‘I remember’ is often the start of an untrue sentence

A man reminiscing about a teenage romance once paused in mid-conversation with me. Let’s pretend the girl was called Mary and that she had a sister called Joan. He had seen neither of them for a very long time.

“Was it Mary or was it Joan?” he asked after a while. “I mean I remember her, but the name . . .” He was mortified at this failure to remember the name of the bright and shining first love of his life.

His lapse of memory wasn't unique. Memories, including those that feel real, can be far from accurate. For instance, the unreliability of eyewitness memory is well established in psychology. We insert people who were not there, we delete others and we remember things happening quite differently to how other people remember them happening.

And because our brain has to reassemble the memory every time we think about it, the details keep changing. It’s like ordering your groceries for delivery and the pickers in the store substituting one brand for another so that what you get is different to what you thought you were going to get. Except that when it comes to memory – unlike your groceries – you don’t notice what has happened because it feels right.

What this means is that your life was not the life you thought it was.

I think that's a remarkable thing and we are only able to deal with it by ignoring it. After all, we have to have a story to "know" who we are. As Ruby Wax puts it in Frazzled, "Memory is not accurate but, even if the details are dubious, it's still the only life story we've got."

The fragility of memory can also lead us to attribute emotions to the wrong causes. Suppose you eat something which triggers a feeling of dissatisfaction. Your brain searches around for an explanation for your dissatisfaction. It turns up a memory of how in love you were with Mary (or Joan) and how devastated you were when she left you for John (or Michael). So you conclude that you are dissatisfied because of unrequited love and that the person you actually married could never make up for the loss. That the actual cause was the burrito you had for lunch will never be known to you.

As Ruby Wax also suggests, when your brain is engaged in its “Why do I feel like this?” exercise it might as well be playing a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

Try not to take the past too seriously. It might not have happened that way and it might not be the explanation for everything you feel today. And try to remember that “I remember” is often the start of an untrue sentence.

As for the man I mentioned at the start, it isn’t as terrible as he thinks that he couldn’t remember if it was Mary or Joan he was in love with. The question is do Mary or Joan remember him?

Addendum: In a recent column I mentioned Patrick Pearse’s story Íosagán as one that generations of children suffered through and that all of them wished he hadn’t bothered writing. Maireád O’Connor reminds me of another Pearse story that brought head-banging boredom to the sons and daughters of Erin: Eoghainín na nÉan. Eoghainín talked to the birds and eventually died from TB, after which his soul might or might not have flown away with the flock.

We ploughed through this stuff in Naas CBS at a time when all we boys were interested in was playing cowboys and indians (my memory now informs me that Damien McCarthy from New Row was the envy of the class because his mother bought him a complete cowboy outfit with fabulous, glittering, silver six- shooters). Poor Eoghainín couldn’t compete with our repeated acts of cultural appropriation which is how cowboys and indians would now be described in progressive quarters.

Were there other Pearseisms to which we were subjected? My memory is blank on the subject. Long may it stay that way. pomorain@yahoo.com @padraigOMorain Padraig O'Morain ) is accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His daily mindfulness reminder is free by email.