Your Memories Are Like Paintings

Our memories are not like old books in the library, lying there dusty and unchanged; they are rather like a living, breathing entity. What we remember today of our past is in fact a product of editing and reshaping that occurs over the years whenever we recall that particular memory. In other words, our current experiences shape our view of our pas

Munch's ambition was to paint the story about the self, and the method he found was stylised and dream-like representations of inner experiences which were unified enough and lay close enough to known stories or archetypes to be decoded and understood. He removed everything specific and detailed, allowing only the unspecified sweep of memory to rem

So if you want to remember something, convert it into an image and store it in a familiar place in your mind.

Memory begins to qualify the imagination, to give it another formation, one that is peculiar to the self. … If I were to remember other things, I should be someone else. —N. SCOTT MOMADAY

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.’

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