Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Glue
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Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Glue
Human memory is not an archive. It is associative, embodied, contextual, emotional. We do not think in folders. We do not retrieve meaning through backlinks. Our minds are improvisational. They forget on purpose.
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
It is helpful to imagine these roadblocks as questions: How do we rediscover ourselves anew? How do we right our collective rememory? Think of rememory as an undoing, unraveling and rewriting of corporeal constitutive elements. In the changingness of rememory, could we find transcendence? Or perhaps a trace of a former history that gives us the
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