Quotes About Memory

The peak-end effect described by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky could contribute as well. We would be prone to creating strong memories for the more rewarding aspects of a past scene and obscure the rest. Memory is imperfect.

This book is dedicated to presenting some facts behind the making of minds that think, create narratives and meaning, remember the past and imagine the future; and to presenting some facts behind the machinery of feeling and consciousness responsible for the reciprocal connections among minds, the outside world, and its respective life.

But we may well ask, who are the players in these imaginary orchestras, exactly? And here is the answer: the objects and events in the world around our organisms, actually present or recalled from memory, and the objects and events in the world inside.

the memory of images, for example, the memory of a scene that we perceive in visual and auditory terms—is achieved by converting explicit images into a "neural code" that will later allow, by working in reverse, a more or less complete reconstruction in the process of image recall.

Loss of the hippocampus in both cerebral hemispheres disrupts the formation of and access to long-term memory of integrated scenes. Unique events are no longer recalled even if objects and events can still be recognized outside a unique context. One is able to recognize a house as a house, but not the particular house where one has lived. The contextual, episodic knowledge acquired by personal, individual experience is no longer accessible. The generic, semantic knowledge is still recoverable.

Singing a song with lyrics requires the time-locked integration of varied fragments of recall: the melody that guides the singing, the memory of the words, the memories related to the motor execution.

Feelings accompany the unfolding of life in our organisms, whatever one perceives, learns, remembers, imagines, reasons, judges, decides, plans, or mentally creates.

Memory, language, imagination, and reasoning are leading participants in cultural processes

It is an evanescent reference state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows it is being remade unless something goes wrong with the remaking.

As I walked towards travel, that illusion of liberation, I strangely felt myself walking back into childhood.

Any kind of discourse which has a flavour of the British ruling class, so powerful is ancestral memory, must be strenuously avoided.

The way her fingers flutter through the space around her. Each a thing he hopes never to forget.

But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.

It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of your life spiraled. Marie-Laure still cannot wear shoes that are too large, or smell a boiled turnip, without experiencing revulsion. Neither can she listen to lists of names. Soccer team rosters, citations at the end of journals, introductions at faculty meetings – always they seem to her some vestige of the prison lists that never contained her father's name.

Forgetting, he is learning, is how the world heals itself.

Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.

The premier achievement of human history, they said, the triumph of memory over the obliterating forces of destruction and erasure.

Memory builds itself without any clean or objective logic: a dot here, another dot here, and plenty of dark spaces in between. What we know is always evolving, always subdividing. Remember a memory often enough and you can create a new memory, the memory of remembering.

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

Where do memories go once we've lost our ability to summon them? It

From somewhere comes the sound of fire: the sound of dried roses being crumbled in a fist.

Anna remembers something Licinius said: that a story is a way of stretching time.