Almost 100 years ago, it was hypothesized that individual memory reconstructs past experiences on the basis of social frameworks bound to collective memory . According to this view, collective memory supplies a long-term organizational model (or schema) of historical and social knowledge, symbols, narratives and images, into which individual memory must fit. Collective representations of the past are selected according to schematic narrative templates, often emphasizing some elements and minimizing others, that define the group’s identity. These collective representations are stored both within individuals connected by a common historical past as shared memories, and outside individuals through sociocultural means such as the media.
Until now, research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology has adopted a bottom-up approach to highlight the individual cognitive mechanisms that underpin the formation of shared knowledge about collective events. The top-down approach (that is, how cultures, mediated by several different resources, shape and influence individuals’ cognitive structures) has received less attention….
Commemorative events, films, education and numerous memorial sites stress the role of particular historical events and promote their retention in collective memory. These various forms of memories are constantly being produced through the media, which play a central role in expressing and shaping the collective memory of a nation, connecting people through a common narrative across time and space. To capture the organization of collective schemas in the media, we analysed a corpus including all 3,766 news bulletins and reports on World War II broadcast on French national television from 1980 to 2010….
Our goal was to demonstrate the universality and validity of the model of collective memory by showing that it reflects a shared and selective representation of the past, whose core structure is different from a historical perspective that aspires to provide an accurate account of the past. Collective memories are often viewed as shared individual memories or representations resulting from the social means and transmission tools created by the community. These social means serve not only to reshape and harmonize individual representations by guiding the remembering of all the members of the community, but also to regulate the construction of a collective identity by selecting and emphasizing certain elements of the past at the expense of others. This fact highlights two fundamental properties of collective memory: (1) collective memory is located both in the social tools used to connect individuals (for example, national news broadcasts) and in individual minds (as a shared form of representation), and (2) the selection and sharing of events for inclusion in the collective memory are determined by their social value and importance to society, leading to a schematization that may contrast with the meaning of historical memory….
Collective schemas are integrated in the course of a lifetime. In theory, we would expect exposure to the relevant World War II media to increase the alignment of individual schemas with the collective schema, which would then be apparent in the pattern of neural activity. As such, we might expect to see individual age-related differences, such that more exposure to the relevant World War II media would increase alignment with the collective schema. Older individuals should have more exposure to the relevant World War II media and presumably exhibit a closer alignment with the collective schema….
The ability or inability to integrate and fit one’s personal history or memory into a collective framework imposed by one’s cultural environment may play a fundamental role in human well-being and deserves to receive greater attention in future studies. These future challenges for the neuroscience of memory can be met only by adopting a transdisciplinary perspective that promotes interactions between psychological, social and mathematical models of large-scale data to construct an integrative account of human memory. The present study shows how one such model of memory systems could be constructed, drawing on the interactions between the neu- robiological and collective levels.
For a summary of the article in Inverse.com, see here
H/t Heather Hayton
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