Veronica O'Keane pictured in Dublin this July.Deirdre Brennan
Human memories are very much alive, and they are forged in the present moment. They are not a fixed memory that the brain simply keeps in its files for when it is necessary to go to them. Veronica O'Keane came to that conclusion, which turned everything she had learned in years of studying psychiatry, medicine or neurology, after an intense conversation with one of her patients. A victim of postpartum psychosis, the patient was convinced for a time that her newborn had died. Through the window of the car that was taking her to a mental institution, where she was admitted for a few weeks, she could even see the baby's grave in a cemetery. Having overcome the disorder, and aware that nothing of the imagined had been real, one day he saw the tombstone again and a feeling of terror invaded him:"The memories were still real." In his book
The Memory Bazaar: how we build memories and how memories build us
(Siruela), this professor of Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin describes with pedagogical elegance how the body is the receptor of sensations, sensations create memory, and memory defines people.
QUESTION.
How was that process by which the story of your patient, Edith, led you to rethink your ideas about memories?
ANSWER.
He had a very established idea, the one we are taught in medicine, psychiatry or neurology, that memory was something like a permanent store that you go to when you want to remember something or figure something out.
But I realized that memory is something that is forged in the present moment, because the only way one can have the experience of a given moment is through memory, through a process of connections that give meaning to that moment. moment.
Sensations come to your body constantly, and you make sense of those sensations through memory.
In other words, memory is something that basically lives in the present moment.
That is what Edith taught me, that memory is something very alive, it is what we are.
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Q. You are very critical of that widespread idea that there is a mind-body dualism.
A.
The idea that people are something different from their own bodies, that the thinking human being is different from the feeling human being, is a complete error. Like the very concept that men and women are different. Philosophy has been dominated for centuries by the concept that men think and women feel. All that began to disintegrate with the arrival of the Enlightenment and human rights. It is the arrival of humanism that begins to demolish that sexist conception. The recognition that mind and body act together, even if they do it in a different way, is fundamental not only to understand biology, but to understand ourselves as human animals.
Q. It is fascinating how you use the great works of literature in your book to explain how the brain works.
A.
All these authors dedicated their lives to a process of introspection. The intensity with which they reached the bottom of their own consciousness, through the literary route, and their thought and feeling processes, exceeds my ability to even imagine how they reached those achievements. They were highly developed human beings. Think of Samuel Beckett, capable of creating a world in which there are no anchors, in which there is no time, space and sometimes there is not even a person. Those are precisely the anchors through which memory is built, on a cellular level in the brain. Beckett got rid of them. He was able to remove those elements to demonstrate the raw matter that we are made of, underneath all those structures that we use to make sense of the world.
Q. One can conclude that the great authors were not normal, as far as the functioning of their brain is concerned.
A.
Take the case of Virgina Woolf, who suffered from a psychotic disorder. Sometimes, during his stages of illness, what he perceived around him and how he integrated it into his brain was a non-normal process. We learned what normal perception is, because, in his case, it was something that was broken. He had an extraordinary talent for describing his own introspection. That break ends up being very illuminating about what happens under normal circumstances. Dostoevsky's novels, for example, reveal to me an author with a manic disorder. I don't know exactly what his diagnosis was, but he had periods of extreme perceptibility in which a stage of pure emotion is discovered. Was Cervantes a normal person? I do not think so.
P. One might think that memory is something very individual, but nevertheless you defend the weight of
collective memory
.
A.
You cannot separate your brain from the cultural, family or social influences that surround you.
I was raised in Ireland in a rigid environment dominated by Catholic dogma.
I broke with that when I was very young.
But that cultural influence has stayed with me, and I'm sure it has shaped many of my beliefs.
And even if you lose those beliefs, the structures they have created in your brain remain.
Knowledge is formed through previous layers of prior knowledge, and we will always be reviewing the past in our memory process.
P. It is normal, even healthy, defend yourself, to lie to ourselves and create
false memories
.
R
.. We are human, and we have a need to feel good. One of the most interesting aspects of depression is that those who suffer from it tend not to fool themselves. They observe themselves in a very crude way, which we could consider negative. But it is both a very honest analysis of the world and the human condition. Psychiatry has a lot to teach us about our need to turn the page. And it is a healthy thing. What has come to be called "positive psychology" is intended to encourage patients, give them a boost of optimism, make them feel comfortable. However, I think it is also good to feel uncomfortable. It is part of human nature to need to deal with demons themselves. In a way, all memory is false.
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