Working self: the editor you never hired

Psychologist Martin Conway described autobiographical memory as a hierarchy. On top, life periods and identity: who I am, who's with me. Below, general events and ongoing goals. At the bottom, the details of single days, which fade first.

And what holds it together he called the "working self". Current goals decide which memories get kept and which get pulled up.

It's the "you" that is active right now. Your current goals, plans, worries, and your picture of yourself at this moment.

Conway's claim is that this working self acts like a gatekeeper. It decides what gets stored and what gets recalled.

Simple example. When you're deep in a project, old memories about similar work come up easily. Things unrelated to your goals stay buried, even though they're still there.

How many layers are necessary to be yourself?

Strohminger and Nichols, 2015. They asked families of patients with different dementias: is this still the same person? Alzheimer's, which eats memory, scored "still him" more often. Frontotemporal dementia, which keeps memory but changes morals and character, scored "gone". Lose your past, you stay. Lose your values, you vanish.

So the minimum is two layers:

1. What I'm like. Trait knowledge.

2. What I care about. Values, character.

Episodic memory, the stories, is the most fragile layer and the least necessary.

Buddhists put it in samskara long ago.

Character is what carries forward.