Some of the great quotes about memory from F. Paul Wilson’s Mirage . These quotes are from the “random notes of Julia Gordon," the neurophysiologist in the book. As far as I know, the observations portray correct information about brain function and memory. They explain a lot about what we sometimes call human nature. That is, our tendency to remember things in ways that best suit our purposes, experiences, and biases.
"Memory is not written in stone. It is highly susceptible to reconstruction."
"The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them…” Marcel Proust.
'“I think, therefore I am,' doesn’t quite make it. 'I remember, therefore I am' is more like it."
"Recall—the act of memory—should not be viewed as merely opening a mental drawer and pulling out a memory. Recall is a reconstructive act—the various pieces of that memory must be located, gathered together, and reassembled for inspection."
Joseph Conrad: “Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.”
“We don’t realize how fragile memories are. Memories decay if they’re not accessed regularly. We’ve got a finite number of neurons in our brains, so older memories get shunted around to make space for the constant flow of new ones."
John Kotre: “As a maker of myth, the self leaves its handiwork everywhere in memory. With the passing of time, the good guys in our lives get a little better and the bad guys a little worse. The speeds get faster, the fish get bigger, the Depression tougher.”
"People shouldn’t compare memory to a videocamera, either. No way is amemory an objective recording of an event. Memory is an extension of perception, and stored as outcomes of perceptual analysis. It’s colored by our feelings about the event, our emotional state, probably even our blood-sugar level at the time."
"When people question the malleability of memory, I tell them about the “barm” experiment. Volunetters were shown a film of a car accident where one car pulled out of an intersection and was hit by another. A week later, they were asked how fast they thought Car B was going when it passed the barn. 17% remembered the barn, and could give details about its shape and color. –There was no barn anywhere on the film."
"Dr. Elizabeth Loftus is doing fascinating work with false memory. She’s been able to create false childhood memories in adults ranging in age from 18 to 63. Her subjects became genuinely convinced that they’d got lost in a particular store at a particular age; each embellished the false childhood memory with a host of personal details and emotions, but it never happened. Some were so adamant about the veracity of the memory they were willing to bet money on it."
"Source amnesia is the root of most false memories. The source of a memory—its context in time and place—is the most fragile aspect, and often the first to decay. Once that’s gone, the memory is adrift, so to speak, and the brain can no longer distinguish whether the event it encoded was real or imagined."
"You can understand how easily false memories can be implanted in a susceptible person when you realize that the act of imagining the look of an object utilized the same area of the cortex imvolved in actually seeing an object; the act of imagining a touch utilized the same area of the cortex involved in actually feeling a touch."
