Becoming A Dad

Memory from Cats

Trying to understand what is happening inside the brain of my two-month old daughter has inadvertently taught me about myself.

We both have brains; we are both having lots of new experiences. And we are both unable to articulate these experiences fully. For her, it’s because she doesn’t yet have many mental models — she doesn’t have a sense of herself in 3D space, she doesn’t have a sense of sequence, she can make sounds but they are just sounds, not encoded with semantic meaning. I have all these capacities. Why am I still tongue-tied?

While she doesn’t have any mental models, I have too many. My brain has many grooved patterns built over time. They are not calcified. I still have neural plasticity. But they are long-standing and have served me well and now, all of a sudden, a wave of new experiences, rich, full, elevated-oxytocin moments are coming thick and fast like invaders over a rampart, overwhelming my capacity to make sense of them. Intermittent sleep doesn’t help either since sleep is where a lot of life fragments are integrated into a cohesive whole.

So I’m letting go (partially, as much as I can) of the attempt to ‘make sense’ of what’s happening to me and am instead sinking into the experience without attempting to distill it. Still, there’s a few things that I’ve learned that I’m eager to share.

One, I learned a new word. In memory research, the initial impact of an experience on the brain is called an ‘engram.’ An engram may contain, for an adult, many different aspects: facts, elements of one’s own autobiography, sensations, emotional content.

(The Developing Mind’ by Daniel Siegel)

Now, how this engram is stored and recalled, depends a lot on how you grew up, how you treated memories before. I have always had strong semantic recall; I’m good with words and facts but I have poor perceptual recall. I can’t recall how things tasted or smelled. Our dinner table conversation as a family often consisted of facts: ‘What battles did Alexander the Great win? Issus, Granicus, Arbela’, ‘What was the name of his horse? Bucephalus’ instead of ‘What did you today? What was the school lunch?’ My dad loves trivia and used to quiz us on capitals of the world but we weren’t big on ‘how was the bus ride home.’

When we got to Japan for our two-month stay, T was confused when she saw that I journaled everyday about everything — what we ate, what we saw, what we heard, what we smelled. I told her it helped with my recall. It was just something I’d done for the longest time. Now, I finally understand what I was doing and why it was silly to her. She just remembers how something tastes. I need to convert perceptual memory into semantic memory — words — and those words then trigger for me the taste of ichigo daifuku - strawberry wrapped in red bean paste. For me, the memory is inseparable from the words. This is true for most of my memories except for very emotionally charged ones. I need to convert memories into words for them to enter long-term storage. My engrams are stored largely semantically. And the semantic recall triggers the other aspects of the engram to fire in my brain and I remember the rest of the episode.

Without realizing this, my younger self discovered journaling as a way to make up for poor perceptual memory. I used a strength — ‘semantic recall’ — to cover up a weakness (episodic recall). It’s always funny to me how so much of our cognitive wiring is jerry-rigged.

I hope my daughter comes to enjoy words but also earnestly hope she won’t have to write down what she ate to remember how it tasted!

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