"When we thought of ourselves we immediately begin to sort and arrange memories, which we then rearrange. "
"memories can be polished, like objects taken out, burnished and contemplated."
in Augustine's Confessions X.8, he depicts memory as the basis for personal identity and continuity. In one of his passage, memory is metaphorically presented as a "palace", where segments of memory can be found in different
" Human memory is a collection of thousands of stories we remember through experience, stories we remember by having heard them, and stories we remember by having composed them. Any story in memory could have gotten there in one of these three ways. The key point is that, once these stories are there, they are relied upon for all that we can say and can understand. "
" There are several stories of one's birth, and many more stories that comprise one's life. These stories get strengthened in the telling. The memories become more real because we tell them. When we tell them in the abbreviated way, they are simply that, abbreviated stories."
http://cogprints.org/636/1/KnowledgeMemory_SchankAbelson_d.html
" ’ Participants labeled 61% of their retellings as distorted (containing exaggerations, omissions, minimizations, or additions) but only 42% of their retellings as inaccurate. Social context shaped the stories people told: they changed stories for changing audiences; they exaggerated to entertain and simplified to inform. People construct stories as they retrieve and use memories in a social context. "
- spinning the stories of our lives
"We spend our lives crafting stories that make us the noble - if "flawed" - protagonists of first-person dramas. A life story is a "personal myth" about who we are deep down - where we come from, how we got this way, and what it all means. Our life stories are who we are. They are our identity, A life story is not, however, an objective account. A life story is a carefully shaped narrative that is replete with strategic forgetting and skilfully spun meanings."
-The storytelling animal (pg 161)
"Alterations and fabrications in memory add up to what Barlett in 1932 and psychologists today call reconstruction. The idea is that memories don't sit inertly in our minds the way they do on an audiotape or the shelves of a library. They are constantly refashioned."
An experience is firstly received as unformulated, the details of the experience is gone in tenths of a second. for experience to become a memory it has to go through a process of short-term and long term. What is left to register the experience are only materials stored in different compartments of the brain, which is then used to conjure up a simulation of the memory to be retrieved.
Barlett (1932) Remembering is a process of reconstruction rather than a process of simple retrieval or recovery of precise details. Aspects from previous materials are combined to make a coherent narrative, with the implementation of pre-existing knowledge. Details may be omitted or added in order to make sense of the whole.
- Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past (p. 69)
"Memories create our stories, but our stories also create our memories. Once we have a narrative, we shape our memories to fit into it." (p. 77)
- Tavris, C., & Aronson, E. (2008). Mistakes were made (but not by me): Why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Tulving (1972, 1983) further distinguishes two types or systems within declarative memory: episodic and semantic (see also Cermak, 1984; Furlong, 1951; Gennaro, 1996; Parkin, 1997). Semantic memory contains relatively generic, context-free information about the world, such as Grapes are edible, 2 + 2 = 4 and Sacramento is the capital of California. Semantic memory lacks a source tag – it doesn’t specify when or where the memory was acquired; rather, it is retrieved as knowledge without regard to where and when that knowledge was obtained (for example, Klein, 2004; Tulving 1983, 1995; Wheeler, Stuss, & Tulving, 1997). Although semantic memory typically does not make reference to the self, it can contain propositions expressing facts about the self (for example, Stan Klein was born in New York in 1952), just as it can about other things in the world. But this information is known in the same way that one knows that 2 +2 = 4; it is not recollected or re-experienced vis a vis the context in which it originally was learned. In contrast to semantic memory, episodic memory records events as having been experienced at a particular point in space and time. On standard characterizations, what distinguishes episodic memory is that an episodic memory represents the ‘what, where, when’ of an event. As such, it is experienced as a memory that makes explicit reference to the time and place of its acquisition. Examples of episodic memory are I remember eating chicken for supper yesterday evening; I recall my meeting with Judith last Monday.
- http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~snichols/Papers/MemoryandSenseofPersonalIdentity.pdf
The past, unlike the future, has actually happened. But the past, as represented in our minds, is a mental simulations too. Our memories are not precise records of what actually happened. They are reconstructions of what happened. (p. 169)
Sensory memory are the information received through sensory receptors, unlike short term or long term memory which are essentially a coding of data, sensory memory is a system of the data itself in its original sensory form. Sensory memory only last long enough to pass onto short term memory, which the brain then scans for patterns that match with data stored in long term memory. In a way, short-term memory is for storage, while long term memory is for retrieval. (p. 20)
- Memory (what it is and how it works: facts, theories and approaches)
