A Journey and a Mind Trip

Our memories are relief maps of our interiors, tracing where we’ve been, suggesting possibilities. The mundane route to work or a new acquaintance’s name merges with the treasured: the image of a childhood home, the rasp of an old friend’s chuckle. And lost worlds may suddenly reappear, invoked by a sensory trigger: the feel of the stitches on a baseball. The scent of star jasmine. A song from some distant summer spinning out from the dashboard radio. The taste of a madeleine.

“Memory,” an exhibit currently on view at the California Science Center in Exposition Park, traverses this world with a wild, circuitous journey through the theater of the mind and the brain. Developed at San Francisco’s Explor- atorium by a team of curators led by Michael Pearce, the show is a collection of cross-discipline work: video and fine artists alongside neuroscientists and other brain experts exhibiting their research findings. Through a battery of interactive installations that consider the psychological, biological and cultural aspects of memory, the show illustrates the intricate process we describe compactly as “trying to remember.”

Memory’s dimensions, it becomes clear, go beyond what we remember to encompass how we remember, whether in small bits or wide swaths. The act of remembering, unique as the person within whom it resides, depends not only on ephemeral factors like personality and experience but also the physical repository that holds them, the network of nerves and chemicals that work to store all manner of impulse and detail.

Two Angelenos whose work brings them in contact daily with these two poles of memory agreed to walk through the corridors of “Memory,” each revealing a distinct way of understanding the process. For Bernard Cooper, a memoirist and the art critic for Los Angeles magazine, the visit is a journey into the essential stuff of writing. And Keith L. Black, director of neurosurgery at the Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, selected as one of Time magazine’s “Heroes of Medicine,” travels through our biological coding, sorting through the goo and the two-dollar words to find the spiritual dimension at its core.

*

‘Recollection is part fact, part embroidery’

The ersatz vanity table set with a cluster of plastic apothecary bottles filled with Johnson & Johnson Baby Powder or Vicks VapoRub holds little appeal for Bernard Cooper. Nor do the reverberating bass lines or guitar licks from many seasons past hurtling from a jukebox.

What makes him pause is a TV screen.

There he lingers, staring at flashing images of Hollywood icons. They tumble past in luminous black and white or hyper-real Technicolor: A flash of Hepburn. A glance of Bogart. There’s a reedy Robert De Niro, interrogating his reflection. In galloping succession past dusty western towns, dancing girls, cops and robbers, UFOs.

“Precious Images,” a dreamy film loop assembled by director Chuck Workman, is one of the lead-off installations in “Memory,” and it has caught Cooper by surprise. “Those images remind me that when I sit down to write, even a brief remembered image can lead to a whole story. Whole narratives can unfold from extremely concise visual recollections.”

It might be a downcast smile, the shadow moving across a face. He doesn’t know what brief flash or magnified mini-detail might trigger his reflex to burrow in, to settle inside a memory.

Images have long been Cooper’s catalysts, the road leading backward into a vast store of memories. And this installation, with its flashy collage set in motion and its provocative prompts--”an image that lasts less than a second can evoke strong memories. Watch what happens to your memory when you see a large number of film images in rapid succession ...”--is designed to do just that: uncover the deeper associations tied to images--when and how they got there, why they stick.

As “Memory” evocatively illustrates, sight, like each of the senses--smell, taste, hearing, touch--serves as a memory trigger. Each sense has the power to open a long-stuck door or suddenly excavate a piece of personal history, making it as vivid as a chance meeting with an old friend.

The visual, in particular, might strike Cooper because he has a background in the arts--or, as the exhibit suggests, his preoccupation with visuals might point to why he chose those life paths to begin with. The author of “Guess Again,” (Simon & Schuster, 2000), a collection of stories, and “Truth Serum” (Houghton Mifflin, 1996), a memoir in essays as meticulous and luminous as tiny paintings, is not only tuned to the shadings of written narratives, he’s also studied visual arts and architecture, earning a master’s in fine art from California Institute of the Arts in 1979. Images stick, evolving into doors that open to the future and the past.

“Sometimes, it’s an image you can locate in time,” he says. “I can remember once as a kid my father and my mother got into an argument and they were about to leave on vacation and [my father] threw his suitcase up into the air and it opened. And all of the clothes drifted down all over the driveway and in front of the house. The image is so provocative. To explore it really allowed me to explore all the conflicts with my parents and the way my father expressed frustration, but it was all locked into that image.”

He glides quickly past installations that urge visitors to explore aspects of remembering like mnemonics and memory’s other clever shortcuts. He stops briefly before a laminated board that describes ways to sharpen memory using clustering devices such as “chunking” to help recall a string of unconnected letters, so that “IBMCIAFBIATT” becomes IBM, CIA, FBI, ATT.

“Oh, I don’t think so!” Cooper says, his bellow suddenly blooming into big a laugh. Similarly, he doesn’t linger with the kitschy “Jukebox Memories” installation that belts out pop-song hooks grouped by decade. And the trio of fancy Punch and Judy-style puppet boxes “Touch Theater” that test tactile recall makes him anxious.

His twists and turns, fascinations and fears, support the theory that we tend to navigate the past using familiar and comfortable sensory pathways. In fact, what Diane Perlov, deputy director of exhibitions at the Science Center, has noted, is that memory itself helps make determinations about what installations visitors find themselves drawn to or avoiding. Within the exhibit, which is designed to make people more aware of science and the unique characteristics of memory, “people are guided by their preferences, their memories of past experience.”

“Wide-Angle Memory” restores Cooper to more comfortable territory, appealing to his visual sensibilities and the pleasure he takes in arranging and rearranging pieces. He studies an image, a grainy, washed-out still of garbage cans in an alley. From memory, he now must sketch what he thinks he saw, using an old-fashioned black slate and a sliver of chalk. He draws: A row of cans. A picket fence. A crumpled paper-wad. His rendering looks as if he had stepped back five or six steps from the scene in the photo. He’s even tidied up the alley, moving a lid from the ground to the top of the can.

From an explanatory card, he reads: “Our brain makes sense of partial information by filling in the gaps.” On goes the lightbulb: “You have to stand back and look at what happened. You start from being inside of a memory, but eventually you stand back and look at it from outside--or farther away--to make sense of it. This is what I do. This is what a memoirist does!”

The nature of his own memory becomes clear to him as he considers what he’s drawn to among the exhibits. “When Flannery O’Connor was asked what was the most important sense for a writer, she said it was the sense of sight ... because you have to be able to see what’s happening in your head if you ever hope to get it down on paper,” says Cooper. “The trigger is visual, but the expression is verbal....I trust my memory not because it is accurate or extraordinary--because I’ve always assumed that recollection is part fact and part embroidery. I take for granted that there will be a certain amount of fabrication ... I try to be careful ... not to portray myself in a better light or to blame somebody. [It’s] all about trying to get closer to truth.” What disturbs him are a pair of explicit videos that examine the fragility of memory, its dependence on the body: The first is a mini docu-journal of a San Francisco-based artist, Paul Kwan, whose memory is scrubbed away after a stroke. Cooper races by with barely a glace: “I’m really afraid of anything that is about losing memory,” he says. “My fear of course is that I would be ... I would be a shell. In the best-case scenario I would be just like my dog. Just going moment to moment, wagging my tail. “

He’s made equally queasy by a different clip depicting an earnest Berkeley-based neuroscientist, Robert T. Knight, carving into a brain as if it’s a Christmas turkey and pointing out its various regions and their functions in the memory process. “It makes me feel my brain in a way that I really don’t want to,” Cooper says. “I want to live from the brain out. I don’t like to think of the physical component. And maybe that’s the memoirist point of view--but [memory] seems a sort of transcendent thing. Not sort of rooted to something as mundane as an organ in your skull.”

He’s more interested in the way we make meaning of remembered events, fitting the incomprehensible into our personal and collective narratives. He pauses before the last television set in “Memory,” absorbed yet again with familiar images--the Space Shuttle crash, the fall of the Berlin Wall-- and finding them to be slightly altered reflections of those that settled somewhere deep inside him long ago.

“One of the things I do habitually,” says Cooper, “is if something strange or inexplicable happens, I tell the story over and over and over ... until I get it right. Or it makes sense.” The facts alone, he’s learned, don’t really get at the essence of history. “The kind of ‘this happened, that happened’ narrative is totally boring,” says Cooper. It’s the incidental details--a door the color of lime sherbet, a whiff of Palmolive soap--that dress it up, give it context and set a memory in motion.

*

‘The brain is like an airplane engine’

The brain, that “organ in your skull,” is Keith L. Black’s domain.

He’s a Los Angeles-based neurosurgeon who pioneered groundbreaking research, designing ways to open the barrier between blood and brain, and thus enable chemotherapeutic drugs to be delivered directly into a tumor. Black saunters through the nooks and crannies of “Memory” as if touring familiar grounds. In somber suit and soft oxfords, he moves thoughtfully from installation to installation, pausing long enough to take mental snapshots and connect the mind-body dots.

Remembering and forgetting, this basic propelling device of life, says Black, is key to our very existence. “Memory is basically a survival instinct, the reason that the body or the brain does anything at all,” he says. He nods toward the exhibit “Smell and Emotions,” which offers visitors a chance to revisit various evocative scents. “It really brings out why you remember more--and the memory becomes more colorful--with smell.” Smell helps seal an event, he says, because it’s threaded back to basic wiring and impulses. “Most animals have well-developed olfactory lobes and depend on smell for activities--hunting, sexual drives, emotional limbic system. Since that part of the brain is more developed, in animals the sense of smell takes on a significance in helping to avoid predators--for survival .... If you can smell a predator or a potential prey, then obviously that gives you an advantage.”

Unlike Cooper, Black, impressed, lingers at the video of Dr. Knight’s brain dissection. “The brain is like an airplane engine,” he explains. “It’s redundant. You have to get an injury on both sides of the hippocampus to lose your short-term memory ... your ability to form new memories.” He’s intrigued by film of the stroke patient’s quest to reassemble his memory, and consequently his identity. He looks intently at a through-the-microscope video display of wriggling dendrites and nerves firing and connecting, reading them as if they were captions on a page.

Indeed, the museum’s Perlov has found that people navigate toward interactive exhibits that bring memory back in a rush. “People gravitate toward the exhibits that test their own memories--or their friends’ or families’.” They compare and contrast versions of stories; they test their own perceived limits or are surprised at what lies just beneath the surface.

Where Cooper sees memory as a vehicle that carries him toward characters (and ultimately himself), Black sees the brain itself as a character. And his deep fascination is with the stories of how memory is created, rather than the stories memory can create.

Many factors, says Black, determine why we slough off some memories or give one memory more significance than another. “If you had something that happened when you were 5, and you remember it, it’s probably because it is associated with a significant event. Either you got hit by a car or burned on a stove. That’s a pretty traumatic event. The brain [first] says, ‘Let me remember that’ and makes that first filter. It stores it in short-term memory.”

Trauma is experienced in the body as a “bilateral event,” with both sides of the brain working in tandem, says Black. As a survival mechanism, those events “are associated with a high priority, and are more likely to be laid down as a noxious event in the future.”

But it takes another step to put the event in deep storage. “Short-term memory ... is essentially a chemical event. There are chemical changes that occur in the brain that will last for minutes, hours or days. Then the brain has to have a second filter. So, it processes the information in short-term memory, then it says this particular short-term memory is important--someone gave you a million dollars, you got burned on the stove--let me put it in long-term memory. Then it becomes hard-wired. The actual cells make new connections to store that memory--it’s very similar to the computer. You have your hard drive and then your other memory space, which is not your hard drive, which you can basically ‘dump and resolve.’”

Essentially, the brain is a memoirist, as Black describes it, choosing details, highlighting or striking, and ultimately determining what will best move us forward in our personal life stories. “If you imagine all of the things the brain must do when you walk into a room, every little detail it records: the lights, where every stool is, every sound--you don’t want to remember all of that stuff. The brain wants to dump it out. The brain wants to decide what is important for me to learn to enhance my survival. So, in the stroke patient [video], for example, what the brain remembered was that he had some of his childhood food--Chinese food--which is what he liked in the past.”

Sunk deep in long-term memory, says Black, “the brain said: ‘Oh. I remember this. This must be important. Let me start paying attention.’ And the more attention it pays, the more it begins to stimulate the process of laying down new memories.”

There are reasons, he explains, that some memories stand out in sharp relief from others, or that an event witnessed by many might be remembered and interpreted in just as many ways. “It’s illustrated in the drawing exercises around the exhibit. Unless the event is truly significant, you will only remember a portion of the details,” and the brain, as Cooper learned, makes accommodations, filling in the gaps with imagination. The same goes for family disputes over who was wearing what and who said what to whom: “Let’s say you remember 60% of the detail. And everyone is going to remember a different percent of that 60%.”

The metamorphosis of the story into “Rashomon” begins as each participant’s brain makes allowances and tweaks for what it does and doesn’t know. “Everything gets either amplified or downplayed,” says Black. “And then the events change. You change a word and someone extrapolates something else .... “ like the best of fiction.

And like the best of fiction, these stories become embedded, passed along. Memory genes, says Black, are shared and transmitted. “The best example,” says Black, “are birds who can migrate thousands of miles when they are born and remember without having seen that pathway before. Or remember a mating song without ever having heard it before. So the genes are basically code for certain programs and connections in the brain.”

In humans, built-in memory goes beyond coded primal instincts: fears--arachnophobia, say--or survival skills such as homing in on prey. It may have a spiritual sense as well, Black suggests. “If you think back, in essence, theoretically all of us could have a pre-programmed memory of the origin of life,” he says. “And if you look at the writings of all the different religions, no matter what it is--Christianity, Buddhism--it all has common themes. One possibility, an explanation for those common themes, is that we all have a certain sort of genetic program--whoever our creator was and whatever the origin of life was.”

That might begin to explain a memoirist’s reverence for stories sprung from the past by unexpected triggers, the stories of our own beginnings.

At an exhibit consisting of a night stand set simply with a lamp and open journal, Cooper pauses to read visitors’ recollections of their earliest memories: “ ... When I would put food in my diaper.” “Getting sick in the car on the way to California ....” “Counting in Italian.”

He gazes at the penciled entries, common, yet almost too intimate, then gently shuts the book.

*

“Memory” is on view through June 23 at the California Science Center, 700 State Drive, Exposition Park, Los Angeles. Open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission to Science Center exhibits is free.