Memory is like a journal: selective, incomplete, and subject to interpretation
…if we’ve learned anything over decades of research into the properties of memory, it’s this: memories are idiosyncratic, they change, and the way we stored them to begin with will affect the way we will remember them later on.
…you decide to write down what you’re seeing so that you’ll remember it for later, maybe to share with someone else, maybe for your own personal benefit.
What do you write down? What features do you think are important enough? What features do you think will be sufficient to trigger your memory and allow you to fill in the rest of the details later? Do you focus on why it captured your attention, or what it made you think of, or just the objective picture before you?
…the features you chose to note that first moment, when you didn’t have a camera present, will grow to define the experience for you. Because they are used as memory triggers each time you go back to the scene, they will in time grow larger, more definitive, more important. And those features that you decided were not worth recording will fade in comparison.
A camera has a shot at relative objectivity…Our memory journals are rich and varied and full of meaning. They are central to our sense of self and to our sense of the world. But whatever they are, they are not and never will be (unless we are one of six) wholly objective or entirely stable. They are inherently ours and inherently flawed, in the sense of failing to have captured with complete accuracy whatever it is they were trying to memorialize. And that is something we should never forget.
- Maria Konnikova
Related
In my post, Capture as it happens - Memory fades, protecting our world view, and forcing cause and effect I rounded up lots of posts on the idiosyncratic nature of our memory. We all choose to look at the world a certain way, we all choose to remember a situation a certain way. When time passes we also lose the moment, so the closer to the time we capture this the better. The idea is raw truths are going to reveal much more. Even gathering in anecdote circles to gather different takes on the situation. When gathering lots of raw narratives we can infer patterns. Whereas when writing a report, aside from time passing, it has an agenda.
Our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them
An excerpt from Nassim Taleb’s book, The Black Swan:
The journal was purportedly written without…knowing what was going to happen next, when the information available…was not corrupted by the subsequent outcomes.” “While we have a highly unstable memory, a diary provides indelible facts recorded more or less immediately; it thus allows the fixation of an unrevised perception and enables us to later study events in their own context. Again, it is the purported method of description of the event, not its execution, that was important.
Lots more on this thinking in my post, KM as a hippocampus
(Source: bigthink.com)
