Porous Memory and the Cognitive Life of Things
John Sutton
Page 5
Source: http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton/CognitiveLifeOfThings.htm
Just as infants learn to walk by leaning on objects and by holding others’ hands, until they achieve some fragile motor autonomy, so our cognitive skills require scaffolding. The development of autobiographical memory exemplifies the process (Sutton 2002a). Children learn to remember in company, with their initial narratives of experienced episodes being prompted and heavily guided by parental intervention and shared reminiscence. This scaffolding doesn’t then simply disappear with the inevitable triggering of a blueprint for autobiographical memory. Instead the parental scaffolding is internalized, often in some idiosyncratic detail. Developmental studies show that the particular emotional tone, and the elaborative or pragmatic style of talk about the past in the child’s local narrative environment influences not just the expression but the contents of the child’s own memories (Nelson and Fivush 2000). A child’s autobiographical memory, then, isn’t the product of an automatic unfolding of autonomous capacities: rather it’s already sculpted by and embedded in specific and uneven narrative worlds.
Questions about the location of the cognitive technology in this kind of scaffolding thus become less pressing, for there just may not be constant or determinate interfaces between brain, body, and world (Haugeland 1998). More interesting are the idiosyncratic cognitive trajectories along which our particular cultural and institutional learning aids allow us to go. We can understand the old arts of memory as one culturally-anchored way to ‘minimize contextuality’ (Clark 1997, 210). Clark’s description of the cognitive function of the reusable, relatively stable linguistic media in which we learn to fix our mental representations could be applied equally well to the special fixed pictorial images with which the Renaissance memory artists sought to order their minds (1997, 210):
by ‘freezing’ our thoughts in the memorable, context-resistant, modality-transcending format
of a sentence, we thus create a special kind of mental object – an object that is amenable to
scrutiny from multiple cognitive angles, [and] is not doomed to change or alter every time we
are exposed to new inputs or information.
The biggest challenge, then, in constructing a genuinely dynamical framework to analyze the cognitive life of things in memory, is to acknowledge the diversity of feedback relations between objects and embodied brain. Just as architects can occasionally be too confident that buildings or monuments can act as simple analogues or substitutes for memory (Forty 1999), so cognitive anthropologists and psychologists can too easily neglect the sheer variety of the forms of media and exograms which humans have developed since the Palaeolithic emergence of notations and external symbol systems. Merlin Donald's initial classification, for instance, strongly contrasts the fading, constantly-moving contents of biological working memory with the enduring, unlimited, supramodal, context-independent, and reformattable nature of exograms (1991, 314-9). Certain formats do freeze information, allowing it to be held up to multiple scrutiny in future, transmitted more widely across a variety of networks, altered and then re-entered into storage; and these properties of exograms have had essential roles in the development of artistic and theoretic culture. But of course different external media hold information in quite different ways, on quite different timescales, and interact quite differently with individual memories.
Information in notebooks, sketchpads, and word-processing systems, whether really external or interiorised, may normally sit passively on call, awaiting mobilization. But other kinds of memory objects are themselves dynamic, like pets and landscapes and cars and friends and ghosts, or will themselves decay or fade or break, like films and knots and bowls and buildings and unreliable machines. Information and emotional memory are held also in rituals which occur only once, or in the dynamic singularity of a group performance, or in other human minds, unpredictable and fragile. It’s just because our bodies and brains are porous, our memory thus opened up to time, sensation, and pain, that objects don’t just trigger and unlock memory retrieval, but can also stagger it, halt it, haphazardly twist it, and leave it in disarray.
The desire thus to attend to artifacts, media, and brains all at once does not require a unitary view of memory along classical reductionist lines: rather, the idea is the construction of parts of a partial but potentially integrated framework within which different memory-related phenomena might be understood (Sutton 2002b). Memory may have to be studied in both natural and human sciences, while such institutional distinctions remain; but nature is as patchy and idiosyncratic as culture, and the social and technological products of human cognition and action in turn "have direct effects upon individual cognition" (Donald 1991, 10). I suggest that, in the bewilderingly interdisciplinary future of the sciences of memory, from neurobiology to narrative theory, from the computational to the cross-cultural, historical and prehistorical studies should play a significant role .
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