In a recent publication, "Reconsidering therapeutic action: Loewald, cognitive neuroscience and the integration of memory's duality" (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-8315.2011.00415...), my co-author, Martin Conway and I describe a dual memory system, consisting of an immediate imagistic recording system (episodic memory) and a more delayed and abstract system (conceptual memory). Individuals rely on the episodic memory system to provide short-term input on their current environment and activities; without it we would lose track of the actions we had just taken or of the words we had just spoken. In most cases episodic memories become ephemera that do not take hold in long-term memory, unless they link to the more enduring knowledge base and schemas of conceptual memory.

Developmentally, the episodic memory system is the initial memory processing system of the infant and young child. Its neuroanatomical substrates in the striatum, cerebellum, and posterior-occipital regions take form earlier than the parts of the brain associated with more conscious, sequential, and language-based memory - the medial temporal lobe structures, medial diencephalon, limbic temporal association areas, and the prefrontal cortex (Bauer, 2004). Sheffield and Hudson (1994; Hudson and Sheffield, 1998) found that as children age from 18 months to 24 months to 3 years, their capacity to re-enact an event based on increasingly symbolic cues improves dramatically. At 18 months, they can be cued by another child on videotape; at 24 months a photograph of the event can cue their recall, and by the age of 3, their recall can be cued by a verbal description. Bauer suggests that by ages 3-4 children are already processing their memories in largely verbal forms and lose access to their more iconic image-based memories.

Although our episodic memory system is often overpowered and dominated by existing schemas and abstracted categories of conceptual memory, we do indeed retain the power to access consciously the more unfiltered and less cognitively-mediated sensory memories encoded by the episodic system. The psychoanalyst, Hans Loewald, wrote eloquently about the value of these memories in our lives, noting their capacity to bring an emotional urgency to what would otherwise be distant and detached experience. He noted that artists, poets, and mystics find their way to these recollections and draw on them for their inspiration. Wordsworth in "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" wrote about a child's capacity to experience the world with this level of immediacy and wonder:

"There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,/The earth, and every common sight,/ To me did seem/Apparelled in celestial light,/ The glory and freshness of a dream./ It is not as it hath been of yore/Turn wheresoe'er I may,/By night or day/The things which I have seen I now can see no more." And yet his lyric poetry at its best does indeed take us with image and delicate description to those earlier times of "splendor in the grass."

So too is it possible for a filmmaker to achieve the same effect. In The Tree of Life, Malik gives us moments in the childhood of the Sean Penn character that draw on our most primal memories of the first years of life. There is one particularly evocative shot of a toddler lurching up a wooden staircase. Shot with the camera at the bottom of the stairs and almost eye level to the crawling child, the viewer feels again the immensity of the climb upward, the danger and exhilaration of reaching the top step. I found myself thrown back to the blue carpeted stairs of my first boyhood home, of my body crouched beneath the wooden bannister - how I slinked my way up each stair, eyeing the wrought iron table with a corded telephone, its white circular plastic dial on a black solid base. In another scene, using hand-held cameras and tracking shots, Malik conveys the sweep of boys across the neighborhood at dusk, fanning out for hide-and-go seek or capture-the-flag. He ends these moments of atavistic release with shots of porch lights and doorways illuminated from within as mothers rein in their reluctant charges. In this case it is the light that I remember - the particular rectangle shape of each amber glow - and the knowledge that its appearance at each successive house meant another name cried out and the end of that evening's wanderings.

Loewald wrote, "Without such transference - of the intensity of the unconscious, of the infantile ways of experiencing life that have no language and little organization, but the indestructibility and power of the origins of life - to the preconscious and to present-day life and contemporary objects ... human life becomes sterile and an empty shell."(Loewald, 1960, p. 250)

Malik's artistry at giving us back our childhood memories through the evocative imagery of his camera work and cinematography reminds us of the vibrancy that memory can give to our lives, as long as we remain open to its claims upon our senses and our hearts.