Human memory can be bifurcated into two types: declarative and procedural, sometimes called explicit and implicit.
Declarative memory (“knowing what”) is memory of facts and events, and refers to those memories that can be consciously recalled (or “declared”). It is sometimes called explicit memory, since it consists of information that is explicitly stored and retrieved, although it is more properly a subset of explicit memory. Declarative memory can be further sub-divided into episodic memory and semantic memory.
Procedural memory (“knowing how”) is the unconscious memory of skills and how to do things, particularly the use of objects or movements of the body, such as tying a shoelace, playing a guitar or riding a bike. These memories are typically acquired through repetition and practice, and are composed of automatic sensorimotor behaviours that are so deeply embedded that we are no longer aware of them. Once learned, these “body memories” allow us to carry out ordinary motor actions more or less automatically. Procedural memory is sometimes referred to as implicit memory, because previous experiences aid in the performance of a task without explicit and conscious awareness of these previous experiences, although it is more properly a subset of implicit memory.
What would happen if everyone in the world were to lose their declarative memory?
The plot generator is this. Everyone simultaneously and instantaneously loses their declarative memories. How does the environment around them change in their perception? At once, no one knows where they are, what they are doing–this much is obvious. But its a bit more complicated than that. With no memories of their past lives whatsoever, how can they possible judge exactly what everything around them is? The street they are walking on, the buildings adjacent, the cars passing by–are they now mere foreign objects with no known purpose? Well, yes, but only in a relative sense. If we were in this scenario, walking down the busy city street, maybe on the return trip to our apartment from a quick errand–and a phenomena overtook the world which suddenly erased everyone’s declarative memory–we would, like everyone else, have a moment of oblivion where we are re-perceiving our environment as if it were entirely new. But luckily, we would still have the ability to recognize the street as a street, the buildings as buildings, and the (likely out-of-control) cars as cars. This is because this kind of recognition is embedded in our procedural memory. It is not reliant on context, on time and place. We have perceived these daily environments hundreds of thousands of times and associated them to the ideas which they embody, therefore this skill would remain.
In fact many things would remain, as we can learn from the definition of procedural and declarative memory above. Our ability to do things, our acquired skills, and languages would all remain in tact. The ability to recognize objects for what they are and their general purpose should be untouched by this apocalypse. What would change, however, is our entire definition of ourselves, our society, and our life meaning. Anything which is contextual, anything that can be recalled as a “memory”, which is why it is often called “explicit.”
No longer would we know our own names, our loved ones, our friends, nor would we recognize them since their very existence is contextual based on the development of our own character (although I recognize that this point is debatable, and it is quite possible that we could recognize the person as someone of meaning, just not be able to identify what). We would no longer know where we are, the society in which we abide to, our homes. Everyone would be entirely stranded. Left with nothing but the uncertain instinct to survive, battling with fragments of recognized images, places, and feelings.
In Arata Isozaki’s City Demolition Industry, Inc, he talks about his business proposal, a coalition aimed at destroying contemporary cities as we know them. He outlines three major goals: Physical Destruction, Functional Destruction, and Destruction of Images. What stood out to me was firstly, the functional destruction:
The aggravation of traffic confusion through the systematic abolition of traffic signals, etc; the encouragement of of illegal construction; the dropping of poison into water reservoirs; the disturbance of communication networks; the total abolition of the housing number system; the immediate and complete enforcement of all legal city planning provisions.
The next thing which stood out in the passage happened not so much later:
Aren’t cities merely abstract ideas? Nothing but ghost images which have been built up by citizens through mutual agreement for their practical purposes? And, so far as such a mirage has been transmitted, only the process of transformation exists as the substance of the city. The force that can eliminate this transformation is not the destruction of cities, but the eclipse of civilization.
If you do not believe this, burn your house and dig up your land. You will not forget the scene, and somebody will probably make a record of it. Thus, you will still be possessed with some fragments of your home unless oblivion, death, and the total eclipse of civilization wipe out everything.
Isozaki hits on the nail on the head with this. But moreover, we can imagine that context, set-in ways, and history have all identified the city as it is. Our scenario–collective memory erasure–eliminates these and thus eclipses the civilization as we know it. And what happens to the city, to the urban environment, in this instance? Ordering systems are lost, ownership is irrelevant. We have essentially created the most formidable, unatural arrangement of space and material as a monumental scale. The city–now a playground of space without order (initially) and a blank slate which serves to rewrite its own identity. This is the setting.
It begs the question, what would cause such a catastrophic event? This is also a plot driver, and should remain unanswered. Many possibilities exist but especially interesting may be that it was imposed upon a group of people for the agenda of another. We can take a country like Japan as our home base, and imagine it the victim of this new wave terror attack. Japan, an island, suddenly becomes an isolated node in a vast network of communications, economy, etc. For plot purposes, we can say that all of these connections to the outer world are dealt with systematically. (From the onset, people have absolutely no incentive or reason to even think about contacting anyone beyond Japan, since they do not know what Japan even is anymore).
In a world of this type, littered with remnants of the past in all their forms, people must strive to make new order if they are to survive. It probably goes without saying that the initial mass chaos would be tenfold, as people become lost in a foreign world with no home, food, or ownership. Utilities would likely go out as no one knows whose responsibility they are or even what purposes they serve. These things occur because although the electrician will still have his skillset, he won’t know it because he has no context in which to use those skills (at least in the early stages). Thus, a person driving a car–would they crash, or continue on course? This one is hard to answer because the skillset of driving a car remains, as well as a cue (the mere fact that they reside in the driver’s seat of a vehicle at the time of the event) to use the skills.
The appeal of this as a conceptual setting is the inherent realism to it. Regardless of the onset of a phenomenal event, the setting itself is merely the contemporary world–only completely reperceived. It throws to the forefront the contextual identity of everything, the subjectiveness of our understanding of civilization, and our understanding of the every day environment.
Enter the architecture student. In a world that needs definition and understanding in the midst of chaos and unpredictability, a person left with the skill set to design and interpret the environment may suddenly become more valuable, if the skills can be tapped into. They may even wield a degree of proto-political power (a new metabolism, anyone?) In any case, this part is still in development…
More to come.
superficial words journal 