Bammer & Gold: Scientists, Humanists, and Collective Memory

Angelika Bammer and Hazel Gold, Now You See It, Now You Don't: Scientists, Humanists, and Collective Memory

What exactly do we mean when say “collective memory” and how might individuals’ personal memories of an event converge into a cohesive memory maintained by a group? This was the central inquiry of the second CMBC Faculty Lunch Discussion of the spring 2015 semester, titled “Now you see it, now you don’t: scientists, humanists, and collective memory” and led by Dr. Angelika Bammer (Institute for Liberal Arts, Emory University) and Dr. Hazel Gold (Spanish and Portuguese, Emory University). In the fall of 2014, Drs. Bammer and Gold co-taught a CMBC sponsored seminar called “Mapping Memory: History, Culture, and the Brain ”, the purpose of which was to examine how our memories of the past shape the present from a cross-disciplinary perspective. The class struggled with how to approach collective memory from an interdisciplinary perspective, failing to reach a satisfying resolution by the semester’s end. Drs. Bammer and Gold reviewed this struggle in the lunch discussion, and raised questions about how to best define and conceptualize collective memory.

The “Mapping Memory” class was organized around two aims. The first aim was to foster an open inquiry into relationships between memory, the past, and the present from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The second aim was to use the assumptions and approaches of one discipline as a check on the accepted premises and methods from another discipline. These aims worked well for the class at the outset of the semester, as the class examined the processes of memory and forgetting within individual minds. The class studied memory and forgetting from a neurobiological perspective, reading case studies and scientific research to understand how memories are encoded and retrieved at a neuronal level. Approaching these questions through a humanities lens, the class also looked at how individual acts of memory are represented in literary texts, film, and art. For example, the class read the Jorge Luis Borges story, “Funes the Memorious”, about a boy who acquires the ability to remember every detail of his life, down to the shape of every cloud he sees in the sky. The protagonist’s experience is similar to that of people living with Highly Superior Autobiographical memory, a rare condition whose existence invites questions about the limits of memory capacity in the human brain.

When the class began investigating the question of collective memory, it ran into difficulty reconciling perspectives from the humanities and the sciences. The term ‘collective memory’ was first coined by the sociologist and philosopher Maurice Halbwachs in the 1950s and refers to the larger social framework in which individual memories are believed to be constructed and embedded. Halbwachs argues that memory is largely a social act, given that many of our memories are laid down and recalled in social settings and for social purposes. Halbwachs asserts that memory is often invoked in response to questions posed by others, and that we assume others’ perspective in formulating a response. Hence, group membership informs the encoding and retrieval of memories, such that memories are formulated within a larger social framework, rather than in individual minds. According to Halbwachs (Halbwachs,1992):

There is no point in seeking where they [memories] are preserved in my brain or in some nook of my mind to which I alone have access: for they are recalled to me externally, and the groups of which I am a part at any time give me the means to reconstruct them, upon condition, to be sure, that I turn toward them and adopt, at least for the moment, their way of thinking… It is in this sense that there exists a collective memory and social frameworks for memory; it is to the degree that our individual thought places itself in these frameworks and participates in this memory that it is capable of the act of recollection.

To understand how collective memory would be approached by cognitive scientists, Drs. Gold and Bammer invited Dr. Daniel Schacter (Psychology, Harvard University) to visit Emory and speak with their class. Dr. Schacter has researched and written extensively on the topic of memory, and often appeals to the humanities in his own writing. Drs. Gold and Bammer believed the visit could prove fruitful for synthesizing a richer understanding of collective memory by forging a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. While Dr. Schacter was familiar with the term ‘collective memory’, he does not recognize it as a useful or meaningful construct in the field of cognitive science. He understands the term to be used metaphorically, and does not believe it can be operationalized and measured in an experimental setting. Dr. Schacter’s objection to ‘collective memory’ as a meaningful construct in the sciences compelled Dr. Gold and Bammer’s class to reflect on collective memory and try to make more sense of it—reflections which were actively discussed in the CMBC lunch talk.

A central challenge in defining and understanding collective memory is how to delineate the ambiguous boundary between individual and collective memories. This inquiry leads to questions about ownership of memories--when is a memory an entity we can claim individual ownership over, and when and how does it become collective? Dr. Robyn Fivush (Psychology, Emory University) attended the talk and argued that we are born into cultures that prescribe the way we should live our lives and form our memories. As a result, our memories are heavily shaped and constrained by cultural stories and definitions from the very beginning of our lives, such that it may be difficult to speak of veritable ‘individual’ memories that exist outside of a sociocultural framework.

The boundary between individual and collective memories is also murky when we stop to consider how a cohesive collective memory emerges from the individuals’ disparate experiences of an event. In the CMBC faculty lunch discussion, attendees all shared their personal experiences of 9/11, an exercise which revealed that many people’s recollections activated associated memories of tangential events and people. When and how do all these personal memories of an event like 9/11, each with their own complex web of associations and memories, hang together and become the collective memory we speak of when we say “never forget” 9/11? In discussing this issue, Dr. Bammer also raised questions about what gets lost as this collective memory emerges, and what happens to all the individual memories along the way?

Defining ownership over individual and collective memories in turn raises questions about the transmission of memories across time and space. Can individuals claim to have access to a collective memory of an event for which they were not present? For example, children born after 9/11 will have had no first-hand experience of the event, but will hear others’ accounts and be exposed to media coverage of the event many times throughout their lives. Do we acknowledge these children as having shared ownership of the collective memory of 9/11? Many attendees participating in the discussion endorsed the belief that intergenerational memories constitute collective memory, for the experiences of an event are effectively shared and constitute memories that are central to people’s identities. If collective memories can be claimed to extend to individuals who do not have first-hand experience of the event, they would stand in sharp contrast with Dr. Schacter’s definition of memory. In Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past, Schacter explains “In order to be experienced as a memory, the retrieved information must be recollected in the context of a particular time and place and with some reference to oneself as a participant in the episode” (Schacter, 2008, p.17).

Defining collective memory also raises thorny questions about the reliability of memories and whether the term ‘story’ may be more appropriate than ‘memory’ in some contexts. When events are transmitted across generations, details may be added, altered, or dropped, calling into question the verisimilitude of the memory. Hence, it may be argued that memories that have been altered in various ways may be more accurately described as ‘stories’. This does not necessarily discriminate collective memories from individual ones. Dr. Gold pointed out that individual memories are altered when they are reconstructed by the mind, and that individual memory is also fallible in all kinds of ways—a point that Dr. Schacter raised himself in his talk on the seven sins of memory when he was visiting Emory. Thus, fallibility should not necessarily be a reason to deem collective memory any less valid than individual memory from a scientific perspective.

Although Dr. Schacter was not amenable to the idea of ‘collective memory’ from the perspective of a scholar in the cognitive sciences, his visit ultimately proved to be generative for the class. Dr. Bammer explained that the students were frustrated with Dr. Schacter’s response, and that it motivated them to tackle “richer, more nuanced, more risky, more experimental projects” probing questions concerned with collective memory. For example, one student examined how collective memories of the Irish famine are represented in Irish literature and how these memories may be affecting the way people experience the current economic crisis. Many unresolved questions remain concerning how to define and understand collective memory, but Drs. Gold and Bammer’s class and the CMBC faculty lunch discussion made progress in hashing out these questions and opening a dialogue about how to address them from a cross-disciplinary perspective.

References

Halbwachs, M. (1992). On Collective Memory. University of Chicago Press.

Schacter, D. L. (2008). Searching for Memory: The Brain, Th. Basic Books.

Jaeger & Wolff: Bridges between Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology?

Dieter Jaeger and Phillip Wolff, How to Build Bridges between Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology

In the first CMBC Faculty Lunch Discussion of the Spring 2015 semester, titled ‘How to Build Bridges between Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology?’ Dr. Phillip Wolff (Department of Psychology, Emory University) and Dr. Dieter Jaeger (Department of Biology, Emory University) conversed about the ways in which cognitive psychology and neuroscience can develop more meaningful cross-disciplinary collaborations. The two fields address overlapping research questions and use some of the same modeling tools, but, historically, have been relatively isolated from one another. Drs. Wolf and Jaeger emphasized the benefits that can come from greater collaboration between the two disciplines, and acknowledged the challenges that make collaboration inherently difficult. The lunch discussion itself provided a starting-point for bringing faculty and researchers from both disciplines together, encouraging dialogue about the advantages of building a stronger alliance between the two disciplines.

Collaboration between cognitive psychology and computational neuroscience has the potential to be mutually beneficial, as research findings from one discipline help constrain and guide research in the other. Cognitive psychology research delineates how human minds represent information and perform computations in different contexts. Through subtle manipulations of task design, cognitive psychologists can identify whether information can be represented in different ways and which representation is most likely, given the particular context, learning-related changes, and individual cognitive biases. For example, cognitive psychology research has found that the spatial relationship between objects can be represented in multiple ways by the human mind, and that different cultures have biases toward particular representations. A ball sitting on the ground in proximity to a chair could be described as being to the north of the chair, in front of the chair, or to the right of the chair. The first description captures allocentric properties of the scene, the second reflects the position of the objects relative to each other, and the third corresponds to an egocentric perspective. By asking participants to describe the scenes, cognitive psychologists can discern which type of spatial representation participants are using. These varied representations likely map on to different neural processes, so it would be important for a neuroscientist to identify which representation is being used in a particular task, in order to test a more constrained hypothesis about neural pathways of activity. In this way, research findings from cognitive psychology provide top-down guidance to neuroscientists, allowing them to make more precise predictions about the location and type of neural activity they expect to see.

Neuroscientists examine neural processes at varying spatial levels, from subcellular processes taking place in individual neurons, at one end of the continuum, to interactions between functional brain networks at the other end of the continuum. Just as cognitive psychology findings can be used to provide top-down guidance in constraining the hypotheses of neuroscientists, the corpus of neuroscience research can provide bottom-up information about the flow of activity in neural pathways and help psychologists make more refined predictions about cognition, perception, and behavior. For example, lesion and neuroimaging research has provided evidence that there are distinct learning and memory systems in the brain—a hippocampal-based system and a striatal-based one--and that these systems competitively and cooperatively interact, depending on the context. Neuroscience research can help cognitive psychologists refine predictions and build more accurate models to capture how people learn new skills and remember information.

Despite the advantages to be had from greater communication between the disciplines, there are a number of challenges that make collaboration difficult. Some attendees raised the point that between the cellular processes that computational neuroscientists study, and the higher-level cognitive phenomena that cognitive psychologists research, exist multiple layers of neurobiological complexity that are challenging to traverse. A single neuron itself is very complex, receiving inputs from thousands of other neurons and responding to diffuse neuromodulators in a variety of different ways.  Thousands of neurons organize into well-structured networks, which themselves give rise to larger-scale maps, such as the somatotopic map in the somatosensory cortex. At a larger spatial scale, brain regions with well-studied functions come into view, and these regions interact with one another in coordinated ways, defining systems (e.g., the limbic system). Because there are many intermediary steps between the level of neurons and the level of functional systems, and each level is itself defined by profoundly complex interactions, it is inherently challenging to model how activity in individual neurons, or even neuronal networks, map on to higher-level phenomena like language and perception. Despite these challenges, neuroimaging is a promising tool for bridging the gap between nervous system activity at different spatial levels and human cognition. Neuroimaging detects functional activity at the systems level in the brain as humans perform cognitive and perceptual tasks. Thanks to research being carried out by investigators like Shella Keilholz in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology, we are gaining insight into how systems-level activity detected by neuroimaging corresponds to the coordinated neural activity occurring on a much finer spatial scale. Hence, neuroimaging provides an important link between how activity at smaller spatial scales in the brain generates higher-level cognitive processes.

Another challenge that has proven to be problematic historically for the two disciplines is the dearth of models and theories that make clear and testable predictions. In the early 1990s, the two disciplines temporarily came together to experiment with a new generation of connectionist network models. However, neuroscientists quickly soured on these models because they failed to make clear predictions about neural activity, and psychologists found that they modeled cognition and behavior in ways that were very different from how human minds appear to work. As a result, the two disciplines drifted apart and made less effort to coordinate conferences and meetings together. Recently, new and exciting machine learning algorithms have emerged that may encourage the disciplines to work together more closely again, by providing the means to design and test more promising models. In addition, efforts made by centers like CMBC and other cross-disciplinary institutes and national meetings can facilitate greater communication between the researchers in these fields. As a case in point, the CMBC Faculty Lunch Discussion was successful in bringing together Emory researchers from computational neuroscience and cognitive psychology, some of whom had never met before, and creating a space for the two fields to consider how they can benefit from greater collaboration.