Are Memories Reliable? Expert Explains How They Change More Than We Realise
Our sense of who we are depends, in significant part, on our memories. And yet they’re not to be trusted. ‘What is selected as a personal memory,’ writes Professor of psychology and neuroscience Giuliana Mazzoni, ‘needs to fit the current idea that we have of ourselves.’
Will Storr • The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human, and How to Tell Them Better
All of this research shows that we are the great masterworks of our own storytelling minds—figments of our own imaginations. We think of ourselves as very stable and real. But our memories constrain our self-creation less than we think, and they are constantly being distorted by our hopes and dreams. Until the day we die, we are living the story of
... See moreJonathan Gottschall • The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different f
... See moreTed Chiang • Exhalation: Stories
People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different fo
... See more