Returned memory

[Oudeis]

Spoilers for the ending of the book, you've been warned.

 

In Lightsong's first chapter, he remembers his niece, the one he died to save.

 

"Inviting brown hair," Lightsong said. "Red lips, three shades shy of the seventh harmonic, with a deep beauty. Dark tan skin."

 

I don't know about you, but if I have my glasses off and look at a painting, then go to another room and put my glasses on, I do not suddenly remember the painting with clarity. It's odd that Lightsong the Returned, with his Fifth Heightening, remembers something from when he was a mere mortal with (presumably) a single Breath, yet remembers it as though he were looking at her with his Returned sight. I find it fascinating.

[PorridgeBrick]

Hmm, that is interesting. Maybe it's related to how the dead can see a vision of the future before they return? What if they see into the past as well?

[Kurkistan]

A very astute observation, Darnam.

 

My first inclination here is to say that this tells us that BioChromatic perception is on the processing side of things, rather than the input side. So your senses, per se, aren't enhanced, but your mind's ability to process them is.

 

Of course, they may well run afoul of the degree to which perception itself is an activity of the mind... 

Edited January 2, 2014 by Kurkistan

[Quiver]

I wish I had my copy of Warbreaker right now.

I was under the assumption that Returned did have memories of their mortal life, but hazy ones,maybe only of people who were important to them. We don't get any other Returneds perspective, but I imagine Calmseer must have remembered her daughter to an extent. Unless she believed that her goal as a Returned was to heal this random person she didn't know.

[Kurkistan]

Brandon gives it away for free, if you want to look through a PDF or the like.

 

I think that it's less a question about Returned memory (despite the title) and more one about "Awakeners' memory". Lightsong's flashbacks are all from his perspective—they're his memories—so the question is how his color-perception got retroactively better once he reached the Fifth Heightening.

[Oudeis]

I wish I had my copy of Warbreaker right now.

I was under the assumption that Returned did have memories of their mortal life, but hazy ones,maybe only of people who were important to them. We don't get any other Returneds perspective, but I imagine Calmseer must have remembered her daughter to an extent. Unless she believed that her goal as a Returned was to heal this random person she didn't know.

 

My impression, from the annotation and from Lightsong's eventual perspective, is that Calmseer didn't remember anything until that moment, then when her daughter stood before her, the recollection all came back, she remembered the voice telling her, "Your daughter will need your help one last time; will you go back and save her?" and she recognized her own daughter just before giving up her life to save her.

 

Now, if you want my whole thoughts on "how does Returned Destiny work, is Lightsong's experience universal," please check out this.

 

I think that it's less a question about Returned memory (despite the title) and more one about "Awakeners' memory". Lightsong's flashbacks are all from his perspective—they're his memories—so the question is how his color-perception got retroactively better once he reached the Fifth Heightening.

 

Interesting. So when Vivenna gets all of her Breath, can she call up a visual memory of Fafen and see her in perfect tones?

 

If so, it works NOTHING like how visual images work on Earth. Every week on a forensic criminology show Bones, they show the scientists "enhance a picture" and get more information out of it than was there in the actual picture; in reality, that's impossible, unless you literally time-travel back to the past and take the picture with a better camera.

 

I could be wrong, but I've been video-editing for ten years now, and most "picture enhancement" is, "this is what I think it should look like, so I'll make it look like that," rather than actually making the picture a more accurate representation of what it is; so, for example, I could take a picture of this girl's face, decide I want the lips to be "three shades shy of the seventh harmonic," and make them be that, but there's no way I could take the picture and tell you what shade her lips actually WERE in real life.

 

Well... actually there is exactly one trick that I know of which will truly make a picture more accurate. It's called white balancing, it means the picture has to be either very luckily framed or deliberately shot in a way that makes it possible after the fact (which isn't always possible), and it might have been able to manage something like this... but only if Lightsong's original memory were so precise, all the colors were distinct to such a level, simply skewed off true. In other words, if he was given a sample of "the seventh harmonic" on a swatch, and held it to her lips, he'd've had to be able to tell, "Yup, that's exactly three shades off, all right," which I don't think he could have done.

 

It's possible Returned (or even just Heightened) memory works that way; it is, after all, magic, and doesn't have to make sense. For something so innocuous, so unlikely to tip the balance of power to or away from anyone in any sort of dramatic conflict, I'm willing to accept that Heightened memories are so gifted.

 

It's possibly more likely, however, that Lightsong received an accurate retrocognitive vision of his niece. After all, we have it confirmed that Endowment grants him accurate premonitions at times, so presumably showing him something that happened in the past would be no more difficult. (For that matter, since his niece is still alive, they could still be premonitions, even if Endowment is somehow restricted from granting past visions). As for the "why"... Lightsong's obsession with his own past informs a LOT of the decisions he makes in pursuit of his Destiny, and this mysterious woman is a large part of his fascination.

 

EDIT: One final thought. Kurk is right, this might be Heightened Memory, not Returned Memory. We have only one example of it, from a man who is both Returned and Heightened, so we have no way to know which was responsible for the specific phenomenon. The best argument against it is specious; Vivenna, the other Heightened primary viewpoint character, never mentions it, which means either she doesn't have the same trait, she has it and doesn't realize, or she realizes and simply never mentions it.

Edited January 2, 2014 by Darnam

[Kurkistan]

It's possible Returned (or even just Heightened) memory works that way; it is, after all, magic, and doesn't have to make sense. For something so innocuous, so unlikely to tip the balance of power to or away from anyone in any sort of dramatic conflict, I'm willing to accept that Heightened memories are so gifted.

For shame sir!    Of course it should make sense, otherwise I've wasted quite a bit of time trying to make sense of it.

 

As to the post in general:

 

You may be drawing false parallels here, Darnam. It's not necessarily that new information is added on to the memory, but I think that it may be that Lightsong's ability to interpret it is better.

 

If you want to do a TV comparison, I think it may be like when Charlie (in Numb3rs) figures out the location a picture was taken by doing crazy math stuff to it and measuring shadows and the like. Nothing new is added to the picture, but a lot of analysis (which can draw on outside knowledge) is applied to it to procure new information that a naive viewer would not have been able to glean from the picture.

 

Another example would be symbols or letters or paintings that you saw before you knew how to interpret them, only to grasp later. So if you see the radiation symbol one day, don't know what it means, then have it explained to you later and say "oh yeah, I saw the radiation symbol back on that door last week."

 

The most direct example, of course, is colors. If I show you a chartreuse color swatch, you'll only be able to identify it as "a greenish yellow" or the like. But if you're then taught about what chartreuse is, you'll be able to retroactively label that swatch in your memory as the specific color "chartreuse". Of course, in this case, not only does Lightsong have new knowledge, but a new ability to apply it. Learning about chartreuse for him, then, is necessary if he is to be able to differentiate it from all the other ranges of "greenish yellow" colors.

 

EDIT: Actually, there's some support for this in that people with broader color vocabularies are better able to differentiate between colors. Show two people a spectrum of greens and the one with access to more green-words will see/identify more distinct colors on the spectrum than the layman; 10 instead of 3, for example.

 

---

 

Yeah, whether it's Fifth Heightening vs. Returned is unclear. If it was just Returned, that would strongly suggest in some Endowmenty stuff going on to explain everything away.

Edited January 3, 2014 by Kurkistan

[MathEpic]

 

If you want to do a TV comparison, I think it may be like when Charlie (in Numb3rs) figures out the location a picture was taken by doing crazy math stuff to it and measuring shadows and the like. Nothing new is added to the picture, but a lot of analysis (which can draw on outside knowledge) is applied to it to procure new information that a naive viewer would not have been able to glean from the picture.

 

As a mathematician I feel the need to point out that most of what they did in Numb3rs is also impossible.  This never stopped me from enjoying the show because they did a fairly good job with the characters and personalities, but the math they claim to be able to do just gets more hilarious the more you know about what they are supposedly describing.

 

Nevertheless, I am happy to know that I am not the only one that watched that silly show.

[Oudeis]

 

If you want to do a TV comparison, I think it may be like when Charlie (in Numb3rs) figures out the location a picture was taken by doing crazy math stuff to it and measuring shadows and the like. Nothing new is added to the picture, but a lot of analysis (which can draw on outside knowledge) is applied to it to procure new information that a naive viewer would not have been able to glean from the picture.

 

I agree with the underlying principle that you're referring. Where I disagree is with the basic underlying idea that it can apply to specifically this information.

 

Charlie, on Numb3rs, was able to do a fairly basic (although I'm not sure technically possible, see below with MathEpic) calculation to get information that was in the original picture, it simply hadn't been deduced yet. There is no way that, with nothing to work on but the picture, Charlie could ever have told you if the man taking the picture were currently hungry or exactly how long it had been since his last haircut.

 

In the specific case of the memory of his niece's lips (ew) we've got a few things working against it. Firstly, it's not a picture, it's a memory, and memories are inexact, though that's a minor point. The bigger one is, take my example of a picture. If a picture is taken with a still camera and the picture it out of focus, no amount of upgrades to the camera or focusing after the fact will let you focus the picture, and there's no computer program that can make a blurry picture accurately focused (there are ones that will "clean up" a picture, but they're based on heuristics and best-guesses and, in the main, are more concerned with making a picture "look better" than "be more accurate"). The information on the shade of her lips is data like that. His mind can recall that they were red, but since it didn't have the capacity to distinguish between shades that closely at the time, it can't store that data to be narrowed down later. If it could, he would have known about it at the time. It would be like taking a photograph in black and white, and adding color later. You can infer, you can make best-guesses as to what the colors were, you can pick colors that look natural and add them on purpose, but there's no information inherent in the picture itself that will give you anything as exact as "three shades off the seventh harmonic".

 

EDIT: for a typo, and another thought. We don't know that Lightsong was right. Maybe he was just remembering it as best he could, and made up a more specific shade for her lips (again, ew) to be. It's fairly consistent with how memory actually works.

 

As a mathematician I feel the need to point out that most of what they did in Numb3rs is also impossible.  This never stopped me from enjoying the show because they did a fairly good job with the characters and personalities, but the math they claim to be able to do just gets more hilarious the more you know about what they are supposedly describing.

 

Nevertheless, I am happy to know that I am not the only one that watched that silly show.

 

Here's to someone who understands that sometimes you have to turn your brain off if you want to enjoy a show.

Edited January 3, 2014 by Darnam

[Kurkistan]

@MathEpic
 
Television lied to me?! 
 
@Darnam

 

We may well be "run[ning] afoul of the degree to which perception itself is an activity of the mind" here, and are certainly stepping beyond my realm of expertise. I think our disagreement rests on this different understanding of how active our minds are in perception/memory formation.

 

You are positing (quite possibly correctly) that a memory formed with insufficient background understanding is like a blurry picture. I am proposing that it is more like a picture who's content you don't understand: the picture is still perfectly clear, you just don't know what you're looking at. I may very well be wrong, but in the second case it's perfectly fine for Lightsong to look back and have a better grasp of shades of color than he had when he first "took" a memory.

 

Example:

 

Let's say you show a sign that says "EXIT" to a 3-year-old who can't read. He'll remember it as "that red sign over the door with the letters."

 

Looking back at that memory years later, the kid will have different experiences depending on which memory-model is real. Under your model, he'll probably know as a point of fact (just because of context clues and later experience) that it was an "EXIT" sign he saw, but his memory will still just be of a red shape over a door. Under mine, he'll be able to look back and "read" the word "exit".

 

Once again, I'll reiterate that I know memory formation is not just like snapping a picture, even beyond it's inherent "blurriness." We may need to *shudder* do some research, of all things, to settle this one.

Edited January 3, 2014 by Kurkistan

[dyring]

Perhaps he remembers the exact same image, but he can tell exaktly what the colour is now?

Or for all we know, perhaps he simply assumes, his mind "fills in the blanks" since now that he have the ability to se colour perfectily, it is unable to let him see "an average colour" without exact hues?

 

If you got a memory of your first bike, but cant recall the colour, if your told the colour it is sometimes added to the bike in your memory... the mind adds what your told unconciously, wether it is correct or not.

 

(Guess thats close to what Kurk said)

[Oudeis]

That's actually a lot closer to my second theory than to Kurk's....

[Kurkistan]

Yeah, I was about to point out that that sounds like Darnam's theory (which I agree is certainly a possibility, btw).

 

Although, to be fair, Darnam, the dyring's first sentence is what I was saying.

[Oudeis]

I still don't see how his brain can store information it was never given, but like I said, "it's magic" so it doesn't have to make any actual sense.

[Kurkistan]

I am unclear as to why you're confused, Darnam. The idea (which may be wrong, I'll admit) is that, when you see words you can't read, you remember them as their actual shapes so that, when you learn to read later, you can retroactively interpret the words in your memory. Your brain is already storing the information about the shapes you saw before you learned how to properly interpret them.

 

Alternatively, both you and dyring have suggested that our memories just fill in the blanks: we don't recall reds as "an indeterminate shade of red", then, but as some arbitrary shade that may or may not be the shade it actually was when you saw it.

 

Neither model requires that weird senseless things happen or require the brain to "store information it was never given." Technically the second model has the brain making stuff up, but it's still incorporated into the memory before you reach the Fifth Heightening.

[name_here]

What this would imply is that Heightening-related sight enhancement doesn't alter the image and is a purely mental effect. It's not like "enhancing" an image; the information existed in the original image but could not be interpreted. Now, if it's accurate that would imply that, for some reason, people on Nalthis actually store what they see before interpreting it into colors and shapes.

 

It could also be that he mentally filled in the details later, which is pretty common. I'd generally expect such memories would basically normalize colors to the center of the range, but Returned might not do that because they don't recall getting their color perception boosted.

 

Or maybe Lightsong had enough Breath to distinguish colors to that degree at the time; he was apparently quite good at a high-end job and could have afforded to buy some.

[Oudeis]

I'll try explaining it again, but it's nothing I haven't said before, and I can't think of a different way of explaining it.

 

You're comparing apples and oranges. In your analogy, the child is able to tell the difference between "red" and "white". He can see the shapes; they don't have meaning to him, but he can still see them. I have about a million other problems with your theory but this is the one we'll focus on.

 

In your version, the information is there in his memory, it simply needs to be interpreted. Let's say I see a word written in Russian. I take time and effort to memorize it, and draw it out later for a friend of mine who actually knows the cyrrilic alphabet. He can then look at what I've written, and tell me retroactively what it means. That's a plausible scenario, but it's not applicable to this situation.

 

Your explanation requires that people can get the information in the first place, and store it, perfectly, in their minds. Neither of those two things are true, at least on Earth. The human eye is simply no more capable of seeing exactly how many shades a red is darker than "true red", any more than our eyes are natively capable of seeing individual blood cells. It's simply not something we can do, and it's only possible on Nalthis with the magical assistance of the Third Heightening.

 

Further, even if we could, it's brought up a million times in Mistborn that human memories degrade the instant they form. Without a method of storing a memory, perfectly preserving it, there's no way that five years later, even if his eyes took in the information but couldn't process it, he would have remembered the image well enough to deduce the literal shade.

 

Let me rephrase your theory in a different context. If your theory holds true, then imagine a skaa on Scadrial. One day he's walking through the mists, unable to see more than ten feet in any direction. A block away, a woman crosses the street. He's looking right there, but the mist is in the way, and he can't see her, has no idea she's even there.

 

Two years later, he Snaps and turns into a Tineye. He gets some tin, and burns it. Would he now look back over his memory, retroactively see through the mist, and see the woman? That's what's happening here. The Third Heightening adjusts your sight and gives you the ability to distinguish differences you couldn't before, just like tin lets you see through mists, which you couldn't before.

 

The only way your theory works is if people on Nalthis operate fundamentally differently than people on Earth. Maybe that one single Breath does, in fact, store data without giving it to your mind to process. There's no evidence to support that, it wouldn't make any sense, and like I said, it'd be magical hand-waving, but it's technically possible.

 

The far simpler and far more likely option; Lightsong doesn't remember being a human, so literally can't imagine what it's like to see his niece's face and NOT know the exact shade of her lips (ew ew ew). This is a very human trait that is documented to happen on Earth literally any time anyone ever accesses a memory; he just feels he should know something, so his brain makes up something plausible enough for him to believe. This is why the Keepers have copperminds.

 

EDIT: To re-iterate my credentials, video editing is literally the trained job I've been doing for ten years. I know what I'm talking about when I tell you how visual information is stored, processed, and what the options are to enhance it after the fact. If information is taken with a device like a poor camera or a human eyeball, that's it. You've hit the upper limit of how accurate the picture will ever be. You can fake it, you can pick an ideal and "enhance" the picture towards that, but there's no way to know what color it was SUPPOSED to be. It just isn't how vision works. There's no information encoded in the picture that just needs to be interpreted, derived, unlocked, or inferred, what you see is all you get. TV shows like Bones or Numb3rs will take a blurry picture, run it through "made-up hand-waving computer program" during the second act and come out with a perfectly rendered picture of the killer's face; that's literally impossible with the way visual information is stored, either in the human brain or on a computer.

Edited January 3, 2014 by Darnam

[Kurkistan]

It seems that you know more about memory formation than I do (not surprising, given my ignorance), so I'm fine with going forward with the assumption that Lightsong can't remember a real shade of red unless he saw it as such in the moment.

 

Just to clarify what I meant (though I'm perfectly fine dropping it, I just want the record straight for posterity), let's look at the Scadrial example.

 

Let's say you have a Feruchemist on Scadrial. It's conceivable that he could use Feruchemical zinc to help him see through the mists a little bit just by being being able to piece together glimpses and the like with his increased mental speed.

 

My model of memory would be such that, if he walked through a misty night recording what he saw in a coppermind (but not tapping Feruchemical zinc at all), he'd be able to "see through the mist" if, the next day, he tapped Feruchemical zinc while tapping the memory from his coppermind. Degradation of the memory if he hadn't been storing it in Feruchemical copper would make it harder, obviously, but the principle remains the same.

 

You are claiming that, for color memory in particular, at the very least, we should be talking about Allomantic tin, while I have been thinking of Feruchemical zinc.

 

Regardless, I'm fine dropping this model as likely unrealistic, and am currently inclined to go with the "the brain makes stuff up" model.

Edited January 3, 2014 by Kurkistan

[MathEpic]

It is my understanding that we humans don't see as much with our eyes as we think we do.  Instead we see just a few details and our minds fill in the blanks.  Hallucination is what happens when the mind gets too enthusiastic about filling in the details and the information that is filled in is simply incorrect.  The same sort of thing applies to memory.  We only really remember a handful of details and we fill in the blanks afterword.

 

My guess is that Lightsong has gotten used to seeing all the colors in such detail that his mind might be interpreting the memory in terms of the senses he has been using since his Return.

[dyring]

Regarding who I agreed with... Ya... I wrote the part about simularity with Kurk after writing the first line, then came to think of memories filled in by the unconcious, and added that later;). Thus it got wierd:)

[Satsuoni]

As a person who more or less majored in Image Processing for the last 6 years (and had a specific interest in image enhancement) I must add that any natural image is hugely redundant and can, in theory, be restored from a low amount of pseudo-random samples. Faces, in particular, could be recognized pretty well from about 250 pixels in strategic places, IIRC. Most of such enhancement, though, relies on  the external knowledge (common statistical distributions for sharp natural scenes, etc).

Brain does that in spades, first compressing image (starting from the retina), then classifying, filling in blanks - that is why my combined eyesight is about 0.6 (in glasses), while each of the eyes is only ~0.4.

Regardless, there is probably not enough information retained in memory (there certainly isn't enough in normal memory) for Lightsong to recreate a face to harmonic.

So, in order of decreasing probability, my opinions:

1. As above, he added the detail postfactum, based on his imagination, essentially.

2. That was actually Endowment-granted vision rather than simple memory.

3. As a Returned (or heightened?) he can access memory directly in the Cognitive Realm, where it works like the memory of the goblet (how does an inanimate object remember time, anyway?), or even his history in Spiritual, thereby accessing "pure" memory untainted by perception. Somehow.

4. (Very unlikely) His Breaths transform his memory into supercomputer, that by aggregating age, race, health, recalled memory image, etc, calculated the most probable shade of red for the lips.

[Oudeis]

That was incredibly accurate, informative, and succinct, Sats. Thank you!

 

I'm going to throw in one last thing, however. This being a story, and not real life, I think I weight the option slightly in favor of an Endowment-endowed vision. As I've said, his eventual obsession with his past informs a lot of the actions that lead to the fulfillment of his destiny, and the memory of this woman is a large driving force for that.

 

Purely logically, and in real life, postfactum memory adjustment is far more likely. This being a tale, I'm not sure but your second option has more weight.