Quotes About Memory

El pasado se iba alejando como un paisaje que se va reduciendo poco a poco hasta convertirse en un punto en el espejo retrovisor mientras, delante de ella, a través del parabrisas, brillaba un futuro que reclamaba toda su atención.

Once leprosy had gone, and the figure of the leper was no more than a distant memory, these structures still remained. The game of exclusion would be played again, often in these same places, in an oddly similar fashion two or three centuries later. The role of the leper was to be played by the poor and by the vagrant, by prisoners and by the 'alienated', and the sort of salvation at stake for both parties in this game of exclusion is the matter of this study.

only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory.

Qui expérimente ? Le corps. Qui invente ? Lui. Et qui flotte, court et vole, en ivresse archangélique lorsque l'intuition bienheureuse le baigne et le fait léviter ? Le corps, oui, le corps encore. Nu. Confite en logique et en mémoire, toutes deux machinales – laissez-les donc aux machines –, l'intelligence reste bête et lourde sans lui, ailé. Ascension : il vient d'appareiller

Cogito: my thinking is distinguished from knowledge, and from the various processes of understanding— memory, imagination, deductive reason, discernment, geometry— that have been externalized, along with synapses and neurons, in the computer.

I tore open a bag of truffle chips---really truffle-flavored potato chips---that cost $3.95: a novelty I'd never buy on my own. I shook them onto a small plate and the scent of truffles, at once earthy and faintly metallic, filled the air. That scent always triggers a free-floating longing in me, the ache of a bittersweet memory, but with no specific memory attached. (Did such poignancy make the chips worth twice as much as the Lay's?)

He strode in excitedly and they turned to face him. Dr Little looked grave and Aunt Nance had been crying. They didn't need to say anything. He knew that Zach was dead.

He knew that Zach was dead.

I have a hunch that our obsession with photography arises from an unspoken pessimism; it is our nature to believe the good things will not last. . . But photos provide a false sense of security> like our flawed memory, they are guaranteed to fade. . . . We take photographs in order to remember, but it is in the nature of a photograph to forget (pg 157)

As the years progress and we experience more and more, the mini-narratives that make up our lives are distorted, corrupted, so that every one of us is left with a false history, a self-created fiction about the live we have led. pg 163

Whenever I feel old—which seems to be happening more and more often these days—Alice tells me to imagine taking a picture of myself, then to imagine myself twenty years in the future looking at that picture, thinking how young I looked, hoping that I had enjoyed or at least recognized my youth. That usually does the trick

I barely knew her at all. She was on hold, someone I'd be friends with when she got her shit together. And then she died.

Indeed, brain scans done by scientists at Washington University in St. Louis indicate that areas used to recall memories are the same as those involved in simulating the future. In particular, the link between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus lights up when a person is engaged in planning for the future and remembering the past.

It should also be pointed out that some of the strains of smart mice were exceptionally timid compared to normal mice. Some suspect that, if your memory becomes too great, you also remember all the failures and hurts as well, perhaps making you hesitant. So there is also a potential downside to remembering too much.

Studies have shown that retaining memories can be improved by getting sufficient sleep between the time of activity and a test. Neuroimaging shows that the areas of the brain that are activated during sleep are the same as those involved in learning a new task. Dreaming is perhaps useful in consolidating this new information.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

In 2009, Markram said optimistically, "It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in ten years. If we build it correctly, it should speak and have an intelligence and behave very much as a human does." He cautions, however, that it would take a supercomputer 20,000 times more powerful than present supercomputers, with a memory storage 500 times the entire size of the current Internet, to achieve this.

In 2017, the Pentagon announced a $65 million grant to develop a tiny, advanced chip that can analyze a million human neurons as the brain communicates with a computer and forms memories.

If you take 200 voxels in this area, and look at which of them are active and which are inactive, you can construct a machine-learning device that decodes which number is being held in memory.

Your laptop never learns—it is just as dumb today as it was yesterday or last year. But the human brain literally rewires itself after learning any task.

The rest of the animals pay once for every mistake they make. But not us. We have a powerful memory. We make a mistake, we judge ourselves, we find ourselves guilty, and we punish ourselves. If justice exists, then that was enough; we don't need to do it again. But every time we remember, we judge ourselves again, we are guilty again, and we punish ourselves again, and again, and again.

La única forma de almacenar información es por acuerdo.

We frequently use memory against ourselves, but we have the power to use it differently. Instead, we can let memory enlighten us.

The human is the only animal on earth that pays a thousand times for the same mistake. The rest of the animals pay once for every mistake they make. But not us. We have a powerful memory. We make a mistake, we judge ourselves, we find ourselves guilty, and we punish ourselves. If justice exists, then that was enough; we don't need to do it again. But every time we remember, we judge ourselves again, we are guilty again, and we punish ourselves again, and again, and again.