How Your Brain Can Change the Past
Eckhart Tolle’s popular book ‘The Power of Now’ has been on the shelves of the seekers since Oprah first gushed over it back in 1997. The argument wasn’t a new one – that bliss could be found by concentrating on what’s right in front of you – but it’s certainly done its part in popularising the idea that mindfulness can help you get your head out of the future, or the past, or your ass.
‘Now’ is important for a number of reasons in the science of understanding yourself as its the only thing we ever have some access to. We interpret the data from our immediate environment through our senses in almost real time and fill in the gaps as we need to, creating a fairly representative picture of what’s going on around us. That really is the absolute limit of our environmental ‘knowledge’ and even that can be unreliable or interpreted incorrectly. It’s true that one of the major reasons for collecting all this ‘now’ data is to predict the future, so that if you see a ball flying towards your head, it’s probably a good idea to duck as the prediction is that it could bloody hurt if it makes connection with your cranium. Beyond this it becomes rather more chaotic, with our predictions becoming more and more muddied with variables that we can’t possibly have sight of. We don’t know how others will react or exactly what the environment will be like, so we can only create probability sets based on our experiences, our knowledge and our temperament. It’s at best a wild if potentially educated guess, at worst a doom-laden, woe-begone, dirge filled with dire implications for our well-being. We all know that person. If you don’t then, sorry, you ARE that person…
So what of the past? Our mind doesn’t create that because it’s already happened, right? Well not quite. We often think of time stretching out as a line that comes from behind us, has us stood firmly in the middle and stretches out forever into the future. This might be true in a far-removed universal sort of way but it means nothing to us as individuals. We’re sat on the line, we cant see the line. What we get instead is the entire future and the entire past emanating outwards from the probabilities that our brain creates. That might make intuitive sense if we accept that our future is basically from our imagination but what of the past?
Think about a film with a plot twist. The narrative ticks along nicely throughout most of the film and then BAM, the twist tells you everything that you knew was wrong and Bruce Willis was dead from the beginning. Or Edward Norton was punching himself in that car park. Or Dorothy had the means of getting back to Kansas all along. This is much more how the memory works and the twist is your understanding RIGHT NOW, not back then.
One type of memory, known as the Autobiographical memory, creates sense impressions of your experiences. Often we think of these like little films that are recorded onto the tapes in our brain forever but this isn’t the case. Memory, most often associated with the hippocampus in the temporal lobe, is linked to many other parts of the brain through the limbic system that can respond emotively, or with reason; passionately or with sorrow. So what of the event of the past when the new knowledge is filtered through it? What about the once happy wedding before you knew she was banging her co-worker. What of the loss of the job before the new exciting offers came flooding in? How do we make sense of a sad memory, that somehow gives us comfort or a happy memory that causes great sadness? The event may not have seemed significant at the time but if now it stirs something deeper, then that memory is more in the present moment than it is in the past.
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Time stretches out in either direction from where we are in it. The brain creates its predictions and its autobiographical memory only with the filters that it has right now, and in this way the sense of your past can only ever flow backwards. The good news is that this means it can be changed. If we give ourselves new tools that recreate memories in light of a new sense of control, a new sense that our terrible memories are the things that made us the beautiful human beings we are today, then we take control of the things that we thought were controlling us.
Try taking a memory that is less than pleasant. Start easy, don’t try to tackle something big. Confront it dead on. Take hold of it and look at it from every angle. Look at all the lessons it has taught you, all the strength it has given you, the butterfly that emerged from the cocoon you created around yourself in response to it. That’s how to change the past. You can’t change what happened but you can change its meaning and often that’s even better.