This illustration combines a number of pieces of clip art with some of my own artwork. It starts with vecteezy_man-digging-hole-in-the-park-illustration_648087 by graphicsrf via Man Digging Vectors by Vecteezy;
adds an excerpt from vecteezy_wooden-sign-set-collection_2050232 by kanamizu_std via Signboard Vectors by Vecteezy;
and then, vecteezy_treasure-chest-isolated-against-old-wooden-trunk-3d_18931954 by duangdee123050146 via Treasure Chest PNGs by Vecteezy,
followed by vecteezy_egyptian-pyramids-isolated-transparent-background_12975448_119, also by klyaksun via 3d Pyramid Vectors by Vecteezy,
and finally, an excerpt from vecteezy_archaeology-scientists-working-on-excavations_15680595_79 by klyaksun via Man Digging Vectors by Vecteezy.

Introduction

This wasn’t intended to be a separate post at all; it is the second half of the response to a guest article published back in March, before the unwanted disruption of my life caused by relocating to a new apartment (I’m still unpacking!)

Rather than repeat a lot of material from Part II, I think I’ll just drop a couple of links and then steamroller straight on ahead.

• The original guest post, a must-read if this article is to make sense.
• Part II of the trilogy series of posts, about how and when to fight the effects of Plastic Memory; useful to have read before this article, but largely independent of it.

Memories are ‘plastic’ because they can be reshaped easily – in fact, it’s almost impossible to resist this happening. Every time you access a memory, it gets read and rewritten – but the rewritten version is NOT identical to the old one, it contains new associations and interpretations and can omit details that don’t fit the revised narrative. If a memory hasn’t been accessed for a while, it can throw content away out of sheer “efficiency” (after all, if you needed those details, you would have accessed the memory more often). Like plastic, a memory can be and will be reshaped.

Memories are ‘fuzzy’ because they can ‘steal’ information from other sources – memories statements made sufficiently strongly by others – and write them into the memory as though they had always been there. This is why Police try to separate witnesses rather than letting them compare notes., at least until they’ve had a chance to document each person’s recollections, and why witnesses at trials are normally not permitted to hear each other’s testimony.

Put both phenomena together, and a third naturally emerges: Memory is unreliable unless reinforced by notes or other documentation. Logically, most of the attention goes to fighting the phenomenon, because an unreliable memory can be quite inconvenient.

But there are times when it’s useful, even necessary, to take advantage of this flaw in memory architecture. In real life, triggering memories of trauma can be tempered, for example, or simply made more tolerable. I’m not really here to talk about that sort of thing, though; my focus is on the RPG applications of the principle.

5 Harnessing Memory Plasticity

There are four direct ways that the GM can attempt to employ memory plasticity on the part of players. Before I get into them, though, I really need to take a moment to discuss the ethics of these proposals.

These are all attempts to psychologically manipulate the players. They are not certain to succeed, and the chances of success plummet in the face of resistance, while rising slightly in the event of cooperation. The best way to secure cooperation and reduce resistance is to openly admit what you are doing (but not necessarily how).

If the technique is abused, or misused, or only used to make the GM look better, he should be aware that each and every one of the techniques listed can also be applied by the players against the GM. This will rarely work, of course, because the player will not have secured the GM’s cooperation, but even the occasional success is undesirable. The best defense against this possibility is to give the players no reason to resort to such measures.

Your game table is not, or should not be, a playground for PsyOps manipulations. The goal is for everyone to have fun, not to “win”.

5.1 The Overlooked Detail

The most innocuous use of plastic memory is to employ fuzziness to retroactively insert some detail that was overlooked last time, something that would not have made any difference then, but that is likely to be important going forward.

The best technique is simply to narrate one PC ‘noticing’ the missing detail, but set the discovery in the past tense, at the conclusion of a brief synopsis of ‘last time’. This segues from past to present and sneaks the lost detail into the mix in the process.

Inevitably, one of the players will say “I don’t remember that,”, to which you respond “My bad – I didn’t realize that this small detail had been overlooked last time. I don’t think it would have changed anything at the time, but wanted to set the record straight so that you can make informed decisions going forward” – or words to that effect.

The worst crime a GM can commit is to threaten or deny player agency. This technique casts your use of the plastic memory into the light of supporting such agency, making players more likely to simply accept it and move on with play.

5.2 Retroactive Revision

A bigger change from further back may require more extreme measures. In such cases, it’s better to get the justification out of the way up-front (including a mea culpa for the stuff-up) and then lead into a synopsis that incorporates the correction.

The purpose of leading with the mea culpa and explanation is to secure player cooperation and deny player resistance. This has to be done to make them receptive to the revised backstory

5.3 The obscurity of temporal remove

However, this can also trigger player cynicism, in which a player develops the attitude that the GM is serving his own interests and/or convenience first and anything else a distant second or third. Once this notion sets in, regardless of it’s accuracy, it can be devilishly hard to shift. In this case, it can be triggered when players don’t perceive any need for the correction, don’t recognize its significance, and so start looking to assign ulterior motives.

If the relevance of the correction is not going to be immediately apparent, i.e. be a decision-making element in the current game session, you will often be best served by ignoring the need for a correction until just before it will become significant.

Some GMs may be tempted, in this circumstance, to try to sneak the change through with no announcement at all, especially if they think they can get away with it. My advice is don’t do it.

You see, there’s a second effect making such an announcement has: it lends the change gravitas, implying significance, and that makes it more readily accepted by the players. The more importance that gets attached to the retroactive change, the more the announcement of being at fault acts to suppress resistance to the change on the part of the players, because the GM is showing his human side through the somewhat-embarrassing announcement that highlights his own capacity for making mistakes. It humanizes the GM and that makes him a more sympathetic figure.

Most of the time, you can maintain an air of infallibility if you want; this is one occasion in which the needs of the campaign supersede such a perception.

5.4 Sowing Confusion With NPCs

With everything the GM does to avoid the problems that can result from game-table memory plasticity, it has to be acknowledged that the pristine clarity of recollections, reinforced with regular synopses and making sure to call attention to all the important considerations just before a critical decision can produce a quite unrealistic level of confidence in players regarding their understanding of what’s going on.

Every now and then, it’s useful to inject a small measure of uncertainty and confusion just to restore a little realism to the campaign. The best way of doing that is with an NPC who has a different interpretation of past events common to both groups.

“We remember the same things, I just remember them differently>”

This immediately raises the question of ‘who’s right”, casting doubt on everything the GM has been reminding the players of. Is the synopsis an accurate one, or has it been crafted by the GM to preserve misinterpretations and mistakes made by the players at the time?

The unrealistic hyper-confidence is instantly dispelled.

The GM can reinforce this effect with phrases such as “as you recall,” rather than employing absolute certainty within the narrative. This can make it harder work to get through however, so it’s best used lightly – a hint, not a sledgehammer.

6 The Strength Of Continuity

Some campaigns are more strongly affected by the impact of memory plasticity than others. Arguably, for example, the more episodic a campaign, the less pristine the continuity has to be, and the greater the lapses that the GM can simply ignore.

There are several subvarieties to contemplate, as well – the Adventurer’s Club features strong continuity of characters, and in some of the plot elements, where those are used to bind parts of a narrative arc together – but outside of that, there’s far greater looseness in this campaign than there is in, say, the Zenith-3 campaign, in which continuity is rigidly fixed over decades of real time (and years of game time). A casual comment by an NPC two decades of real time ago can hang around, gathering dust, for decades until the right context manifests and it suddenly becomes critically-important this week.

The Warcry campaign, despite being a spin-off from the Zenith-3 campaign, is the exact opposite of the Adventurer’s Club campaign; because it was (in part) designed to be a test vehicle for rules changes, it has near-absolute continuity of plot while characters can morph and change on a weekly basis, and retcons are assumed to account for any discrepancies between current character capability and past performance.

Plastic Memory can be an extremely useful tool in adjusting and correcting campaign continuity, once the GM knows what he is doing with it.

6.1 Episodic Continuity

In more episodic-continuity campaigns, what the players remember of a past event whose ramifications are still unfolding can actually be detrimental; the situation being confronted in the current adventure can differ from those memories in any number of critical elements.

What the players remember may no longer be accurate reflections of the current in-game circumstances being presented by the GM.

Using Plastic Memory, the GM can contradict those memories, leaving the players better able to react to the circumstances in front of them without preconceptions from the experienced past getting in the way. In the Adventurer’s Club campaign, for example, we have reset the game date at least twice, and will shortly do so again; the current game date is 1938, but it will soon become 1932, 3, 4, 5, or 6, just to create more space within the campaign for future adventures. We already know how the campaign will end, and when, in game-time (a mish-mash of 1939 and 1941, in which the events of Pearl Harbor and the outbreak in Europe of WW2 roughly coincide).

Naturally, there is a fine line; you can’t contradict absolutely everything from one episode to another, even in episodic continuity. Because there is continuity of characters, you want to at least appear to pay lip service to continuity, only violating it when it’s essential to the current plotline.

6.2 Serial Continuity

Strongly-serial continuity campaigns, often also described as “Strong Continuity” campaigns, have a completely different problem. The continuity is supposed to be fixed, which means that any mistakes made will perpetuate forwards in time.

The plastic memory phenomenon permits revisions to that continuity without violating the general principle. More accurately, it permits players to take changes made retro-actively onboard, literally revising history to a more accurate account of what would have happened, but for the mistake made.

In both cases, the phenomenon introduces the flexibility to incorporate just a little of the opposite continuity mode where it’s necessary to maximize the plot potential of the campaign.

6.3 Plastic Continuity

In any time-travel campaign in which multiple entities with disparate agendas can rewrite the past to their liking, and there is no such thing as an original or “stable” base history – the Warcry campaign, for example – what you end up with is a “Plastic” Continuity. Episodic at times, Serial in others, perpetually in flux at some critical moments, and with the Episodic capacity to completely replace or rewrite the ‘established’ Serial continuity.

In some ways, it can be said that this model contains the flaws and problems of both types of ‘simple’ continuity, and can therefore use Plastic Memory in both of the ways described in the preceding sections.

But there’s an additional advantage, overcoming one of the biggest headaches that comes with this “Plastic” Continuity. You see, when an Episodic Continuity Event completely rewrites some part of the “Common Reference” Serial continuity, the GM can normally be expected to prepare a revised History of both the Campaign and the associated World History. And that’s a LOT of work.

The usual solution is to state that temporal manipulation imposes a kind of “Historical Uncertainty Boundary”, beyond which the truth of history cannot be certain because of the multiple interventions that have taken place one way or another and the potential for future interventions that could be taking place as the narrator speaks. This limits and restricts the amount of prep work the GM has to contend with, while enabling him to cast his mental net further forwards or back as needed.

6.4 Flexibility vs Sweeping Epic Planning

One of the eternal debates of tabletop RPGs is always the extent of forward planning the GM does. There are all sorts of variations possible, but the arguments tend to polarize around the flexibility of sandboxes and the sweeping epic of detailed planning, comparing and contrasting the advantages and disadvantages of both, and focusing in on related topics like player agency, and whether or not there can be too much of it, leading to player indecision, and whether player agency is even possible under the ‘Sweeping Epic Planning’ model, and…. well, you get the idea.

To the best of my knowledge, no-one has attempted to integrate the concepts of Fuzzy Plastic Memory into any of these debates – but because the concept is fundamental to how players experience continuity, that potentially a significant omission.

I’m fighting hard to avoid getting (sucked? suckered?) down the rabbit holes of these debates! Suffice it to say that I don’t hold any of the common positions in these debates; I believe that it’s possible to have sweeping, epic (general) plans which dictate the actions of NPCs and – in bold strokes – other events outside the control of PCs while still leaving those PCs in a sandbox – or, more accurately, a succession of overlapping sandboxes.

The phenomenon of plastic memories injects a measure of uncertainty and flexibility into the process – usually unwanted, but occasionally useful, because it offers a tool that can alter or amend the finer details of past events while leaving the broad strokes uncompromised.

With sandbox campaigns, this permits a measure of larger-scale planning, because there is a mechanism for fixing conflicts if they threaten the stability of the sandbox enclosure. With epic-planning campaigns, they prevent the rigidity of the planning from undermining player agency by providing mechanisms to alter the plans to accommodate player decisions.

Either way, you end up with a more structured but dynamic campaign perspective, and that’s a good thing, right?

6.5 Campaign Identity

One of my most strongly-held tenets is that every campaign should have its own identity, it’s own personality, it’s own brand if you will. A distinctive atmosphere that distinguishes this campaign from Joe and Jenny’s campaign just down the road, and Ronald-from-across-the-street’s campaign, and from the previous campaign that you ran.

Lots of things contribute to that uniqueness. Naming conventions, social and political structures, campaign philosophy, house rules and the impact that they have on the game world sandboxing vs pre-planning, realism vs fantasy, high fantasy vs low – the list just keeps on growing.

Many of these fall under the umbrella heading of Campaign Philosophy, which I can define as “one or more general principles used to derive more specific campaign traits, conditions, rules and content.” These should never be chosen at random; they should always integrate to create a total greater than the sum of their parts, and how this integration takes place is the subject of still more of these general principles. Unfortunately, “random choice just because” is often the approach taken by GMs, if they even bother with high-level thinking in the first place. Note that even if the GM puts no effort in this area, these are emergent properties of decisions made along the way if the campaign lasts long enough.

Added to that long list can now be a group of entries related to Memory Plasticity – what level of revisionism the campaign will tolerate, whether or not it’s permissible for players to initiate a revision, and so on.

6.6 GMing Style

The need to always get it right, or try to, can be stultifying to a GM’s style. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, forcing GMs away from the radical and toward a more workable common denominator, but it’s not commonly a good thing, either. Understanding how to employ Plastic Memory to his advantage liberates the GM to be more experimental and to more fully express his personal style.

7 Confusing The Issue: Perception, Cognition, and Recollection

Oh, if only it were all so simple! Everything in the previous section is accurate – when viewed from the standpoint of the GM. But with multiple participants comes multiple perspectives, and those of the player(s) might not accord with the GM’s view. What seems completely reasonable to him can look completely different to the people on the receiving end, who may prefer the stability of a fixed timeline.

And the potential complicating factors don’t stop there. In fact, I have identified no less than 11 of them.

7.1 Perception

Ultimately, players rely on the GM to tell them what their characters can see. The two basic models for doing so are Theater Of The Mind and Representational (and there are any number of hybrid systems).

Strangely, these two are not alike in the way that Plastic Memory alterations are received. Perhaps it’s because the Representational approach engages more than one sense, but players are more receptive to “Oops, I left something out that might be important” with pure Theater Of The Mind.

The most common hybrid approach uses Representation as an abstraction – that “glowing pool” might not be a glowing pool in the scene, it’s just an indicator that there is something there. The GM then uses Theater Of The Mind to set the scene, with the Representation conveying the physical locations of the elements described. One advantage of this approach is that errors are far less likely to result – if the GM puts an indicator on the Representation but forgets to identify it in his narration, a player is sure to ask, “What’s that?”. If the GM mentions something that he has forgotten to emplace on the map, the omission becomes immediately obvious.

Because errors are less frequent and more quickly corrected, players are going to be far less forgiving and more resistant to retroactive changes.

These factors can also give the overlooked detail a greater significance than is actually warranted in the minds of the players, and this effect can be particularly hard to combat. “It must be important, look at all the fuss he’s going to just to put it in.”

All these are things that the GM has to take into account when applying Plastic Memory corrections to character perceptions.

7.2 Cognition

A different can of worms gets opened when the GM retroactively adds in something that a character thought of or associated during a plot sequence or conversation, because this can be viewed as an overt manipulation of player agency.

Telling a player, “It reminds you a bit of…” at the time is viewed as the GM helping the player comprehend the in-game events, making connections that the character would perceive immediately from what they perceive through their senses.

Saying, “Something you noticed at the time but didn’t think too much of now comes to mind,” followed by the missing detail is a more overt correction, and is far more received as the GM interfering in the character’s thought processes in order to achieve a plot outcome, more commonly known as “railroading”. And it is far less tolerated.

Plastic Memory manipulation is therefore far more problematic in matters of cognition, and has to be handled far more delicately and cautiously. The admission that the omission was an error on the part of the GM is critical to defusing this potentially explosive situation; emphasize it strongly. This is not the time to present an air of infallibility!

7.3 Super-human Memories?

“My character has an eidetic memory. He never forgets anything.” spells instant trouble when applying Plastic Memory manipulations, because the GM is really targeting the player as a means of conveying a corrected impression to the character. Again, the best answer is to place heavy emphasis on the GM attempting to correct his mistake before the error leads a player to make incorrect decisions.

It gets even trickier if decisions have already been made based on the inaccurate world-view perceived by the player. “If I had noticed that, I might have tried to do X instead of Y” is essentially a direct confrontation between player and GM over the issue of player agency. The submissive “My bad” will not longer cut it in such circumstances; the GM will need to have a plan of action prepared that addresses the issue before he even raises the question.

There are no good answers to the question of how to handle this problem. They are all problematic in one way or another. The least worst is to let the player retroactively change his response and for the GM then to further amend the continuity retroactively to incorporate the changed decision. His goal has to be fully accommodating player agency while still having the ultimate outcome be as close as possible to the resolution that took place on the day. Serving two ends at the same time is never easy, but the alternatives are even worse.

Alternatives, you ask? One GM tried to retroactively introduce a hidden enemy using mind-control to influence the character into ignoring the ‘overlooked detail’. Another tried to retroactively cloak the overlooked detail in an illusion (a somebody-else’s-problem field) to explain why it was overlooked at the time.

Both fell flatter than a pancake. In the latter case, it led to a player leaving the game immediately; in the former, the whole campaign fell apart.

Not doing much better, another GM tried to pretend that the player had overlooked the detail at the time, claiming that he had made no mistake. Unfortunately, he had posted a detailed synopsis constructed from his own adventure prep which made no mention of the overlooked detail. BIG mistake. Not only did the player immediately drop out of the campaign, he also dropped out of the friendship he had formerly had with the GM.

I can’t recommend any of these approaches.

7.4 Filing and Misfiling of Memories

It happens to all of us occasionally – I’m notorious for it: forgetting what happened last time. I’m good at remembering the big picture, and at recalling the smaller picture of the adventure, but terrible at remembering how far into that adventure the characters got – especially since I’m perfectly happy to change the adventure completely if the players make unexpected choices.

If I can, I make a note in the adventure’s text file, “Up to here” (while deleting any old occurrences), but sometimes I can’t do that for whatever reason. Part of the problem is that for a week or two afterwards, I have perfect recall of the information, and then one morning, it’s just gone. No fuzzy-memory warning period, it’s like flipping a switch.

Anyway, there is a period of reintegration when you get reminded of what happened. It generally takes only a few seconds, but for those few seconds you can be vulnerable. Earworms presenting at such times are especially difficult to dispel – and earworms are always troublesome in that way, anyhow.

Reintegrating Memories

But that’s a side-issue. Integrating the plotline with past events proceeds naturally; where you have to be careful is integrating undocumented past planning and intentions. Not sure what I mean by that? Then let me expand on the process, and you’ll see where it fits in.

In any adventure, there are plot points aimed at the bigger picture. These exist not only to securely attach the current adventure to that big picture but to develop / change the background, ever so slightly, so that it evolves in game time with the lives of the characters. Dynamic, not static. Most of the time, in adventure prep, I’ll have figured out a scene that actually services that plot parameter, but every now and then it will be dependent on player decisions, and not formally plotted out in advance. That means figuring out how to achieve the plot point as play proceeds.

And it you don’t reach the place in the plot where the improvised scene actually takes place, your planning tends to vanish when the rest of the adventure progress gets forgotten – and because the players never get told of those yet-to-be-realized plans (obviously), they can’t prod your memory about them. You’re on your own.

it also happens when you only figure out how to achieve a plot point after play has started for the day – not a common problem for me, but one that occasionally manifests (or, worse still, the variant of having a plan but thinking of a better answer once play is under way).

Enter Plastic Memory

Plastic Memory gets a couple of bites at the cherry in such situations. First, the foundations of your memory reintegration are the flawed memories of one or more players (between them, they usually get it right, but one or more will be radically wrong about some of the details along the way). That’s usually enough to connect to your lost memories, at least in part, but those memories are also subject to the problems of Plastic Memory.

Still, by functioning as an ‘editor’ trying to reconcile what the player(s) are saying with the memories that they trigger, you can usually get back to being in the same mindset as when play stopped, despite the Plastic Memory problem. (This also gives you the chance to correct the player on anything that he has misremembered, invoking plastic memory manipulation to get everyone on the same page).

So, the parts of the story that you and the players have in common can usually be restored without too much trouble. It’s the parts that only you, as GM, have that are a problem, because they are invariably tainted by plastic memories.

My solution

The best approach that I have found is to start from scratch, asking myself (in general terms) how I can achieve the plot point with just the information that I currently have. Sometimes it will be the first thing that I think of, sometimes the second or third, but sooner or later, one of these general answers will connect with the ‘lost plan’. (This also gives me one last opportunity to change my plans if they don’t seem as good in hindsight as they did at the time).

7.5 Associations and Misassociations

When a memory gets filed, it gets indexed all sorts of ways – think of it as ‘tags’ like you would use on a blog post. These associations are generated subconsciously and generated using a mobile phone’s auto-complete function.

For example, let’s say that something reminds you of a friend from school. Your memories of that friend are recalled, deleted, and rewritten with at least one additional ‘tag’ describing the ‘now’ – so that when someone, a day or two later, mentions that old friend, you respond with “I was just thinking about him (or her) just the other day.”

That’s memory association, and it can happen with any of the senses. There are some scents that instantly transport my memory to a particular time or place (I’ll come back to that in a minute). There are some passages of music that instantly remind me of a particular place or time – especially vivid associations in my case are triggered by “Goodbye Stranger” by Supertramp, “Into The Lens” by Yes, “The Long Run” by the Eagles, and “Up The Junction” by UK Squeeze (just known as ‘Squeeze’ to most of the world). Flavor is a bit more problematic, because multiple instances tend to blur into each other, diluting the strength of the association. A few survive – Baked Turnips and Baked Pumpkin, Home-made Ginger Beer, and Lime Milkshakes – but most are fairly generalized.

Using Memory Associations to improve GM performance

In Sydney, as in most parts of the world, there are certain places that are particularly strongly connected with a particular culture. There are certain spice shops that are indelibly Indian in nature, while others are more Moroccan or Middle Eastern. Each of these has a particular scent that immediately connects my thoughts with other aspects of the cultural experience. I could not articulate the difference if you paid me, but it’s there and distinctive, and I can invoke those associations just by recalling the scent – I don’t even have to smell it again.



I always thought Musk Sticks were originally a British confection, but apparently they are 100% exclusively Australian. So most of the world won’t get that reference. Hopefully this picture and the linked article will help. Image By Samuel Wiki – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=85381092

I’ve learned to use these associations as a GM to put me into a particular head-space, in which the ‘flavor’ of the setting comes to hand more easily. I doubt enough of the association gets conveyed to the players for them to make an association in their own minds, but even without that, it helps me conjure up a vivid and consistent imaginary environment. Kzin, for example, is Musk Sticks and dried Mushrooms overlaid on a Middle Eastern background – at least as far as scents go. And that associates with architectural style and cultural elements and all sorts of other things, which I can use as inspiration when describing Kzin.

Misassociation

So long as the associations are vivid and accurate, there’s no problem. But memory plasticity erodes the accuracy unless the memory is refreshed from time to time – the more vivid, the less frequent this has to be.

It’s when of these associations gets misdirected to some other association by memory decay that problems arise – suddenly, you can’t put yourself into the right mind-set by recalling the scent, the wrong scent with the wrong associations comes to mind instead.

Correcting a faulty link

You can use the Plastic Memory phenomenon on yourself to correct a faulty mental link, and it’s a lot easier than you might think.

All you have to do is put the cart before the horse.

For example, if I misassociated the Middle Eastern Spice scent so that it no longer led to the Kzin in my mind, that means that the outward association from the scent no longer points to the right mental “page” – but that connection is still there, from the last time it was used.

So, by recalling that time, and the way it was used, and my headspace at the time, I can actually follow the association from “Kzin” to “Middle Eastern Spice”. This rewrites both memories with the connection between them reforged.

I may have to do this a half-dozen times to overcome the incorrect link, and you can never do so completely perfectly, but 99% of the time, the technique works.

Short Vs Long-term memory

Within limits, that is. Those limits are all bundled up with the difference between long and short-term memory.

When we first have something to remember, it gets filed into short-term memory. If there’s a particularly strong association, it will eventually get recorded into long-term memory; if not, the memory will get generalized to some extent and lumped in with dozens of similar memories under a general heading. The less distinctive the short-term memory is, the more generalized the recollection will be.

So that point of transition is all-important to the way the memory gets handled. The problem is that there’s no comprehensive consensus on when that happens.

Everyone agrees that one occasion is during sleep, usually REM-sleep (and don’t worry if you don’t know what that is, it doesn’t matter in the context of this article). The consensus fractures when you ask if that’s the only time it happens. What if you take a cat-nap? How about if you are forced to stay awake for a protracted period? Can it happen while you’re awake? Are there consequences if the process gets interrupted?

There are few, if any, good answers to any of these questions. There simply hasn’t been enough research into this aspect of memory function (yet). My own opinions (for whatever they are worth, which isn’t much):

• • Is sleep the only time short-term memories get transferred to long-term storage? Nope – but it’s the most efficient.
  • What if you take a cat-nap? – it depends on how deeply you sleep in that cat-nap, but it’s certainly possible.
  • How about if you are forced to stay awake for a protracted period? Can it happen while you’re awake? – It seems impossible for it not to happen at some point, eventually. I find myself wondering if those brief periods of grogginess that we experience after a while are a really-low priority mechanism for this transfer, if the reason we zone out for a few seconds or minutes is because our heads are busy with “something else” and not paying much attention to the outside world.
  • Are there consequences if the process gets interrupted? – Interrupting the process is like being wrapped in gentle environmental sounds (gentle wind and surf, say) and someone dropping the needle onto a record in the middle of a track at high volume. Some music in this example would be more disruptive than others – contrast a high-energy metal track with a lullaby – and the more disruptive and attention-getting the track, the more likely it is that the memory being transferred is damaged or even lost. So, take away the musical metaphor and replace it with ‘attention-grabbing phenomenon’ and you will have my best-guess answer.

Again, I don’t know any of these as fact. They might all be completely wide of the mark. The most that can be said is that they make sense to me.

But the operative principles remain – those half-dozen repeats should be separated by at least half a day, and preferably a full sleep period, to achieve the maximum rebuilding of association links.

As I was preparing to move on to the next section, a though occurred to me – I idly wondered whether trauma recovery could not be enhanced by more immediate treatment, while the incident was still fresh. The current trend is to send people home to get their heads straight, as it were, and to employ followup treatment only if necessary. Having some form of rapid-response quick therapy could potentially be effective, diminishing the strength and severity of the traumatic event. Just a passing thought, but it seems to fit.

7.6 Obsessions, Misperceptions, and Hobbies

The Plastic Memory phenomenon intersects with all of these in the same way. In essence, these are repetitive thoughts, patterns of thought, or patterns of activity. Obsessions are obviously this type of phenomenon, usually to such an extent that they are harmful to the life of the individual. The other two are a little less obvious.

Misperceptions only matter (in this context) when someone else has mispercieved something we’ve said or done; there is a tendency to repeat the critical conversational passages or deeds over and over in our heads, trying to figure out where things went off the rails. Again, there’s that repetition factor.

Hobbies tend to involve a head-space in which we are approaching sub-problems with the same process time after time; the specifics of each sub-problem may vary, but the problem-solving approach is the same. Think about solving a crossword, for example – each clue is a sub-problem, but the approach is still the same – what are the possible answers to the clue, do any of them fit the space and known letters, do any of them fit if one of the earlier answers is wrong,with modifications – that’s the heart of the Plastic Memory phenomenon.

In the first two cases, this gradually transforms and morphs the memory of an event with which we are obsessed into a form that meshes better with our state of mind – so paranoia would infuse the memory with all sorts of shadowy hints and clues to implied meanings and so on. Tones of voice can change (in a recalled conversation), for example, and facial expressions twist, or we can convince ourselves that while the other party tried to hide it, we picked up on something they didn’t mean to convey, something that reveals “the truth”.

The third case is the other side of the coin – it’s how we ‘learn by doing’, growing our skills subset, trying things and learning from the results.

All these are more applicable, in RPG terms, to the mindsets of characters. The key is that mental states evolve over time, and this not only explains the phenomenon, it gives the GM (and occasionally, player) some direction as to the nature and pace of the changes, enabling characters to be depicted more realistically.

7.7 Recollection

This has to be included for the sake of completeness, but it’s all been said already – in all of Part 2 of this series, in fact.

In a nutshell – guard against revising memories when you recall them. This frequently involves preparations made ahead of time for greater effectiveness. Whenever we remember something, we make that memory both fragile and vulnerable.

7.8 The Lack Of Recollection

Something altogether different happens when we strive to remember something and can’t bring it to mind. When this happens, we tend to try to remember, over and over, and in that repeated failure, we not only lay down a new memory track, and set of associations, but we open the door to Memory Plasticity. Try (and fail) too often, and we can actually replace the memory we are trying to connect to with the absence of that memory. Forever after, that memory will be more elusive, attempts to recall it being diverted to memories of the last time (or past occasions in general) when we couldn’t remember it.

The Lack of Recollection can become a chronic self-inflicted condition. This can happen with vocabulary, spelling, faces – you name it.

The solution to the problem is the same as outlined in 7.5.

7.9 Cognition Of Recall

The above begs the question of what happens when we become aware of a decline in our ability to access memories, absent some medical cause – just natural aging.

In particular, it suggests that the expectation of a failing memory can potentially be a self-fulfilling prophecy, a blanket in which we cloak our minds. Every time this blanket redirects the memory function to a “404 page not found” (to use a modern metaphor), it increases the thickness of the blanket. In a nutshell, because we expect our memories to fade, we are more tolerant of the occasions when it does so, rather than undertaking remedial action – and gradually making the problem worse.

I’ve known elderly people with only the faintest grasp of who they were and when they were, and I’ve known people of similar vintage who had memories like steel traps – again, in the former group, without any specific medical problem to cause the condition, just old age. And every now and then I’ve wondered at the difference and how it came about.

Could it really be this simple? AS with other pieces of speculation in this article, I don’t know – but the pieces seem to fit. It might not be the whole answer, but I think it’s at least part of it.

7.10 Permanent Plasticity

Permanent Plasticity is not a natural phenomenon; it requires brain trauma. In essence, it prevents, at least in part, the recording of long-term memory, so that the sufferer finds themselves ‘reset’ back to a default state at the beginning of each day.

Naturally, there will be discrepancies between the world around them and the ‘yesterday’ that they remember, and much of their day will be spent in a period of emotional distress as they attempt to make sense of the world. As they experience each day, the ‘working copy’ of their recalled memory gets modified, erased and rewritten with modifications – all of which get thrown away the next morning.

I can imagine that someone suffering from this problem would write themselves a brief message (it has to be in their own handwriting) explaining “My name is X, I have been in a car accident that has damaged my memory. The world is confusing to me every day, but the people here will look after me.” It would need to be brief and simple so that it could be quickly assimilated, so there would not be room for much more.

Each day, the person awakes in a strange place, finds this note, and has to decide whether or not to believe it – but it’s in their own handwriting, so they would be more prone to do so. Over time, consistency of stimuli would result in a pattern, a daily routine of substituting contemporary reality for experiences no longer remembered.

This section arose from contemplating the intersection of Memory Plasticity and damaged memory systems; I’m sure it’s not the only such intersection, but it’s the one that came to mind. Consider it an example, not a complete list of possible conditions.

Again, this is more about individual characters and characterizations.

7.11 The accumulation of Flaws and Failures

The final subject in this section has to do with human failings of other sorts. The repetition effect described earlier would apply to all such. Let’s take alcohol dependency for a specific example.

Each time the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal manifested, the memory track associated would be amplified, the symptoms would feel more acute, and the victim would become aware of them more quickly and strongly. The problem thus becomes progressively worse, because once he starts drinking, he doesn’t know how to stop, and his tolerance also increases somewhat.

It doesn’t matter what the flaw is, or whether or not the victim is aware of it – repetition opens the door to memory plasticity. But in many of these cases, there is a measure of wish fulfillment and self-delusion involved; it is entirely possible to think that you are actually improving, when you are growing worse.

In most such cases, the problem is a private one with very few aware of how severely it has progressed (or even that it exists at all). That’s an important element to the problem because it makes any sort of reality check more difficult to find.

Nevertheless, most characters who suffer from such problems will get the occasional sharp prompt, and will promise themselves that they will moderate in future, or even quit completely. And they mean it sincerely, no matter how many times they have made the same declaration. That’s only possible through Memory Plasticity, enabling the addict to blame those past failures on one or more mistakes or traps they fell into that they will avoid, this time. The problem, of course, is that these ‘mistakes’ and ‘traps’ are not the cause of the failure at all, just manifestations of the fallout.

And, of course, the more divergent from reality their world-view becomes, the more prone they are to unintentionally self-destructive actions and behaviors while under the influence, a third consequence of Plastic Memories.

The basic behaviors of Addiction are easy to replicate in a game setting, but the more you understand the causes and the changes that result, the better you can factor in the fringe consequences that are different in detail in every case, making the sufferer more of an individual than a disease profile.

8 Conclusion: The Pond Of Reflection

Imagine a pond of reasonable size. The surface is perfectly flat and calm, a mirror to the surrounds. Any discontinuity of memory is akin to dropping a pebble into the pond. See the ripples spreading in your imagination. It doesn’t matter if the pebble was dropped deliberately or accidentally kicked into the pond, the ripples still look the same.

Now focus your mind’s eye on one of the ripples, and on the distorted reflection that it contains. Is that distortion a truer reflection of reality than the still image? Reflections are inherently distorted, after all, but our minds ‘correct’ our perceptions when we examine them.

How plastic is reality, and our perceptions of it? Do we simply ‘edit out’ discontinuities in our perceptions?

There is some evidence that when we focus our attention, that’s exactly what happens. — the invisible gorilla.

This series started by examining the impact of some observed characteristics of human memory. It’s only now, when you can see how far and wide the trail of breadcrumbs of consequences have taken us, that it becomes apparent how tightly bound to the very definition of being human these observed characteristics really are.

But wait – we aren’t quite done, yet! After breaking the subject down into its talking points for the preceding two parts, I had a number of post-script thoughts that wouldn’t fit into the existing text no matter how I rearranged it.

The evolutionary benefits of Memory Plasticity, for example. Or the impact of the reliance on technology. And a whole bunch of stuff on “alien” thought processes and patterns.

I was going to append these discussions to this article (just as this text was supposed to be attached to Part II), but there simply isn’t enough time to do so. So these thoughts will have to wait for a Part IV to come…