THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REMEMBERING: A MEMORY LIKE A JOURNAL by Maria Konnikova
This article is about the act of remembering and how it influences of sense of self and the world around us. I am interested in the analogues to photography and writing in this article because these art forms also acts as aids to remember details and events sometimes that our memory fails to capture. As tools, are photography and writing helpful or is the process of doing these take away from our imperfect memory? I also have never heard of the condition known as, "hyperthymesia" (an ability to be able to recall the minute details from any day on demand). I guess this is like a hyper-photographic memory?
1 comment:
I think that our perceptions of photographs and writing change over time just as our memories fade and change. As the Schmolck and Neisser research articles proved, memories, even of important events, can change drastically over time. This is probably because we are constantly receiving new information and having new experiences that change our view on the world. We unconsciously reinterpret and change our opinions and memories based on this new information. Even if we had photographs or writing to aid our memory, we would be looking at them at a different time and in a different state of mind than the original memory, photograph or writing. Each time we revisit memories, we interpret the event in a slightly different way, just as each time we look at a photograph or reread a piece of writing we notice something slightly new or different than we remembered.
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