(gentle music) - The memories that we have are stories that we tell ourselves.

Yes, we are programmed to construct coherent images, coherent thoughts, coherent memories.

- There's this belief in an authentic, pure memory that perfectly matches the original event that I just don't think exists.

- I find it very hard to remember the good performances and I remember very, very clearly the bad ones.

- If you're spending time trying to uphold memories that are false, then I think you're really getting in the way of good creativity, good memory.

- [Jim Cotter] On this program, with the help of artists and experts, we'll explore memory, we'll examine how we access the landscape of our past to help define the present and navigate the future.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) Every day we experience about 20,000 moments.

Theoretically, our brains have enough storage to remember all of them, but that doesn't mean it would be pleasant or useful to do so.

Instead our minds constantly decide which moments we should forget and which ones we need to remember for our own safety and emotional wellbeing.

Our memory is also crucial to creativity.

Great creative people draw from their knowledge of their craft and culture as well as their own experiences to make original and innovative work and because we are all creative, we are all constantly rewriting our memories, whether we know it or not.

This makes the very process of recall inherently flawed, says Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman.

- The memories that we have are stories that we tell ourselves.

Yes, we are programmed to construct coherent images, coherent thoughts, coherent memories-- - And narratives.

- And that includes narratives.

- When you are engaged in the act of remembering, you're cobbling together something new in the present-- - A story.

- A story, you're narrativizing, but you're narrativizing it from the point of view of the present, what your present interests are, what your present demeanor, what your needs are.

- [Jim Cotter] Jeffrey Olick is a sociology professor at the University of Virginia and a preeminent scholar in memory studies.

- The idea that a memory is you have an experience, you open a drawer, you drop the experience of the drawer, you close it, go away, come back at some later point and take it out intact has never really held sway with people who study this seriously.

Memory is always reconstructive.

- That seems to involve a principle of coherence, that is things fit and that is part of what a story is.

A story is a way of making things fit.

- I wanna have meaning in my life.

I don't want it just be a set of things.

- [Jim Cotter] For nearly three decades, singer-songwriter Ben Folds has been creating a wide variety of music from piano-driven ballads and catchy pop rock to movie soundtracks and works for orchestra.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) Recently, he has dipped his toe into the literary world with the publication of his bestselling memoir, 2019's "A Dream About Lightning Bugs: "A Life of Music, and Cheap Lessons."

In writing the book, Folds found that he had to diligently interrogate his memories for what was true and useful.

- I had a whole storeroom of corkers for this book just that's so funny I've told that at dinner before.

These are my classics, these are my greatest hits, these are gonna be in the book.

Nothing, nothing was left of that.

What I thought was interesting was not interesting.

What's interesting is what creates, what did I wanna say because I'm a songwriter, what did I wanna say with my book?

It's not just telling someone I went here, I went here, I went here, I went here.

I wanted to feel some sort of meaning and so I found a thread.

Now, my memories needed to serve this thread to be useful in the book, and they had to be accurate.

- [Jim Cotter] Yet Ben Folds' attention to getting the details right is unusual.

Most of us are poor fact checkers, which makes much of what we recall more like fiction.

- Maybe I'm just a good storyteller and I'm just adding some details to embellish it and make it fun and entertaining for the crowd, right?

I don't think I'm lying.

I'm just telling a good story.

However, I've changed it.

My brain will now restore this updated version and delete the old and we're not aware of this.

The next time I go to retell the story, the original version is gone and I've got this 2.0 version of work with.

- [Jim Cotter] Lisa Genova is a neuroscientist and author whose bestselling novels and an Oscar-winning movie explore her discoveries about various neurological disorders.

In 2021, her first book of nonfiction, "Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting" became a bestseller.

- [Lisa Genova] "Every time we pull an episodic memory "from the cortical shelf, it becomes vulnerable to change "and before it's re-shelved, "we overwrite the version we just retrieved "with this new edition containing any updates we've made, "updates that can unwittingly drift further and further away "from what actually happened.

"Your memory for what happened "might be right, completely wrong, or somewhere in between."

- This is really part of human experience.

We experience the world and we feel that we experience it in a valid way and because we see the world as it is, that's what we believe.

We expect other people to see it the same way, but in fact they don't.

- I think there's, I'll sometimes be talking about an experience with somebody else who was there, right?

There's some aspect of this shared story that we haven't experienced together, that I have and that other person doesn't or I remember in one way and that person remembers in a completely different way and it feels like I needed to remember it this way because of something that's happening to me right now.

I've attached myself to this.

I've processed that memory and have made for myself, the thesis of this memory is this and so then I'm putting the details together to have it be that and another person is like, oh no, it was actually a lovely time.

- [Jim Cotter] The playwright Martyna Majok was born in Poland.

She and her mother immigrated to the US when she was a child and for much of her early life, they lived in a diverse neighborhood in Kearny near Newark, New Jersey.

Her mother cleaned houses and worked in a factory to make ends meet.

Martyna Majok's memories from this time have formed the foundation of many of her works, including her Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "Cost of Living."

- Well that doesn't seem like a life.

- I sleep for fun.

(audience laughs) For what are you working so much?

- Everything.

- The first time my mom saw one of my plays was in college and I had not written plays really.

She was so angry and scared at seeing a version of her slash our life on stage and in retrospect, I completely understand that because she had lived in some danger where she came from as well as living here in America with a certain immigration status and living with domestic violence and very shaky financial ground and so we didn't talk for a long time after that.

- [Jim Cotter] In what became her 2014 breakthrough, "Ironbound," Majok again drew on her mother's biography, but this time with more success.

- I felt like I didn't quite get it that first time and this time I invited her to a show, but I didn't tell her what she was gonna go see.

So as the lights were going down in the theater, I was like, by the way, this play's kinda about you.

I hope you like it!

And by the end of that, the lights came back on, she saw the facts of her life.

Her characteristics were not in the character, they were more mine.

It was like a fusion of my disposition and the way that I am in the world, and her circumstances and so she felt a little safer and I've started doing the same thing.

I wear masks when I write.

I find it really exposing to write somebody who demographically is very, very similar to me 'cause I feel like people are like, oh, that's the you character.

- [Jim Cotter] In "Cost of Living," for example, Majok created a character who was a reflection of her circumstances at the time of writing, but he looked and sounded nothing like her.

- Signs are real.

This I know 'cause I used to drive trucks cross country, loved it, loved every aspect of the job, the scenery, every aspect.

Utah?

Utah's gorgeous and no one even knows it.

(audience laughs) - I feel closest to the character of Eddie Torres in "Cost of Living" than I do to other people and he's a 54 year old Puerto Rican truck driver.

When I started writing the play.

I was dealing with grief and that's what he was holding the most and his particular humor and the way that he moves through the world felt like as protection felt truer to myself than some of the people who might be my age or gender or whatever.

- But then I got popped for DUI in a car, blocks from home, lost my CDL, so I got the memories and some unemployment.

That life is good for people.

I was thankful for every day they ain't invented yet the trucker robots.

That life is good, the road, sky, the scenery, except the loneliness.

Except in the case of all the, you know, loneliness.

- [Jim Cotter] Martyna Majok's memories once dramatized do begin to seem distant from her own lived experience.

Yet in order for them to ring true, they must contain, if not an absolute then an emotional authenticity.

- I think because I'm not trying to figure out factual truth of what exactly happened and who said what.

I don't feel beholden to having to figure that sort of information.

Once it's on the page, it becomes fictional characters that also contain composites of other people.

You're trying to honor whatever tangible facts, but I think you're trying to find what's more meaningful underneath that usually for exactly what you're dealing with in that moment.

I'm trying to figure out what's happening to me in the present or what's happening in the world in the present that for whatever reason, a thing from the past is encountering and how are they speaking to each other to help me understand something now that's going on with me now.

It's an active pursuit that takes the form of pulling something from the past to help me understand the present and the future.

- [Jim Cotter] What we're experiencing in the moment that we retrieve a memory can be just as important as what we experienced when we created it, something the acclaimed pianist Simone Dinnerstein believes is happening each time she recalls a familiar piece of music.

- Such as the "Goldberg Variations," which I've performed hundreds of times.

Are you trying to stay true to an interpretation that you've figured out or is that supposed to evolve?

Or something worked 10 years ago but it might not work for you now and how do you keep it fresh?

Everything that happened at home or in in the world informs how you play it, how you deliver it that day.

So I think that interpretation is not fixed.

It's constantly changing.

(gentle piano music) - [Jim Cotter] Dinnerstein's life to date has been dedicated to the piano, thanks to a life-changing decision she remembers making at a young age.

- My father started taking me to concerts, piano recitals at Carnegie Hall.

And those early concerts that I must have been about nine or 10 and I remember the feeling of being in the audience and just that the magic of the sound in Carnegie Hall and just thinking, I want to do that.

And I actually had the experience last year of playing in Carnegie Hall.

The sound playing on the stage brought back the sound of being nine and sitting in the audience.

It was a very, very powerful feeling that I had this feeling of the sound swirling around me and I was creating this sound that I had dreamt about from when I was a child.

(gentle piano music) - [Jim Cotter] The start of that road to playing at Carnegie Hall did involve a lot of, as the old joke goes, practice, practice, practice, but it began in earnest when Dinnerstein was 13 and first heard the great Canadian pianist Glenn Gould's recordings of the almost unplayably complex "Goldberg Variations" written by JS Bach in 1740.

(gentle piano music) - I was in the bedroom of a boy that I had a huge crush on and he played this recording for me and I remember the light in the room.

He had this attic room, so I remember the whole thing.

So it was all very heightened and I don't know if I actually remember note for note what I heard, but I remember that there was this feeling of complete stillness and purity.

There was something about it that felt like an epiphany to me.

I don't know of what, but it was a very strong moment.

(gentle piano music) (gentle piano music continues) (gentle piano music continues) (gentle piano music continues) (gentle piano music continues) (gentle piano music continues) (gentle piano music continues) - [Jim Cotter] Dinnerstein's recording of the "Goldbergs" released in 2007 when she was 29 brought her worldwide critical and public acclaim.

Since then, she's played the variations countless times.

Each performance has been unique and new, something that she says can't be contrived or painted entirely from memory.

- The conflict between repetition and freshness is something that we all struggle with, but to keep it fresh, to feel like when you play it, you've never seen it before and the only way that that can happen really is by genuinely thinking when you're playing that you never played this piece before.

Listening to it while you're playing.

The Aria of the "Goldberg Variations" is amazing every single time you play it.

I guess it's the same thing as like having a friend that you've had a long time or a partner and still finding them surprising, familiar, but also surprising all the time.

(gentle piano music continues) - [Jim Cotter] In his debut collection, 2007's "Totem," the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gregory Pardlo began to explore his memories of the close real life relationship he had had with his father, Gregory Pardlo Sr., who died in 2016.

Greg Jr. remembered the stories he had heard from him as a child about his aspirations, the long hours at work, the picket lines.

In later books, Pardlo Jr. became more candid about their tumultuous relationship.

- "At 13, I asked my father for a tattoo, "I might as well have asked for a bar mitzvah.

"He said I had no right to alter the body he gave me.

"Aping what little of Marx I learned "from the sisters down the street "who wore torn black stockings with Doc Martins, "I said I was a man because I could claim my body "and the value of its labor.

"This meant I could adorn it or dispose of it as I chose.

"Tattoos, my father said, are like children.

"Have one, you'll want another.

"I knew there was a connection between the decorated body "and reproduction.

"This was why I wanted a tattoo, "yet I reasoned not in so many words, "this analogy only held in the case of possession, "i.e.

I possess my body but cannot possess my children.

"His laughter was my first lesson "in the human Ponzi scheme of paternalism, "the self-electing indenture "to the promise of material inheritance.

"Men claiming a hollow authority because "simply their fathers had claimed a hollow authority."

We have our relationships and the the idea that the text should sanitize a memory or eulogize the past in any way I think is offensive to me.

We can celebrate the fact that we're human and we're biased.

This is the thing that I do is I'm constantly making narratives, I'm constantly dredging my memory banks and finding sensory material or narrative material that goes into my work.

- [Jim Cotter] Gregory Pardlo's dredging of his memory banks is an innate part of how humans can uniquely create new ideas from old experiences.

Indeed, it is core to all creativity and innovation.

- And what we found is that our ability to retrieve episodic memories and recombine bits and pieces of past experience that's important for future thinking is also important for creative thinking.

- [Jim Cotter] Daniel Schacter is a professor of psychology at Harvard University.

His research is broadly concerned with understanding the nature and function of human memory.

- We tend to think of memory almost by definition as going back in time, recalling and reminiscing our past experiences.

But one of the things that we and others in the field have been focused on over the last 10 or 15 years is the idea that memory is at least as important for thinking about the future as it is for thinking about the past.

And some of the same brain regions that come online when we remember the past and imagine the future also come online when we think creatively.

So a lot of this work is leading us to reframe our concept of memory.

It's not just about reminiscing and thinking back about our past experiences, but using those experiences in a flexible way to plan for the future, to think creatively and to engage in other kinds of related cognitive function.

- [Jim Cotter] When Ben Folds is writing a song, in order to create something brand new, he theoretically needs to know every melody that's ever been composed.

And since there's no way for him to know all of the other songs that have ever been written or even remember all of the ones he has heard, he looks for the unexpected.

(upbeat piano music) (upbeat piano music continues) (upbeat piano music continues) - A mode is just like, take one of the notes and put it somewhere wrong and just leave it there.

I don't know.

(upbeat piano music) I'm very much in.

It's very blues.

It's a Mixolydian mode and then all of a sudden I'm like.

♪ We'd hit the bottom ♪ I thought I was my Really, I thought you were here.

(upbeat piano music continues) ♪ Thought it was my fault That would be the typical thing to do there because we've already established that we've landed in a Mixolydian mode, like it's all over the shop.

(upbeat piano music) (upbeat piano music continues) Just keep that going.

♪ We'd hit the bottom ♪ I thought it was my fault And we're not in the right key.

It's actually kind of numbskulled because I've just done like, I've butt edited two modes together and has me going.

(upbeat piano music) And now all of a sudden I'm going.

(upbeat piano music) Instead of.

That's the difference.

Now the way you would hear it is just it would sound very wrong.

(upbeat piano music) ♪ We'd hit the bottom ♪ Thought it was my fault You know?

- [Interviewer] But when you're writing that, that's all happening subliminally.

- That's all happening by intuition.

I only analyze or use things that I know about music theory or composition, so I can explain it to you and that's about all the theory is good for.

(upbeat music) ♪ I opened my eyes and walked out the door ♪ ♪ And the clouds came tumbling down ♪ ♪ And it's bye-bye, goodbye, I tried ♪ ♪ Down comes the reign of the telephone czar ♪ ♪ It's okay to call ♪ And I will answer for myself ♪ Come pick me up ♪ Up-up, up-up ♪ Up-up, up-up, up-up, up-up-up-up-up ♪ ♪ I've landed - [Jim Cotter] Conventional wisdom would suggest that the opposite of remembering is forgetting, the passive decay of memories.

But as it turns out, in order to remember, we need to forget.

- People tend to villainize forgetting and think it's this horrible thing, it's pathological.

We need to treat it or medicate it.

No, memory is an orchestrated balance between remembering and forgetting, so if you remembered everything, you'd be overwhelmed and unable to function.

So if you think about the vast amount of information that your brain is exposed to every day just by getting up out of bed, walking around, driving around, doing the things right?

So all of the sights, the sounds, the smells, the taste, the touch, the language, the feelings, all of that.

Imagine a whiteboard and you're gonna write down every single thing you see in all of that in a day.

It's crowded, right?

So if your brain saved into memory every single thing that came in throughout the day, you'd be bombarded with really a lot of non-essential stuff.

- [Jim Cotter] So our brains evolved to jettison the distractions and hold on to what is most essential to our survival.

- And sometimes that's approaching what is positive and good and wonderful, right?

Where safety is, where food is, where the village of people that we get along with, our allies, avoid the enemies, avoid the predators, avoid the danger, avoid the poisonous foods.

We remember what we pay attention to and that's kind of full stop.

What all of those things have in common is they capture our interests, our brain wakes up and we pay attention to them, right?

All memory is selective, like how we hold it, what we choose to pay attention to, what we choose to repeat and share, that will determine what memories stay and which ones go into the ash heap.

- [Jim Cotter] When Simone Dinnerstein performs, she says she's constantly navigating her own selective memory.

- I find it very hard to remember the good performances and I remember very, very clearly the bad ones.

So having to erase a bad memory in order to be able to play it well the next time is a challenge that I'm usually gripping with.

(upbeat piano music) - [Jim Cotter] Daniel Schacter calls these kinds of unwanted recollections "persistent memories."

They're those uncomfortable moments that we latch onto and struggle to forget even after everyone else has.

- When we have a highly emotional experience, for example, threatening experience and we want our memory system to be designed that way, that we have specialized regions that kind of automatically go into action and really make it easy for us to have a very vivid memory of something that might threaten our survival.

That's kind of the upside of the memory system.

But there's also a downside.

The cost is that sometimes we're subject to intrusive recollections that we just can't get out of our mind.

- [Jim Cotter] Yet on the upside, our selective memory usually makes easier to notice and recall cherished experiences, what Lisa Genova describes as meaningful, emotional, surprising, and new.

- And we don't remember same old, same old, and most of our lives are same old, same old.

It's routine day-to-day.

So that's why we remember vacations.

And we tend to take a lot of pictures, right?

So day-to-day life, I'm not taking pictures of my sink full of dirty dishes or the squirrels in my backyard, but if I'm at Yellowstone National Park and there's a moose or a bison, I take a picture, I've never seen a bison before.

So now that's new and surprising, I've got a picture of it, I show my friends, I'm revisiting the neural pathways of that memory.

So I'm reinforcing them and making them stronger.

I'm more likely to remember them.

- [Jim Cotter] And even though it may be a relief that we can minimize how often we forget, there are some forms of forgetting that we just can't get around.

For example, most of us forget names, but maybe we shouldn't be too embarrassed about it.

- Hi, my name is Lisa and we just held eye contact for a few seconds.

You would have enough attention maybe to hold Lisa, but I'm next telling you the next thing or you are telling me the next thing and the conversation moves quickly and so you didn't get to hold the attention there very long or it could be that you're distracted.

The other thing is that we're dealing with a proper noun.

So names, this is the thing that we for seem to forget the most when we meet someone.

I can't remember the name you just told me 30 seconds ago.

Now we're still talking and I can't remember the name.

Proper nouns are really tricky for our brains to remember.

So proper nouns, you can think of them as living in neurological cul-de-sacs.

They're an abstract concept.

It's a word not associated with anything necessarily.

Unlike if I were to say, hi, I'm an architect.

Well architect has all kinds of associations in your brain already, right?

Your skyscrapers and maybe particular buildings and maybe you know other architects and so all of these other things are coming up.

So if I asked you 30 seconds later, I said, hi, I'm an architect, you would say, oh, of course I remember that.

- You try various ways of getting around that in order to not disclose that you don't know the person's name.

But the one thing I've found to be effective is to, in situations where you can do this, to try to be proactive about it.

It may seem a little bit silly to actually study for an upcoming social situation, studying and reviewing names of people, but that's the best way to head off, I think, an incident of blocking when you can, because when once the blocking occurs, then you're kind of outta luck.

There's not a lot you can do at that point.

- [Jim Cotter] Ben Folds has included many people's names in the dozens of songs he's written over the past 40 years.

So in 2017, he decided to test his memory of this vast repertoire and what he called the paper airplane request tour.

A playful way for fans to hear the songs they knew and loved and to challenge Folds to dredge up those old tunes.

- I look at the stage and there's all these paper airplanes with songs that I have played at least once that they must know about and I try it and we're having a laugh together.

If they send something up on stage and obviously I'm supposed to know it, then I'm supposed to know it, but there are a certain number of people who are actually very entertained at does he remember that?

I remember it, do you remember it?

You made the song.

I remember it, do you remember it?

- [Jim Cotter] And so we asked Ben Folds to play a similar memory game with us.

And in the spirit of those mischievous fans, we weren't going to make it easy, so we chose a lyrically and musically complex section from his 1995 song, "The Last Polka."

- So you want the bridge.

So it's come out on two.

(upbeat piano music) ♪ My, my ♪ The cruelest lies are often told without a word ♪ ♪ My, my ♪ The kindest truths are often spoken, never heard ♪ (drumming on piano) (upbeat piano music) (upbeat piano music continues) (upbeat piano music continues) ♪ She said you've been pushing me like I was a sore tooth ♪ ♪ You can't respect me 'cause I've done so much for you ♪ ♪ He said, well I hate that it's come to this ♪ ♪ But baby I was doing fine ♪ How do you think that I survived ♪ ♪ The other 25 before you ♪ Sha la la, sha la la la la li ♪ ♪ The end is growing near ♪ Now we're treading water ♪ And holding back our tears ♪ And the day is rising ♪ We're sinking sha la la lo li ♪ (upbeat piano music) - [Jim Cotter] Our ability to make lasting memories starts at a relatively early age.

Toddlers, for example, absorb immense amounts of information about the world learning and remembering how to interact with what's around them.

But by and large, they don't remember events.

- And infants absolutely have memory from the beginning and researchers debate how to characterize that memory, whether it's more of what we would think of as implicit memory, so that's memory that affects our performance and behavior without conscious awareness or do they have explicit recollections, conscious experiences of remembering.

Certainly very early on in infancy, we don't think that they're having conscious experiences of remembering.

- Up until the age of four, three or four, we really don't remember anything unless it was really shocking, emotional, meaningful, like the death of a parent or maybe the birth of a sibling or a move to a new city, but otherwise, we don't remember much of what happened before the age of three or four because we don't really have the language skills to tell our brains the story of what happened.

- [Jim Cotter] Once we do develop language, we're able to tell these stories, and even as children we begin to experience many of the same memory errors as adults.

Misremembering exactly what happened during a conversation that happened a few days ago or misplacing our keys is a normal form of forgetting, but there are times when forgetting is a cause for concern.

Many of us are afraid of eventually forgetting what's meaningful to us, so it's no secret that developing dementia is a common anxiety.

- Memory's so essential to our sense of self and this is why Alzheimer's can be so devastating and heartbreaking and tragic because it's so keyed into everything we do and so much of who we are, right?

So if we introduce ourselves and wanna get to know each other, we're relying on memory.

Well, who are you and what have you done and where do you live and who are you married to and tell me about yourself.

Those are all gonna be memories.

- [Jim Cotter] According to a study by Columbia University researchers published in 2022, around 3% of people aged between 65 and 69 have dementia.

A person's risk then increases as they age, reaching 35% for people aged 90 and over.

Lisa Genova's beloved grandmother was stricken with Alzheimer's in her early 80s.

And so, just after she completed her PhD in neuroscience at Harvard, Genova set about studying the disease in order to make sense of her grandmother's condition.

The research was a turning point for her.

She became devoted to helping others understand the difficult realities of cognitive decline through story.

Her 2007 bestselling novel, "Still Alice" is the story of the title character, a renowned linguistics professor diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's.

- [Narrator] "She liked being reminded of butterflies.

"She remembered being six or seven and crying over the fates "of the butterflies in her yard after learning "that they lived for only a few days.

"Her mother had comforted her "and told her not to be sad for the butterflies, "that just because their lives were short "didn't mean they were tragic.

"Watching them flying in the warm sun among the daisies "in their garden, her mother had said to her, "'see, they have a beautiful life.'

"Alice liked remembering that."

- Memory is about identity, it's about your life story, it's about how we are connected to each other, our relationship to each other.

So it's so essential to really the experience of being human.

- [Jim Cotter] Our sense of self is also shaped by our general outlook on life, whether we broadly view the world in a positive or a negative way.

- So are you the kind of person who pays attention to the glory and the wonder and the magic of what's around you?

Do you practice gratitude?

Right, are you appreciating your day-to-day life?

Are you revisiting the memories that were happy and wonderful?

And so your attention is drawn to those memories and therefore you're repeating them and therefore you're strengthening them?

Or are you a doom and gloom, pessimist kind of person?

You're like, oh, this horrible thing happened and I can't stop remembering the horrible thing and revisiting the horrible thing and let me tell you about that horrible thing.

And so I'm focusing on the negative and therefore the story of my life is gonna be one that's filled with a lot of doom and gloom and negativity, whereas if I pay attention to the good things, that's the book of memories that I'll carry with me.

- [Jim Cotter] The fallibility or malleability of memory is an integral part of our humanity, but our collective memories, those we have in common with friends, families, and our larger communities, can suffer from other kinds of limitations, says Jeffrey Olick.

- The kinds of processes that go on at the level of a group or society as a whole are different.

They involve institutions rather than brains.

They involve vested interests rather than individual interests.

People are reconstructing the past for present purposes.

We have interests that lead us to, for instance, proffer or support a particular version of history.

And by the same token, we also have anxieties that make us avoid other versions.

- [Jim Cotter] When reflecting on historical events, the story we take away differs depending on who you ask.

Just like the memories we have of our personal lives, as we tell and retell the story of what happened to each other, our collective memories also change over time.

- A life is 70 plus years if you're lucky and so when we're talking about deep cultural memory, that can't be carried in a single human brain.

So that raises the question of the transmission over generations.

What's really interesting is that different generations have different aspects, different attitudes towards the pasts that are being talked about.

So there was a classic study was done in Germany by a social psychologist named Harald Welzer and what he did is he went into schools and he gave teenagers the assignment of go talk to your grandparents about the Nazi period and ask them what did you do during the war?

And it was at a certain point in time, I believe it was the late 90s he might have been doing this, where the grandparents were actually ready to talk and they said more and they were saying, well, yes, I was in the party or I did this or I supported that and the kids couldn't hear it.

What they kept saying is, yeah, but you weren't a real Nazi because for them, Nazi had become this Hollywood image of cackling evil and that wasn't their grandfather or grandmother who they loved and had a good relationship with.

And so the title of the book in German was (speaking German), "Grandpa wasn't a Nazi" because no matter what grandpa said, the kids were hearing yeah, but you weren't a real one because the real ones are the ones who were shooting people at concentration camps and you didn't do that, so you weren't one of them.

So there are different generational attitudes.

- [Jim Cotter] Ben Folds can attest to how these longer term collective memories shaped contemporary attitudes.

Born and raised in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he's noticed that some of his songs are received differently by audiences in the South.

- When you remember it together, then I think as you're speaking, if nothing else, you assume that everyone in the room, your collective place that you are, is based on your memories and so I don't have to say certain things, I don't have to reference certain things anymore.

We all know those.

That's important collective memory to me because that's like, oh, we're all in this together.

When I sing a line about that, especially "my redneck past is nipping at my heels," which is also part of the song "Army," yeah, when I'm playing in the South, I think that there are a lot of Southerners who have tried to do a little bit of a makeover in their life because there are a lot of issues where we were definitely wrong and so there's a certain kind of Southerner that as soon as I say that we're all trying to rewrite, do a makeover, and they know what I'm talking about.

♪ In this time of introspection ♪ ♪ On the eve of my election ♪ I say to my reflection ♪ God, please spare me more rejection ♪ ♪ 'Cause my peers they criticize me ♪ ♪ And my ex-wives all despise me ♪ ♪ Try to put it all behind me ♪ But my redneck past is nipping at my heels ♪ ♪ I've been thinking a lot today ♪ ♪ I've been thinking a lot today ♪ ♪ I've been thinking a lot today ♪ ♪ I thought about each and every one of y'all ♪ (audience cheering) - [Jim Cotter] Our most intimate collective memories, those shared with our families, can shift and expand as new information comes to light.

This reshaping of familial memory helps drive Gregory Pardlo to constantly examine and reexamine his version of the truth.

- I think the resistance to acknowledging our fallibility, to acknowledging that not only do we have our own memories, but that culture has memories that we are steeped in, right?

I think that's the belief that I can separate myself out from the cultural memories that shape everything that we do, our institutions, our interactions, and our expectations.

The idea that I might be able to separate myself out and be unique from all of that I think is really harmful.

It's a belief in exceptionalism.

One of the reasons why I'm a writer is that I don't think my strength is in holding the picket sign, marching, or even arguing in a court.

I wanna tell the stories that help people to create healthy relationships among one another and ideas about themselves.

One of the problems that I experience in just in interacting with people is the assumption that we know ourselves, right?

And when we meet someone who is absolutely certain that they have themselves figured out and they know I'm the kind of person who ba ba ba ba ba, right?

That to me is a red flag because ultimately we have to be as much of a mystery to ourselves as any other person, any other human being is going to be a mystery to us.

- [Jim Cotter] A couple of years back, Simone Dinnerstein decided she wanted to address an enigma that had existed in her family for as long as she could remember.

It began in 1971 when her father, the highly regarded painter, Simon Dinnerstein, began creating his masterpiece, "The Fulbright Triptych."

- And then I was added into the painting when I was born in Brooklyn and so it's a triptych that depicts on one panel my mother holding me on her lap and on the other panel is my dad and in between on the largest panel is my father's studio and there are many images from my parents' life at that time tacked on the walls.

So this has loomed large in my mind since I was a child and also it's very interesting because a lot of the objects in the painting, like the postcards that are tacked on the wall are of paintings that my father and mother took me to see over the years.

There are many paintings that are in the Frick collection or there are little objects that were just in our house and bits of writing.

Everything has significance.

It's almost like seeing the memory of your childhood all in one painting.

- Which is also part of your childhood memory.

- Right, exactly.

Yeah and maybe shaped what I think my childhood memory is possibly, but something that always bothered me about the painting was that my mom and I are so far away from my dad and that art is separating us.

One way of looking at it is that we're circling around art, the creation of art, but the other way of looking at it is that this art was keeping my family at a distance, my father away from me and my mother.

- [Jim Cotter] So in 2021, Simone Dinnerstein debuted and new very personal work, "The Eye is the First Circle," in which multimedia projections formed the backdrop as she plays a Charles Ives piano sonata.

The premier, with her parents in attendance, was Dinnerstein's opportunity to reflect and revise some of her most potent memories of childhood, those of witnessing her father at work.

- I think that families are complicated and especially families with artists.

I thought it would be really interesting if I could take my parents and put them next to each other and we did that and it was incredible because I'm playing in real life in this piece and they're right next to me looking at me playing with baby me on my mother's lap.

(gentle piano music) (gentle piano music continues) - Did you tell them why you wanted to do it or did they see it first?

- No, I didn't wanna tell them anything about it and it actually caused quite a lot of problems because I didn't want my father to be part of this process.

I think he thought I was making a piece about the Triptych but actually I was making a piece about myself and I was using the Triptych.

But I had a lot of anxiety about how they were gonna react to the whole thing and manipulating all of the images that I did.

- So did it have a therapeutic effect, I guess I'm asking.

- Yes, I think it did actually.

I think that I felt that I actually created something.

Look at his painting.

He's using many other people's paintings in his own painting.

His painting is powerful.

One of the reasons why it's powerful is because it has like a hundred images in it of Seurat and Degas and all these different people.

Then I created something that used all of that to become part of my work.

I didn't think I was gonna be able to actually create something original and that's me.

And I'm a re-creational artist.

I use other people's stuff.

I used Ives's music and my father's art, but I think that I created something new with those things that was highly personal and really crafted.

(gentle piano music) (gentle piano music continues) (gentle piano music continues) (gentle piano music continues) (gentle piano music continues) (gentle piano music continues) (gentle piano music continues) - [Jim Cotter] And so, as Simone Dinnerstein discovered, when collective memories are inconsistent, the blending of different views into a shared memory can lead to a better understanding of the events that shaped our lives.

- With knowing more, we can do more and we can do better, right?

So if we understand this about memory and we understand that history has been written by the memories of certain people, then we can say, well, who's missing from that?

Who else was there, right?

So if you and I are gonna talk about what happened on this day and we only have your memory, then we're missing some of the reality of what happened because you can only capture some of the reality of what happened.

The more people that we can collaborate with to say, well, what did you see and notice and pay attention to?

What was meaningful, emotional, surprising, and new for you on that day, right?

Then we can get a a truer picture for what actually really happened.

- [Jim Cotter] We may never know the full truth of our experiences on our own, but our memories joined with those of others just might help us construct even greater truths about what it means to be alive.

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