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SCHOLAR ISLAND |
Memory
"Our memories, at any given moment, form a solid whole, a pyramid, so to speak, whose point is inserted precisely into our present action. But behind the memories which are concerned in our present occupation and are revealed by means of it, there are others, thousands of others, stored below the scene illuminated by consciousness. Yes, I believe indeed that all our past life is there, preserved even to the most infinitesimal details, and that we forget nothing, and that all that we have felt, perceived, thought, willed, from the first awakening of our consciousness, survives indestructibly."
Henri Bergson
"Short-term memory flickers might disappear in just seconds or minutes, but our deeper memories, the ones that constitute our very personality-the permanent actors in David Hume's drama-can exist, impermeable, sustained by the arrangement of electric whirling pulls within our cells, for hours and months and then decades on end. A young woman meets a wonderful man and is swept off her feet. Decades later, old and bent, with grandchildren around, she hears one of her children read aloud from his love letters. At first the words are distant, scarcely recognized. But then the sodium pumps and neurotransmitters and their glowing electricity stir into action. She looks up.
She's remembered."
-David Bodanis
Electric Universe
"Conventional wisdom holds that memory is like a serial recording device like a computer diskette. In reality, memory is dynamic-not static-like a paper on which new texts (or new versions of the same text) will be continuously recorded, thanks to the power of posterior information. (In a remarkable insight, the nineteenth-century Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire compared our memory to a palimpest, a type of parchment on which old texts can be erased and new ones written over them.) Memory is more of a self-serving dynamic revision machine: you remember the last time you remembered the event and, without realizing it, change the story at every subsequent remembrance.
So we pull memories along causative lines, revising them involuntarily and unconsciously. We continuously narrate past events in the light of what appears to make what we think of as logical sense after these events occur.
By a process called reverberation, a memory corresponds to the strengthening of connections from an increase of brain activity in a given sector of the brain-the more activity, the stronger the memory. While we believe that the memory is fixed, constant, and connected, all this is very far from truth. What makes sense according to information obtained subsequently will be remembered more vividly. We invent some of our memories-a sore point in courts of law since it has been shown that plenty of people have invented child-abuse stories by dint of listening to theories."
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
"And how do you activate your memory nerve cells from within? Why, you do it electrically, just as Dr. Penfeld did it from the outside. This has been known ever since Dr. Hans Berger of Jena, Germany, started the study of electrical brain currents in 1928. In the years since, the recording of electrical brain waves has become routine."
But until recently, researchers hadn't found out a lot about the electrical stimulation of memories. The normal rhythm of the brain waves is the so-called alpha rhythm, and that goes on pretty steadily and regularly as long as your brain does nothing in particular-when it "idles." as soon as you start thinking hard or try to remember something, the alpha waves stop"
-Rudolf Flesch
The Art of Clear Thinking
. "The horror of that moment," the King went on, "I shall never, never forget!"
"You will, though," the queen said, "if you don't make a memorandum of it."
-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
"Unless we remember, we cannot understand."
-E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
"So here is your definition of thinking: It is the manipulation of memories."
-Rudolf Flesch
The Art of Clear Thinking
"Have we Forgotten how to Forget? Viktor Mayer-Schonberger worries about this. The associate professor of public policy, who is affiliated with Harvard, has written a fascinating book called Delete: The virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, due out in September. In it, he argues that technology has inverted our millennia-old relationship with memory. For most of human history, almost everything people did was forgotten, simply because it was so hard to record and retrieve things. But there was a benefit: "Social forgetting" allowed everyone to move on from embarrassing or ill-conceived moments in their lives. Digital tools have eliminated that amnesty. Google caches copies of our blog postings; social-networking sites thrive by archiving our daily dish. Society now defaults to a relentless proustian remembrance of all things past. The downsides are obvious. We live with a nagging fear that something we say or do online will come back to haunt us years later. (Just ask anyone who's been Google-vetted at the start of a relationship.) We become enormously more cautious with what we say or do, says Mayer-Schonberger. And society suffers when people stop talking risks...
article by Clive Thompson "Forgetful by design" in Wired Aug 2009
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"memory is the crux of humanity and enables us to endure hardship."
Erica Jong
"A country without a memory is a country of madmen."
-George Santayana, 1906
"The demon of speed is often associated with forgetting, with avoidance...and slowness with memory and confronting."
-Milan Kundera
"You are a repository of memories and little else."
-Melissa Holbrook Pierson
The Place You Love Is Gone
"When you think of the thousands of days you have lived by now, it is strange to realize that there are probably only a few that you can specifically remember."
-Paul Collins
The Trouble With Tom
"The British psychologist, Mr. F.C. Bartlett, wrote a fat book called Remembering, in which he showed clearly by innumerable experiments that we hardly ever remember things the way they are; we remember them the way we think they should have been. By what Mr. Bartlett calls "effort after meaning," we work on our memories until they conveniently fit the patterns we already have in our minds. "Remembering." Mr. Bartlett concludes, "is an imaginative reconstruction or construction.....It is hardly ever exact."
In other words, as soon as we try to remember, distortion creeps in and we are apt to recall something that wasn't so. Marcel Proust, the famous author of Remembrance of Thins Past, knew this very well. He wanted to create a picture of true memories. Therefore he never let his characters remember deliberately, and his great novel is a mosaic of what he called "involuntary memories"-the kind that stir in the mind when you taste a once-familiar taste or hear a long-forgotten melody. "Involuntary memories," Proust wrote to a friend," alone have the stamp of authenticity."
But as if the distortion of memories wasn't enough, the patterns in our minds distort our experience to begin with-at the very moment of perception. Not only is it almost impossible to remember exactly, it is hard to see, hear and feel exactly. Perception isn't a matter of the senses only. We don't see just with our eyes. We also see with our brain."
-Rudolf Flesch
The Art of Clear Thinking
"People don't use their eyes. They never see a bird, they see a sparrow. They never see a tree, they see a birch. They see concepts."
-Joyce Cary
"Memory is a capricious and arbitrary creature. You never can tell what pebble she will pick up from the shore of life to keep among her treasures, or what inconspicuous flower of the field she will preserve as the symbol of "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,".....And yet I do not doubt that the most important things are always the best remembered."
-Henry Van Dyke
"One would expect people to remember the past and imagine the future, but in fact....they imagine the past and remember the future."
Lewis Namier
"The old Edwardian brigade do make their brief little world look pretty tempting. All homemade cakes and croquet, bright ideas, bright uniforms. Always the same picture: high summer, the long days in the sun, slim volumes of verse, crisp linen, the smell of starch . What a romantic picture. Phoney too, of course. It must have rained sometimes. Still, even I regret it somehow, phoney or not. If you've no world of your own, it's rather pleasant to regret the passing of someone else's."
from John Osborne's play Look back in Anger
"Memory tempers prosperity,
mitigates adversity, controls
youth, and delights old age."
-Lactantius
"Memory! Yes a redeemer as well as a liar and betrayer. Like a medieval alchemist it takes the cheap baser metals and triumphantly turns them into pure-flowing gold; and the memory becomes more precious than the things that really happened."
Byron
"His past came back to him in a flash and he remembered it all to the last detail....It is hard to say what there was in that memory to produce so strong an impression on the poor general, who was, as usual, slightly drunk; but he was suddenly extraordinarily moved. "I remember-I remember everything!" he cried."
-Dostoevsky, The Idiot
"Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you hardly catch it going."
Tennessee Williams
....we die to each other daily.
What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them. And they have
changed since then.
To pretend that they and we are the same
Is a useful and convenient social convention
Which must sometimes be broken. We must
also remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a
stranger."
"The Cocktail Party" by T.S. Eliot
Memory! What is it? Is it a betrayer, a consoler or a redeemer?"
Byron
"Today in our mechanized civilization we are dominated by the metered time of clocks. We submit to blackmail by the watch....Occasionally this makes us forget the time of duration. The clock thus becomes a kind of enemy that robs us of the dimension of memory."
-Umberto Eco
"Is this after all the final recompense for living?
Byron
"There is a concealed strength in men's memories which they take no notice of."
Thomas Fuller
The Holy State and the Profane State
"Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?"
François de la Rochefoucauld
"Once I was at a New York City dinner part with a group of well-educated people. They were writers, editors and intellectuals; not a scientist in the group except for me. Somehow the conversation got around to The New York Review of Books, a fine book review magazine that went well beyond just reviewing books....I avidly read and like it....But I went on to describe my problem: I couldn't remember anything that I read in it. The information went into short-term memory storage and never got into my long-term memory. The reason for this, I had decided, was that in spite of the consistently brilliant style of writing, and the quality of the narrative, all that was being expressed in effect was one person's opinion about another person's thinking or actions. It is difficult for me to remember people's opinions (even my own). What I remember are concepts and facts, the invariants of experience, not the ephemera of human opinion, taste, and styles. Such trivia are not to be considered by serious people, except as intellectual recreation.
Silence followed my brief remarks, and I felt isolated. The rift between the two cultures-science and humanism-widened considerably. I realized that in my blundering I had violated the sacred precincts of the other guests' high temple. Those people worshipped in that temple which was dedicated to political opinion, taste, and style, to a consciousness dominated by self-reflection, belief and feeling, and intellectual gossip and activity for its own sake, only loosely bound by the constraints of knowledge. I tried to think of a joke to extract myself from an awkward situation but could not."
Heinz Pagels from new theories of everything by John D. Barrow
"If only I could take a potion
that would enable me to forget."
-Swami Vivekananda
"The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient, at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way, but our powers of recollecting and forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.:"
Jane Austen
"Thanks for the memories.
Bob Hope
"Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"Memory feeds a culture, nourishes hope and makes a human, human."
Elie Wiesel
"Each and all, we are riding into the dark. Even living, we cannot remember half the events of our own days."
Loren Eisley
The Star Thrower
"The past is our mortal mother, no dead thing. Our future constantly reflects her to the soul. Nor is it ever the new man of today which grasps his fortune, good or ill. We are pushed to it by the hundreds of days we have buried, eager ghosts."
Meredith
The adventures of Harry Richmond, 1871
"What would the future of man be if it were devoid of memory."
Elie Wiesel
From the Kingdom of Memory
"People aren't prepared for what is coming, an army of the forgetful is about to march on the whole country."
Elizabeth Cohen
The House on Beartown Road
(what would the future of man be if memory is manufactured?)
aa
"Man must sometimes take a rest from his memory."
Guatemalan Indian to Lewis Lewin
"One lives in the hope of becoming a memory."
Antonio Porchia
Book: The Art of Memory by Francis Yates
Book: PDV-1 by F.E. Potts
"Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.
Rollo May
"The presence of an idea is like that of a loved one. We imagine that we shall never forget it, and that the beloved can never become indifferent to us; but out of sight, out of mind! The finest thought runs the risk of being irretrievably forgotten if it is not written down."
Schopenhauer 'On Thinking for Oneself',
"Ah! The land of Yesterday, It lies in the West, in the times of the setting sun....It is the home of things past, and of all old, forgotten, unhappy memories: a vallied land, full of soft mists and trees that ever shed their leaves in the drowsy wind."
C.S. Lewis
"From the subterranean ore of memory we extract the jeweled visions of our future."
Miguel De Unamuno
"The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten"
Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living: Diaries 1933-39
"Something has to be done to get us free of our memories and choices."
John Cage
"Remembering everything is a form of madness."
Brian Friel
"The things we remember best are those better forgotten."
Gracian
The Art of Worldly Wisdom, 1647
"You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces , to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing."
Luis Bunuel (1900-1983)
"You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful sacred memory, preserved since childhood is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day."
Feodor Dostoevsky (1821-81)
"What a wonderful faculty is memory!-the most mysterious and inexplicable in the great riddle of life; that plastic tablet on which the Almighty registers with unerring fidelity the records of being, making it the depository of all our words, thoughts and deeds-this faithful witness against us for good or evil."
Susanna Moodie (1803-85)
"The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all…..I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water."
Eugene Ionesco
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
Milan Kundera
The Book of Laughter and forgetting
"Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you hardly catch it going."
Tennessee Williams
"The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant."
Salvador Dali
"That is my major preoccupation-memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich the kingdom, glorify the kingdom and serve it."
Elie Wiesel
"One of the oddest things in life, I think is the things one remembers."
Agatha Christie
"Four ducks on a pond,
a grass-bank beyond,
a blue sky of spring,
White clouds on the wing:
What a little thing
To remember for years-
To remember with tears!"
William Allingham
"They teach us to remember; why do they not teach us to forget?"
F.A. Durivage
"The time is close when ye shall forget all things and be by all forgotten."
Marcus Auerelius
"Access to memory replaces historical knowledge as a way for our species to process its past. Memory has replaced history-and this is not bad news. On the contrary, it’s excellent news because it means we’re no longer doomed to repeat our mistakes; we can edit ourselves as we go along."
Douglas Coupland
Microserfs
"We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed."
Milan Kundera
Ignorance
"the one thing that differentiates human beings from all other creatures on Earth is the externalization of subjective memory-first through notches in trees, then through cave paintings, then through the written word and now, through data bases of almost other worldly storage and retrieval power.
Karla said that as our memory multiplies itself seemingly log-rhythmically, history’s pace feels faster, it is "accelerating" at an oddly distorted rate, and will continue to do so faster and faster……
Milan Kundera
"My childhood's home I see again,
And sadden with the view;
And still, as memory crowds my brain,
There's pleasure in it too.
O Memory! Thou midway world
Twixt earth and paradise
Where things decayed and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rise
And, freed from all that's earthly vile,
Seem hallowed, pure and bright,
Like scenes in some enchanted isle
All bathed in liquid light."
-Abraham Lincoln The Return 1846
"....With an empire the size of the Incas' it was important that administration be kept up to scratch, but this was a tricky business owing to the fact that the Incas were illiterate: this magnificent empire never discovered writing. They did, however, have their own special bookkeeping system. They employed memory men, known as yaravecs, whose job it was to memorize everything about everything. Yaravecs held the archives of the Inca kingdom, and their role was passed down through families. On ceremonial occasions they were called up to demonstrate their knowledge, reciting the history of battles, crop yields or Inca lineage."
Dominic Streatfeild
Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography
"In his book The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years. Chingiz Aitmatov recounts how ancient tribesmen in Central Asia created of their vanquished enemies a new type of human called mankurt, a person without a memory. They would shave a prisoner's head, then wrap it with the warm skin of a camel just slaughtered, and let the skin shrink around the captive's skull as it dried. The enormously painful procedure would have the effect of "squeezing out" the captive's memory. he who survived the torture would then become the most precious of all slaves: devoid of memory, bereft of desires or aspirations, he would obey his masters of his own will, which of course is no will at all. The Mankurt's masters would not have to guard him or guard against him-he would be highly economical and effortlessly maniplable."
Yo'av Karny
Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus-in Quest of Memory
See Article: Get Back, Get Back in Science Vol 321 15 August 2008
The project, an online survey devised by psychologists Martin Conway and Catriona Morrison at the University of Leeds, U.K., asks people to describe the first memory that comes to mind related to the Fab Four.such as a movie, a news item, or a pot-addled night listening to Sgt Pepper
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Book: The Art of Memory" by Francis Yates
Book: The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers" by Daniel L. Schacler
Book: "Can't Remember What I Forgot: The Good News From the Front Lines of memory Research" by Sue Halpern
Book: "Memory: From Mind to Molecules" by Larry R. Squire & Eric R. Kandel
Book: "In Search Of Memory" by Eric R. Kandel
Book: "Memory and Emotion" by James L. McGaugh
Book: "The Place You Love Is Gone" by Melissa Pierson
Book: "The Woman Who Can't Forget: A Memoir" by Jill Price
Book: "Highlanders: A Journey To the Caucasus in quest of Memory" by Yo'av Karny
Book: "Total Recall" by Gordon Bell & Jim Gemmell
Book: "DE LA METTRIE"S Ghost: The Story of Decisions" by Chris Nunn
Book: "Remembering" by F.C. Bartlett