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The Persistence of Memory 1931 Salvador Dali (1904-1989) |
During the course of his research into memory, documented in his book 'Moonwalking with Einstein' (see my last post) the writer Joshua Foer meets Ed Cooke, an English mnemonist. Foer sits in on a fascinating demonstration of memory that Cooke gives to a class of students. In the demonstration the students are shown a projection of 30 different images, in rapid succession. After the projection is finished they are asked whether they think they will be able to recall all 30 images, to which one replies, not unreasonably "no chance".
A little while later the students (and Foer) are shown the 30 images again, but this time each of the images is shown alongside an alternative image. In each instance the students are easily able to recall the image that they were shown earlier - despite the fact that if they had been asked to describe each of the those images they would have almost certainly had no chance of being able to actively do so. The result of this experiment leads Cooke to make the bold claim that “Somewhere in your mind there’s a trace from everything you’ve ever seen.” Moonwalking with Einstein - page 27
In fact Ed Cooke's demonstration is based on original experiments that were far more extensive. For example Timothy F. Brady et al, from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a paper called 'Visual long-term memory has a massive storage capacity for object details' in which he counters the commonly held view that human memory is fallible and imprecise. Instead their experiments showed that long-term memory is capable of storing a massive number of objects with details from the image. In their experiments:
Participants viewed pictures of 2,500 objects [for 3 seconds] over the course of 5.5 h. Afterward, they were shown pairs of images and indicated which of the two they had seen. The previously viewed item could be paired with either an object from a novel category, an object of the same basic-level category, or the same object in a different state or pose.
This is to say that the 2,500 images were variously shown alongside a completely different image (novel); an image that was of a similar kind but sufficiently different (the exemplar) or an image much like the one they had previously seen but with a slight variation (state). You should be able to view examples of the kind of images the participants were shown below.
The research goes on to show that:
Performance in each of these conditions was remarkably high (92%, 88%, and 87%, respectively), suggesting that participants successfully maintained detailed representations of thousands of images.
I think this is fascinating from a neurological point of view - how the brain is able to store this kind of visual information without it being available to what might be called active memory.
But I also think it would make a really interesting area for an artist to explore - perhaps in the form of an interactive art installation. This might consist of a number of images (whether paintings or photographs) that are projected for a short period of time. The audience for the installation would then have the opportunity to view a brochure in which the images they had seen projected were printed alongside alternative (previously unseen images) and allowed to decide which of the images created by the artist they had seen projected.
