I remember it as if it happened only tomorrow

In Terry Pratchett's Soul Music , Death, the anthropomorphic manifestation of death who, black-robed, skeletal, riding a pale horse and wielding a scythe, is a main character and sometime hero in Pratchett's Discworld novels, is depressed.

Not because of his work.  He takes a kind of grim pride in his job.  He's depressed because he can't forget---anything.

As he tells a holy man he's gone to for advice about the meaning of it all:

I REMEMBER EVERYTHING.  EVERYTHING.  DOORKNOBS.  THE PLAY OF SUNLIGHT ON HAIR.  FOOTSTEPS.  EVERY LITTLE DETAIL.  AS IF IT HAPPENED ONLY YESTERDAY.  AS IF IT HAPPENED ONLY TOMORROW.  EVERYTHING.

Later, after he's had a few drinks---pretty much the entire stock in trade of the Mended Drum.  It takes a lot of alcohol to get Death drunk, since he has no blood to absorb it.---he explains his unique memory to the bartender:

D'YOU.  D'YOU.  THING IS.  D'YOU KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE, EH, HAVING A MEMORY SO GOOD, RIGHT, SO GOOD YOU EVEN REMEMBER WHAT HASN'T HAPPENED YET?  THAT'S ME.  OH, YES.  RIGHT ENOUGH.  AS THOUGH.  AS THOUGH.  AS THOUGH THERE'S NO FUTURE...ONLY THE PAST THAT HASN'T HAPPENED YET.  AND.  AND.  AND.  YOU HAVE TO DO THINGS ANYWAY.  YOU KNOW WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN AND YOU HAVE TO DO THINGS...

YOU SEE.  YOU SHEE.  YOU SEE STUFF LOOMING UP AHEAD LIKE AN ICEBERG THINGS AHEAD BUT YOU MUSTN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT BECAUSE---BECAUSE---BECAUSEITSALAW.  CAN'T BREAK THE LAW.  'SCOTABEALAW.

SEE THIS GLASS, RIGHT?   SEE IT? 'S LIKE MEMORY.  ONNACOUNTA IF YOU PUT STUFF IN, MORE STUFF FLOWS OUT, RIGHT?  'S FACT.  EVERYONEGOTTA MEMORY LIKE THIS.  'S WHAT KEEP HUMANS FROM GOING ISS---ISH---INSH--MAD.  'CEPT ME.  POOROLE ME.  I REMEMBER EVERYTHING.  AS IF IT HAPPENED ONLY TOMORROW.

In his despair, Death walks off the job, leaving the work of grim reaping to his grand-daughter Susan, and spends a good part of the book trying and failing to forget.

Remembering everything, that would be awful.  "Remembering" the future would be a horror.  But it turns out that we do.  "Remember" the future.  That is, the way our brain think about the future is very similar to the way it goes about remembering the past.  Death's memory isn't unique, after all, or at least that's what I'm taking away from this post by Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance.

Sez Sean:

...the human brain, as most readers of this blog probably know, was not intelligently designed. It’s doesn’t have the high-level structure of a computer program, where all the processes are carefully planned to achieve some goal. (The lower-level structures share the mechanical features of any other physical system, but that’s of little help here.) Evolution nudges the genome in useful directions, but it can only work with the raw materials it’s given; it doesn’t have the luxury of starting from scratch. So over and over in biological organisms, we find features that were originally developed for one purpose being re-engineered for something else.

As it turns out, the way that the human brain goes about the task of “remembering the past” is actually very similar to how it goes about “imagining the future.” Deep down, these are activities with very different functions and outcomes — predicting the future is a lot less reliable, for one thing. But in both cases, the brain goes through more or less the same routine...

We tend to assume that the brain must be like a computer — when we want to access a memory, we simply pull up a “file” stored somewhere on the brain’s hard drive, and take a look at its contents. But that’s not it at all. Schacter believes that pieces of data relevant to any particular memory — times, images, sounds — are stored piecemeal in different parts of the brain. When we want to “remember” something, another part of the brain assembles these pieces into a (hopefully) coherent picture. It’s like running a new simulation every time you need a memory, and it’s the same thing we do when we try to imagine some event in the future.

Studies of people suffering from amnesia find they have almost as much trouble imagining their future as they do recalling their past.

Go read Remembering the Past is Like Imagining the Future.  I would read it again myself but I've got a good memory and remember it as if I read it only next week.

Comments

[Rana]

Fascinating! (You may imagine that with or without a Spockian inflection, as you choose.)

[Linkmeister]

Making Death a sympathetic character is evidence of Pratchett's skill as a writer, I think. The only other time I've felt like he (HE?) was likable was in The Screwtape Letters.

[actor212]

There's a theory that the brain stores information in a kind of hologram, similar to the piecemeal approach that Carroll posits.

Indeed, current computer technology is looking into this model:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_memory

There's a strong reason to be very cautious with regards to describing memory. The brain stores everything, I feel. We only use a small percentage of our brains, but our senses capture 100% of the input we experience. My suspicion is somewhere in the other 90% of our brain lurks every stinking memory we will ever have.

Memory, in my opinion and on the other hand, is related to consciousness, which means it is filtered thru the emotional channels of our minds. This, I think, is why memories tend to be episodic as opposed to continual (after all, if you could recall every detail from a given sequence of events, you'd end up spending more time remembering than being, which would be genetically counterproductive.)

I have a near-eidetic memory, so this model seems to conform best to how I operate anyway.