When they asked people, fourteen years after the assassination of J.F.K., to report details such as where they were when they learned of the assassination, how they learned the news, what they were doing at the time, and how the news impacted them, nearly everyone recalled these details confidently. ![]() These authors argued that when a highly surprising event occurs, a special memory mechanism takes over, causing the moment to be recorded with picture-perfect accuracy. This belief in the durability of emotional memories – a term that is often used as short-hand to denote memories for events that elicited an emotional response at the time of their occurrence – is closely related to the concept of a “flashbulb memory,” a phrase coined by Brown and Kulik (1977). William James wrote that “some events are so emotional as to leave a scar upon the cerebral tissues” ( James, 1890/1998), capturing this intuition that although memory is not always perfect, sometimes a memory can accurately preserve a moment in time. However, many of us nevertheless share the intuition that there are some moments in our lives that have been indelibly preserved: perhaps a wedding day, or the day a baby was brought home from the hospital. Many marital squabbles arise due to inconsistencies in how a past event is remembered, and nearly everyone has, at one time or another, struggled to remember when they were last in a particular location or why the person across the room looks familiar. Though we are not always aware of our memories’ errors, most of us would not be surprised to learn that memory is not perfect. We remember some pieces of an event but forget others, and the event details we recall often are shaped by our current mindset and molded by thoughts and experiences that have occurred between the original event and the moment of remembering. Even when we retain memories of past events, they never are exact reproductions of those initial experiences. We are left with durable and lasting traces of many events and yet we can forget other events just moments after their occurrence. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.“There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences.”Īs captured in this quotation from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, memory is both resolute and fragile. Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one.Įvery man's memory is his private literature. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again. And it never faded, and it never got stale. ![]() If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. The scenery was the last thing on my mind. It was the age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me. I was thinking about the two of us together, and then about myself again. I was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I didn't give a damn about the scenery that day. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that eighteen years later I would recall it in such detail. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any mind. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer - and what trees and seasons smelled like - how people looked and walked and smelled even. I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. ![]() Ghosts don't haunt people-their memories do. So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears. If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten We do not remember days, we remember moments. One lives in the hope of becoming a memory. ![]() Sometimes you can’t let go of the past without facing it again.Ī clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory. Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.
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