I woke up in the middle of the night, as I always do in the first days after flying back from the other end of the world, and left my room with the first sights of sunlight. I walked across the campus, with the bliss of something novel happening in my life — I am living on east campus for the first time this summer, and it feels like a completely different place after living in GovCo for three years.
I love early mornings, the mellow blue of the sky, and the peaceful sounds of birds singing. I love how there is no one around, and how I am the only person experiencing the moment. For a brief second, everything around me — the trees, the elegant architecture, the sun slowly rising — belongs to me.
As I walk across the campus, the memories I have attached to different places awaken in my mind. Somehow, it feels as if I am not walking across campus, but across time, stepping through the different timesteps of my life’s history, with different corners of the campus reminding me of the somewhat melancholic moments of my past. I think back to the memories I had once enjoyed so, so, so deeply, and think back to the people of my past in this promenade of memories. But why is it that we remember our memories while visiting the places where they occurred?
In our brains, deep in our medial temporal lobes, lies the hippocampus — the beautiful structure that helps us experience the moments we are in, and create memories. When we experience a moment, we receive various sensory stimuli — the things we are seeing, touching, hearing — which activate certain regions in the cortex, the outer layer of the brain. These different cortical representations — of sights, sounds, and so — get bound together to form a memory trace in the hippocampus. A memory is simply a specific network of neurons in the hippocampus that represents an integrated sensory experience.
Walking across the place where the memory happened serves as a cue that can activate an old memory, which leads to the daily phenomenon known as remembering. Seeing the place where the original event had occurred activates a cortical region in my brain. In turn, this cortical activation can result in the memory trace for the original experience getting reassembled in the hippocampus through a process called pattern completion: through the partial cue of just seeing the place, the network that corresponds to the original memory gets completed. This leads to the neurons in the cortical regions — that represent the sensory experiences — that were active in my first experiencing of the event to get fired as a result, in a process called cortical reinstatement; and, this results in the remembering of a past memory, with all its rich, lively, meaningful sensory details.
As I walked across Wilbur Field, I remembered the memory of a night, so long ago that the name Wilbur wouldn’t have been familiar to me back then. I was with a boy I had met a day or two ago, who would later become very precious to me, yet as I remember that moment now, he is someone I no longer know. I have this distinct memory of us sitting on a bench at an unholy hour into the night, and I was talking about psychology research. It must have been one of the first times I had seen Hoover Tower late at night, as I have this fading memory of feeling astonished while thinking it looked magical across the dark blue night sky. A picture of that view — I must have taken a mental photograph of it at that moment while feeling in awe — instantly appeared in my mind. I was filled with complete euphoria — with a boy I was convinced I was in love with, in my first days in California.
Seeing Wilbur Field activates the brain regions in my brain cortex that represent this sight. The current feeling of novelty in me might have gotten associated with other times when the campus had felt novel, like that night. The activity of these contextual cues, the place and my sense of novelty, triggers the memory trace for that night to get activated in my hippocampus, which results in the associated cortical regions that were active then, representing my experiences — the sight of Hoover Tower at night and the dark blue sky, the sound of my voice speaking about psychology, the thoughts I had about love and life, and how lucky I was — to get activated. Thus, I reminisce, as I remember this other instance of a time when the campus had felt so new.
As I keep walking, I encounter different parts of the campus — different memories, this time more recent. Around the lake, I remember an evening walk from this past spring, maybe an hour before sunset, that had happened with the pursuit of determining which path takes you to the SigEp house faster. A mellow choir of frogs, flowers of a myriad of colors, and the serenity of the lake. I had met him a few days ago, and he wouldn’t end up leaving a deep mark on my brain, except for that evening when he had explained the symbols in the horse race scene of “Anna Karenina” to me, and I would be insanely impressed to have met someone that actually reads.
Earlier that day, I was listening to the song “Somebody That I Used to Know”, and I had thought about how the meaning of the song’s title only makes sense to you when you are older, at a certain age with enough experience: when you have met a number of people, but have also lost a number of people. It’s a phrase that captures the feeling of people you were closest to once becoming “Somebody That I Used to Know” when you are thinking about their existence. It’s the feeling of emptiness that hits you when you are telling a funny story from the past that they share the main stage with you, but your co-star has gone missing in your life. The name of the song is almost a coming-of-age novel by itself. And I told him that, that understanding the meaning of the title “Somebody That I Used to Know” only comes with age, and he agreed. Perhaps there is a sense of universality to love and heartbreak and the changing of relationships: whoever you are, wherever you were raised, or perhaps regardless of the time era you live in; people come and go.
Walking around the campus, I remember such memories. Memories involving other people, people that felt so exciting and new and rejuvenating for the time being, but who simply become lost in your life eventually. I don’t feel any sadness thinking about them anymore, only a soft sense of melancholy, with a gratefulness for knowing that I have lived, with rich memories that are encoded in my hippocampus. But maybe, I just like to romanticize my past and make it seem more meaningful than it is.