Bio-madeleines: How to reimagine memories
“The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect.”
There is a special feeling – a mix of faith and fear - embracing the very instant in which we let a letter drop into the hole of a post box, hoping that the envelope - and the emotional substance that it contains - will reach the recipient intact, just the way we have sent it. It is with a similar set of feelings, that each time we tell a story about something we have experienced in the past, we are sending out a piece of ourselves into the world, hoping it will stay just as it was when we had released it, until it gets to its destination, trusting our neural activity - the postal services of our minds - to do a good job.
The past that we carry, defines our present selves. Yet revealing our personal fabric of interwoven memories and, thus, revealing ourselves seems – most of the time – an impossible condition to take place. Just as letters, the information we try to share goes through many delicate stages before reaching our addressee.
If it is true that our identities are ever-changing entities, influenced by our personal experiences, we may begin to wonder what it would feel like to be let into someone else’s past? How different would it be to know them in a non-arbitrary way?
Is there a way for us to ensure that our memories are transmitted to another mind – to another body – as accurately as possible? Would experiencing, rather than just listening to memories of another life change the way we live our own?
Perhaps, if this window into someone else’s past could happen not just by regular communication, but through emotionally engaging and experimental narratives, we would be able to understand each other’s stories - and presents - in a much deeper, much more meaningful way.
Maybe, if we could find a way to express ourselves in a less mediated way, we could share our personal experiences to inspire diverse ways of living. Scientists have long tried to explore the ways our minds work when trying to connect with each other. When it comes to sharing emotions and memories, researches in neuroscience have revealed that verbal communication may not be the only accurate channel to connect with other individuals.
Experiments in bioart and biodesign have explored new ways of interacting with others, trying to break the boundaries between words and emotions. What if we could take each other onto a sensory journey through our most treasured and deep memories, regardless of how terrible or wonderful they may be?
Can a living body feel the sentiments of another living body?
How memory works
Our memories play a huge role in defining who we are. Our storage of experiences orientates our behaviour in the social world, and our ability to interact with others. Like a common ground, we move on a similar, and yet different apparatus of knowledge of the world. Although our memories are different, from a neurological point we all shape them in the same way.
The neural and biological mechanism behind our recollections has been studied for a long time. Over a century ago, scientists have come to distinguish between short-term and long-term memory. Where the first category refers to information that is temporarily held in our mind, the second one addresses past events that actually left a fingerprint on our brain, strengthening connections between neurons, the synapses, and sometimes even creating new ones.
Long term recollections are split between implicit memory which “affects behaviour without conscious awareness and without strategic effort to use memory”, like tying our shoes, and explicit memory, which “can be thought of as intentional retrieval, […] the willful process of thinking back in time for the purpose of retrieving previously encountered events”.
While creating an explicit memory, three regions of our brain become active, two of which are part of what is called the “the primordial brain”: the hippocampus, which encodes the information into the synapses, and the amygdala (also considered our third eye, as its functions are very similar to that of the retinas) which attaches emotional significance to the memory we are creating. It then passes to the neocortex where it will be stored for a short or long time, depending on its emotional weight.
For one memory to be shaped there must happen a moment when time, space and context merge together as one experience.
Our memory is therefore the translation of chemical reactions. The way these reactions work, by making paths in our mind and allowing us to walk them again every time we please, make the whole process absolutely – and somehow poetically - stunning.
How shared memories work through storytelling
Even though we form memories in the same way, it is often hard to make ourselves understood to other people. How do we transfer information between one brain and another? How do brains work when trying to understand each other?
In a recent study, led by Professor Janice Chen at Princeton University, researchers asked 17 adults to watch a show on BBC and to then verbally describe it while undergoing an fMRI scan (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), which measures and maps brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. They wanted to compare the neural activity of different people during the act of viewing the event and later spoken recallings of it, exposing the underlying similarities and differences in the memory-shaping process.
Previous studies have shown that when an individual remembers a past event, activity in the brain is reinstated. When someone recalls a book their activities are similar to the ones they experienced while reading it. However, the brain pattern during recalling memories is not identical to the brain pattern from the original experience. Certain regions of the brain undergo a transformation. The study underlined how this change occurs in the same way across different people as a systemic alteration that relates to behaviour, common knowledge and pre-existing schemas, which guide their recalls.
“There are fundamental similarities between the brains of different people as they perceive and remember the real world. That gives us a good groundwork for understanding each other.” – she said in an interview.
A further study on the relationships between perception, communication and recalling of an event, uncovering “the intimate correspondences between memory encoding and event construction” and highlighting “the essential role our common language plays in the process of transmitting one's memories to other brains”. The study consisted of “viewers” who watched a movie, a “speaker” among the ones watching it and then verbally recalling it to an audience of naïve “listeners” who have never seen the movie. These people only listened to an audio recording of the speaker's recollection. It was observed that neural activities between the speaker and the listeners were far more similar during recalling and recall-listening than the neural activity of the same individual in the two different moments of experiencing it for the first time and recalling it later on.
Moreover, neural responses in the listener followed the speaker's neural response time courses with a delay of just a few seconds, showing a neural alignment between the two.
When we share a memory, our neural activities strive to align to each other. There is much more neural similarity between two individuals sharing a memory than there is between the two moments in which the same individual experiences the event, and recalls it. Not only do our memories define ourselves, but the way we recall them reshapes the memory itself, our biochemistry, and also that of the people we are sharing the memory with.
Experiments in Bioart
As fascinating as it may sound, it also means that revealing our personal memories and, thus, revealing ourselves, is always mediated through communication and interaction. There is an invisible barrier through which the sentiment cannot flow unhindered. This can sometimes lead to misapprehension, which in turn can lead to more harmful outcomes, like prejudice and fear. It can make entirely sincere intimacy difficult between individuals.
But what if, instead, we could have bits of our past imprinted on a bacterial film, on a texture, or turned into a scent that other human beings could touch, feel, or smell? What if it was something that we wear, rather than something that we say, that, by mapping our brain states, would communicate to others exactly which feelings we are experiencing?
New ways of interaction could, perhaps, enable individuals to break down physical boundaries. Most importantly, it could facilitate a better understanding of delicate mental environments of people with Alzheimer’s and autism.
Bioartists have imagined a possible future in which our memories are no longer bound to our mind.
Gabriele Lorusso
Objects for a digital man is a project that consists of a group of six mysterious unrecognisable artefacts that replicate the physical sensations associated with the ordinary objects they represent. The artist imagines a world where material things do not exist anymore, and where these artefacts could represent the fictional narrative of a man who rediscovers his existence through tactile memories. By exploring the tactile sensations of the objects, the artist shares their stories without verbal communication.
“The physical contact with these things can say something about our own existence. It can tell where we come from. It can remind us of our family. It can connect us with the things we know. It can say something about the things we like. It can remind us of the ones we love” the artist said.
Objects for a Digital Man by Gabriele Lorusso © the artist
Kristin Neidlinger
SENSOREEs therapeutic biomedia is a bioresponsive design for extimacy, or externalized intimacy. Embedding it in NEUROTiQ, the artist created a brain animating fashion item – a knitted, 3d printedEEG brain sensor – that maps thoughts and exhibits mental states through color, allowing us to visualize internal states. Working on the Emotiv Epoc EEG brain sensor, which has 14 points that monitor brain waves, they created fourteen 3D printed synapse-like light points embedded with electronics within a nylon knit, whose colours respond to brain states.
SENSOREE began as Future Speculation for Healthcare from Master Thesis design research to augment Sensory Processing Disorder, a condition which ranges from ADHD to autism. The system is a feedback loop for behavior change and is applicable to many caregiver patient relationships.
Sensoree by Kristin Neidlinger © the artist, photo by Elena Kulikova
Margherita Pevere
Together with bioscientist Mirela Alistar and IEGT Laboratory, artist Margherita Pevere converted the memory recollection of a woman to genetic code. It was then synthesized into a plasmid, a circular DNA molecule and inserted into bacterial cells by means of electroporation procedure. In this way, bacteria store the woman’s transient memory in their own body. Few laboratory-created colonies of bacteria were further cultured to get the large biofilm then used in the installation, which retains the woman’s memory.
The project Semina Aeternitatis recounts a crucial episode from her childhood: “the first time she was sent home alone riding the family’s workhorse at the age of five. Initially, a shocking experience, the mild stubbornness and tenacity of the horse’s trot became a lifelong lesson for her.” writes the artist. The first time the woman shared such a memory was with Margherita, decades after the episode took place.
Semina Aeternitatis by Margherita Pevere © the artist
Margherita Soldati
“Smell is the most primordial human sense but it is often forgotten. Every breath inhales molecules, even when we sleep. It all flows into our brain and subconscious. Scents Apparatus aims to create a direct interaction between man, space and scent. The scent is activated when a person blows into the vase, rather than being passively perceived” writes the artist.
Scents are extremely difficult to describe, and much of the pleasure of nasal perception is the very fact that it is untranslatable.
So, what would happen if we could actually synthesise a specific smell we connect our childhood to and “show” it to someone with whom we are trying to build a relationship?
Scent Apparatus by Margherita Soldati © the artist
Memory and Touch
Out of all our senses, touch seems to be the more powerful and accurate channel to share emotions and their connected memories.
In a pioneering study, Hertenstein et al. (2006) explored whether people can communicate emotions to a stranger using touch alone. Participants were separated by an opaque barrier, and encoders (touchers) were asked to convey twelve different emotions by touching the forearm of the decoder (recipient), who had to choose which emotion was being communicated. This experiment found that participants could accurately communicate anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude and sympathy. These are broadly the same set of emotions that have been claimed to have universal means of facial expression across cultures (Ekman, 1992; Izard, 1992; Ekman, 2003).
“We used to think that touch only served to intensify communicated emotions,” Dr Hertenstein said. Now it turns out to be “a much more differentiated signalling system than we had imagined.”
A recent study by Fabian Hutmacher and Christof Kuhbandner, undertaken at the University of Regensburg, found that the sense of touch generates memories that are highly detailed and endure over the long term, through a far more complex process than previously imagined.
Touch leaves a memory trace that persists long after the physical sensation is passed. Neuroimaging studies have proved that touch activates the somatosensory cortex but can also activate regions responsible for processing visual signals. They, therefore, believe that when you touch an object without seeing it, your brain makes a mental image of its plausible appearance.
Could this imaginative process happen also for memories which are shared with us through objects and their tactile sensations, across bioart works and biodesign devices? Tactile communication could offer us a completely new way of sharing experiences and memories of emotions, ensuring a far higher level of intimacy than words could ever reach.
What does the future hold?
Nobel laureate and founder of behavioural economics Daniel Kahneman says that our experiencing self and our remembering self are two distinct entities and that the second one has more power in orienting our decision in the world, depending on what “it” remembers as good or bad for us.
If this is true, it feels necessary to wonder and to investigate what kind of impact sharing our memories and feelings have on pro-social community behaviour. Will it be possible for a living body to learn something from the memories of another living body?
With time, we implement other channels of communication, but, as infants, touch is the first language we learn. Researchers in neuroscience, along with experiments in bioart and biodesign seem to suggest that it could also be the one through which we share and shape memories with other human beings. Perhaps we could do so without having to rely on verbal communication channels and instead focus on the sensory part of the recollection that we usually struggle to express.
In order to try and awaken this forgotten sense, artist Margherita Soldati, a long-term researcher of tactility and tactile perception, who works at the intersection of art and healthcare, will lead a workshop with Unbore in May. The workshop is designed to be a collective experimental, sensorial experience. By “training” us to explore our memories through different exercises, it will guide our body to reconnect with itself and the sense of touch, whilst also stimulating oxytocin production.
As humans, we explain ourselves through different alphabets, but as living creatures we live our existence through the smell, the taste, the feel, the sound and the view of things and people that constantly and irremediably change the narrative of our memories, and our lives.
And when all of a sudden, just as it happened to Proust when he tasted his petite madeleine, one of those senses awakens a distant time in our mind and throws us onto one of those forgotten paths, how beautiful would it be to have the possibility to take the ones we love on that walk?
How exciting is to wonder: will it be possible, someday, somehow, to share with someone else our personal petite bio - madeleine?
Florence by Gerard Richter, overpainted photograph © the artist
”The value of a moment when it becomes a memory”