocean blue * * *.

       I learnt my Greek irregular verbs by reciting them in 
     chorus with all the rest of the class at my London school. 
     Saturday mornings (we went to school on Saturdays in those 
     good old days) we were called on to recite a piece of great 
     verse which we had learnt the previous night and declaim it 
     in the almost empty Great Hall to our class mates. It was a 
     valuable lesson and I have portions of it still tucked 
     away on the dusty shelves of my memory.
       Learning by rote has fallen out of favor as a pedagogic 
     tool in our sophisticated West, but not everywhere in the 
     world. On the island of Lamu off the coast of Kenya, I heard 
     a murmur of voices coming from a building and looked in to 
     find a school of very young boys chanting passages from the 
     Koran, which they had had to memorize. Memories of Greek 
     verbs came back and I wished them well.
       In my youth I remember a card game called ``Pelmanism'' 
     which by memorizing and reidentifying like cards with like 
     was said to be highly effective. Association of the less 
     familiar with the more familiar is a method we all use. 
     Politicians have their tricks for remembering names and 
     winning votes. Cicero for the very practical purpose of being 
     a public orator considered Memory one of the five parts of 
     rhetoric, which was his profession. He embellished the 
     ``architectural'' art of memory invented by Quintillian. 
     Think of a large building with many rooms. Take each point of 
     your speech and connect it with an object--a spear, an 
     anchor, a picture--and put each mentally in a different room. 
     Then as you speak, mentally walk from room to room, the 
     object you have placed in each will recall the next point of 
     your speech. This system, refined, is still in use in 
     training memory. We all create mental pegs upon which to hang 
     data. B.F. Skinner, the psychologist, as a very old man did 
     this not metaphorically but literally. He would listen to the 
     weather forecast on the radio and should it be for rain, he 
     would immediately rise and hang his umbrella on the door 
     handle. The older we get, the more we need such association. 
     I find I frequently go through several steps of association 
     to recall names. I can forget John Schafer's name but as he 
     approaches, I look in the memory box named ``University''. 
     Smaller box labeled ``President.'' I mentally take out 
     Koffler, No, Harvil, No, Pacheco, No, Likens, No.'' There is 
     only one name left in the box. Of course that process, 
     accompanied by a blank look which changes to recognition, 
     used to be completed in an invisible flash. Now it takes two, 
     three or four flashes. Bear with me.
       Nowadays, of course, a pill is recommended for 
     strengthening the memory. I received a pharmaceutical 
     suggestion of this sort this week, extensively illustrated 
     and expensively produced. I am skeptical of its potency.


                         Memory and the Future

       Memory we naturally assume deals only with the past. Lewis 
     Carroll's White Queen in Alice in Wonderland felt this was a 
     very limited idea. ``There's one great advantage to living 
     backwards, one's memory works both ways,'' she remarks.
       ``I'm sure mine only works one way,'' says Alice. ``I can't 
     remember things before they happen.''
       ``It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,'' 
     the Queen remarked.
       ``What sort of things do you remember best'', asked Alice.
       ``Oh, things that happened the week after next,'' said the 
     Queen.
       Here, of course, Lewis Carroll is playing with the concept 
     of Time, as in ``Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam 
     today.''
       But there is something, which we might describe as a form 
     of memory of the future. We call it imagination, which 
     projects past data instead of merely collecting and 
     organizing it as does the memory.
       Art draws on both imagination and memory. Think of the 
     combination of memorizing and recreating a great play that 
     goes into an actor's performance. Daniel Barenboim at the age 
     of seven began to memorize all Mozart's works. At eighteen he 
     had mastered the whole corpus. Constant practice fixes the 
     memory in the muscles. A wellknown pianist was suddenly 
     called on to play a certain concerto. He declined saying, ``I 
     have it in my head, but not yet in my fingers.'' When it is 
     in the fingers there is no effort to remember; the music can 
     be fully endowed with the feeling the artist desires.
       Shakespeare asked the question ``Tell me where is fancy 
     bred? Or in the heart or in the head? How begot? How 
     nourished? Reply. Reply'' He replied ``It is engendered in 
     the eyes.'' He did not say ``In the hippocampus or the 
     amygdala?'' The mystery of artistic imagination and its 
     relation to memory still resists a mechanistic 
     interpretation.


                          the future of memory

       As far as information goes, so the experts inform me, 
     before long we shall all be able to have the Encyclopedia on 
     a chip along with the corpus of English literature, all the 
     mathematical formulae required to do advanced physics and all 
     the telephone numbers in the world. Anything you want can be 
     provided on a chip. All you have to do is click on and scroll 
     down. Since the amount of information is limited only by the 
     capacity of the chip--which I am told, will increase a 
     thousandfold or more in the next six months--it is likely it 
     can be carried in a wristwatch slightly smaller than a Rolex, 
     or, in time, implanted in the hippocampus or the amygdala or 
     any vacant spot in the brain. And Memory will have become a 
     vermiform appendix to the computer. I do not look forward to 
     that day. Princeton, I am distressed to learn has just spent 
     two million dollars on an MRI which they have enthroned in a 
     new Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior allied, 
     alas, to the Department of Humanities. The first area of

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     research, according to the New York Times, is to be the brain 
     wave that normal people call ``Love''. Our world is convinced 
     that when we know the ``how'' of our psyche, we shall know 
     the ``what'' and the ``why''. I am not convinced. I hope and 
     trust that should the day come when we understand all 
     mechanisms, measure all wave-lengths, and plot all emotional 
     outcomes, we as individuals will still be the masters that 
     issue the commands that set in motion the neurological 
     synapses which capture memory, enlighten meaning and in 
     general make life human. May we continue to remember as much 
     as is necessary of what we need to remember and forget that 
     which is forgettable, and be kind to those whose advancing 
     years rob them, from time to time of your name, and even of 
     their own.
       And may music still vibrate in the memory and William the 
     Conqueror still come from Normandy and Columbus in 1492 still 
     sail the ocean blue, and Greek verbs still be memorable and 
     may computers fail to find out how to be masters of our 
     consciousness.
       We have had a pleasant half-hour wandering, somewhat 
     disjointedly, through the groves of Memory. Let me close with 
     a poem on the subject by a neglected Twentieth century poet. 
     It is appropriately called ``Memory.''

     Wind, west wind, of an evening
     Whispering through the tall trees,
     Tell me tales I used to hear told
     By the vagabond Sussex breeze,
     Lifting the layers of silence,
     And letting them softly lie,
     Passing into the stillness that comes
     When whispers softly die.
     And I'll see the woods where we wandered
     And wake with a lonely heart
     As the wind of memory passes through
     The tall trees of my heart.

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