This Is Us
I’ll Always Remember
How experiences become memories, which turn into stories
My friend Lisa and I have a very specific, limited relationship: We make mix CDs (and more recently, playlists) of soundtrack music for each other. Yet it’s also oddly intimate: a shared love of music bares something in you — especially love of an uncool, schmaltzy genre like movie scores. I just finished a new mix for her, of ’80s film music — my own idiosyncratic ’80s cinema, as defined by the arty independent movies I saw at Shriver Hall on weekends in college: films like Blue Velvet, Repo Man, Brazil. Listening to this music has made me a little wistful for that period in adolescence and young adulthood when your mind is more receptive, more malleable than it will ever be again, when art has an impact on you that it can’t have later on in life, no matter how much you may hope to be astonished and moved and transformed again as you were then. In those years, the cement of your mind is still wet, the impressions of art indelible; eventually it sets, and becomes harder to mark.
While I was working on my ’80s mix I met my next-door neighbor, a postdoc in neuroscience who studies associative memory. We’d have cocktails out on our shared fire escape at dusk, and she’d tell me about her field. You probably already know, intuitively, that you alter a…
