And so he looked up in the night sky with her hand rested firmly in his and wondered if that moment or any of those that have passed meant anything at all. He thought about the millions – hell, billions- of people that share this planet with him and knows nothing about. He thought about space and time and how schematic is our comprehension of them. As if she could hear his unfolding chain of thought, she gazed at him and said with the soft voice of hers: “It’s a beautiful night, isn’t it?”. He returned her glance followed by a kiss that cleared his mind under the eyes of the silver moon.

So unique and complex but so vastly unaware of our place in cosmos. So childishly naive as to believe that the planet we live in is here to serve our existence. So easily forgettable of facts that are universal in a way that no government or emperor has ever come close to enforce.
Million years of natural selection led to the birth of a nation inside a nation. A unique creature that could so efficiently put to use its acquired attributes to prevail and then become able to transform its surroundings to its liking. Planet Earth opened its gates for the arrival of the rising God. Human.
It’s so easy to get blinded by power. Power hinders the ability to change things and when you possess a significant amount of it you tend to forget that there might exist a force more powerful than the one you have in your hands. You get a sense of invincibility. Until the moment the tables are turned and you get to face the truth. When this happens, you either have to adapt or accept defeat and, perhaps, vanish from existence. The human race is fortunately blessed with a high level of adaptability. This trait of course comes in many forms. I strongly believe that memory is one of these mechanisms that provides us with sustainability.

In the microsystem called society, memory consisted (and still does) an indispensable factor of our evolution. It was through observation and repetition (mechanisms that are closely affiliated with memory) that we were able to construct a basis for survival. When that was cemented, expansion was able to achieve. Civilization arose and, later on, technology emerged. As the human “tree” grew more branches and complexity, it sought and got a kind of autonomy. The connection between the microcosmos and cosmos itself stayed the same, but its tracking became more difficult. The personal memory of each person had to be combined with the memory of others, in order to create our collective memory. The ability to communicate through spoken language and writing made collective memory possible and probably one of our biggest contributors for our thrive and development.

But how strong really is our “organ” of memory? One could claim that our intelligence and knowledge depends almost proportionally to our memory capacity and the ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated observations/facts. But human memory works in a peculiar way. Short term and long term memory create a gap to what can be instantly retrievable by our brain. In addition to that, sensory and emotional memory seem to be more grounded in us and, therefore, best retrievable. This, however, shows that memory isn’t autonomous but rather depended on our senses and emotions which instantly creates a margin of error.
Let’s take the example of an aging person. As years go by and hundreds of thousands of experiences are accumulating in that person’s brain, the significance of a repeating or even a resembling phenomenon becomes less noticeable and gradually diminishes to an event with fewer possibilities of passing the threshold of a “lasting” memory. Even the events that the same person considers as milestones in his life, engraved in his memory, often blur and may even alter significantly with the passage of time. And really, this isn’t something that should strike us as a weird thing at all. A retrieved memory is the projection of an older self, powered by the sensory and emotional stimuli. And of course you can recreate mentally the occurrence of an event, but how possible is it to perfectly remember every aspect of your existence at that point of time? Try it for yourself. Think of a long past event and pinpoint the numerous gaps and uncertainties that pop up. Naturally, due to that normal imperfection, we tend to either fill the gaps in more abstract terms with our brain, or just deliver the general feeling of that moment. In a nutshell, every single event that occurs in our lives cannot ever be recreated in perfection because of the limits and function of the human memory.

Just imagine a scenario of men with perfected memory. There would be practically no need for documentation since everything would be accessible in an infallible way. But how stable would these persons be? Could they live a “normal life” or would the memories tackle their every decision? You can watch a possible outcome of this question in the episode “The Entire History of You” from the series “Black Mirror”. Another example would be politics or war. Since there have been countless events of lies, corruption and deaths globally, which we may have even witnessed ourselves or heard and, consequently remember, we should have been pretty absolute of not repeating the same mistakes. Instead, we tend to vote for the same liars and engage in wars. How can this be? It’s because of the level of emotional engagement we make that supplants the occurred event and leaves us with the (manufactured) need for change.

As a conclusion, the imperfections of the human memory create the necessity for collective memory which includes vital information for the human evolution, sustainability and survival. Personal memory nests within the fragility of the self and refers to the assessment of each individual through events (real or partially manufactured) in order to create the sense of continuum and stability of each person’s existence, as well as a reference for the emotional states which are used as a map for future events. It’s a carefully drawn line between what we lose as a result of a non perfect memory and the sense of equilibrium we get in exchange.