What lessons do you remember from school? (Picture: Alamy)

Thank you for the memories.

But who or what do we have to thank, exactly? And when do we have to start thanking them from? Most adults cannot remember anything that happened in their lifetime before the age of three or four, although sometimes you do get the odd fantasist.

‘There are some people who say they can remember being born but I think that’s ridiculous,’ said Dr Duncan Banks, a lecturer in biomedical science at The Open University. And what about his own powers of recall?

‘I definitely knew something probably about the age of three or four. There’s not an awful lot there. I can remember my brother going to a nursery for the first time.




‘I can definitely remember by sister being born and going to the hospital to collect her, so that would be six.’

Memories are funny things. For some reason you cannot quite explain, you might recall a line from a piece of literature you were taught in school or you may immediately remember the answer to a particular bit of long multiplication, such as 13 x 13*.

But then there is a mountain of stuff from your childhood that you’ve forgotten. Conveniently, however, no one forgets where to find the warp whistles in Super Mario Bros 3 or the words to the theme tune of the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles cartoon.

Dr Banks, who was born and brought up in Malaysia, said there are many factors at work when it comes to something sticking inside our heads for the rest of our lives.

‘It’s about you as a person, where you’ve come from, your family, the environment in which you’ve been brought up, how interesting the lesson is, whether you’re attentive – if you’re asleep in the lesson you’re not exactly going to remember much, are you?

‘What we remember from school are those things that are important to us, those things that have maybe given people a big impression. It could actually be an embarrassing event.

‘I can remember a lot of what I was taught at school. I can recall individual lessons. It’s the embarrassment of not having a tuned violin in a music lesson or the point of breaking your voice in the choir – those are the sort of things I remember.

‘It’s a combination of whether you wanted to learn or whether you were forced to learn. It would probably not take me too long to remember all my Shakespeare, and that’s going back 45 years.’

He pointed out that our memories are distributed in different areas of the brain, but are most associated with the hippocampus, which helps form new memories.

But our powers of recall are not always total. The brain doesn’t file memories away in a system designed for easy retrieval.

‘The brain isn’t like a computer,’ said Dr Banks. ‘A computer in the way we know it is doing things in a serial fashion but very, very fast. It’s stored information in absolute terms, in bits of zero or ones – I don’t think our brains work like that.



‘For a start, we do everything in parallel. Instead of having just one computer, if you can imagine it, we’ve got lots of them working simultaneously all in parallel and talking to each other. I think we store things more in an analogue way.’

Dr Banks said social media will have a big impact on the way young people today remember things, as the constant collating of life experiences and images online creates a ‘reinforcement of memories’.

Professor Andrew Hoskins, a lecturer in social sciences at the University of Glasgow, said memory is not personal, but a shared experience.

‘The real paradox of memory is that it is egocentric yet deeply social,’ he said.

‘Some psychologists speak of transactive memory, where we can remember more by knowing others who know what we don’t. This is especially the case in relationships where partners rely on each other to remember certain things, when family members’ birthdays are or what day the recycling is collected.’

He is concerned, however, that the internet is seen by some as an extension of transactive memory.

‘Digital media is not a benign extension of memory – rather we have lost control, we have given memory away,’ he said.

‘The advent of Facebook was as though we had all suddenly moved to live as Truman Burbank in The Truman Show, barely noticing, although being vaguely aware, that our every digital move is tracked and not just made available to a mass prurient audience in real-time, but there to digitally haunt us.’


Prof Hoskins calls this ‘iMemory’, where we have forgotten how to forget.

‘The faded and fading past of old school friends, former lovers and all that could and should have been forgotten are made part of a living archive of Google, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook,’ he said.

‘We have a kind of double presence in the world, where the many databases of social media and search engines that we use will always hold a version of our life that it is very difficult to change or hide or erase.’

Yet even without digital media, there can be an artificiality to our memories, as Prof Hoskins admitted.

‘My first memory is as a young child in a pram amazed at the taste of white chocolate fed to me by my mother,’ he said.

‘But of course this probably isn’t my first memory or even a memory at all. Rather, it is a story that my mother has repeated over the years about my delight as a baby at tasting white chocolate for the first time that I now hold as one of my memories, as though I can actually remember the same moment.’

The other twist in the memory tale is that you can’t remember something without forgetting it first.

‘There’s a whole load of memories that are probably inaccessible under normal circumstances,’ said Dr Banks. ‘Forgetting is a very important part of remembering. It’s ridiculous.’

They may be ridiculous, but we would be quite literally lost without them.


‘They’re an essential part of our normal day,’ said Dr Banks. ‘We couldn’t function without memory. We need to know where our keys are or where the remote is. How is it that it’s possible that someone goes to a shopping centre, locks their car door and then on the way back knows precisely where the car is, but in reverse? That’s quite a difficult thing to achieve.’

* The answer is 169

Do you have a photographic memory? Try The Open University’s test to find out at OpenUniversity.co.uk/memory