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
How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory.