Distant memories

[Pogo]

Do you ever dream your memories?

I know this is not the same question as "do you remember your dreams" but whenever I remember parts of dreams vividly in excruciating hyperawareness detail, and I try to get them analyzed, the answer is always "oh that's nothing".

Had to learn that the message was in the subtle symbology.

 

[Pogo]

I ask a simple question but perhaps not so simple to answer.

Why are some memories so fresh in our memory and others erased forever?

A memory of little importance that dates from a long time is intact while a closer memory is erased.

What is the reason , the explanation ?

My first memory is of my baby sister being born.

I was 2 1/2 years old.

Seems like only yesterday.

I can remember it clear as day.

It WAS yesterday.

 

[Pogo]

I ask a simple question but perhaps not so simple to answer.

Why are some memories so fresh in our memory and others erased forever?

A memory of little importance that dates from a long time is intact while a closer memory is erased.

What is the reason , the explanation ?

On the other side of the coin, I can only remember the names of about 50 of the 100 different women that I slept with.

This is a perfect example of what that neurologist said --- "Stories we tell ourselves", until they are embellished beyond recognition.

This one moved a whole decimal point.

 

[Dalia]

Some of what memories we keep is intentional.

I heard a neurologist make a point that was very revealing about how the brain works --- that a memory in the brain does not work like a videotape, rather it's a story one tells oneself, over and over.

In the process of that reteling of course, things get embellished. And other parts get eliminated. Or merged with other stories.

I always thought of my oldest memories, like the day my sister was born, as more like "memories of memories".

Thank Pogo, I would always think that it worked like a videotape and that we remembered a memory maybe because at that moment something different would happen, feeling, scent, sensation ?

Yes certainly there are associations, some of the time. Something in the right brain -- a piece of music, a vision of a landscape, and so forth. These can trigger what the memory was, but I don't think there is always such an association.

I can remember vividly the voice of our high school principal on the building's public address system telling us that President Kennedy was dead. I remember where I was sitting, what the view outside the window was, what the sky looked like, how our teacher reacted, all of that. When something meaningful happens we go into a heightened awareness. Other times it's much more subtle, that the brain just happened to receive two different stimuli at the same time and desired to remember one of them, and the other 'hitched a ride'.

But yes, a story we tell ourselves, over and over until it becomes a belief. If we listen to ourselves carefully we can start to hear how the story changes over years. Then we start to have doubts about what really happened.

These moments that we remember for a moment of our life that are may have little importance as events that mark us for life on September 11th, JFK death, the loss of a love one ... we can not "forget we remember the moment of exactly what we were doing.
The insignificant moments have a reason for this memory, something that memory has retained.
Pogo, for your last sentence:

But yes, a story that we tell ourselves again and again until it becomes a belief. If we listen carefully, we can begin to hear how the story changes over the years. Then we begin to have doubts about what really happened.

What comes to say that we have not really lived the moment? or at least not at all the way we perceive?

 

[Vastator]

I ask a simple question but perhaps not so simple to answer.

Why are some memories so fresh in our memory and others erased forever?

A memory of little importance that dates from a long time is intact while a closer memory is erased.

What is the reason , the explanation ?

Memory is a funny thing. Another question in regard to memory is...
Why can we remember every detail of a dream upon waking? But forget what we dreamt about at all, just an hour or two later?

 

[Pogo]

Some of what memories we keep is intentional.

I heard a neurologist make a point that was very revealing about how the brain works --- that a memory in the brain does not work like a videotape, rather it's a story one tells oneself, over and over.

In the process of that reteling of course, things get embellished. And other parts get eliminated. Or merged with other stories.

I always thought of my oldest memories, like the day my sister was born, as more like "memories of memories".

Thank Pogo, I would always think that it worked like a videotape and that we remembered a memory maybe because at that moment something different would happen, feeling, scent, sensation ?

Yes certainly there are associations, some of the time. Something in the right brain -- a piece of music, a vision of a landscape, and so forth. These can trigger what the memory was, but I don't think there is always such an association.

I can remember vividly the voice of our high school principal on the building's public address system telling us that President Kennedy was dead. I remember where I was sitting, what the view outside the window was, what the sky looked like, how our teacher reacted, all of that. When something meaningful happens we go into a heightened awareness. Other times it's much more subtle, that the brain just happened to receive two different stimuli at the same time and desired to remember one of them, and the other 'hitched a ride'.

But yes, a story we tell ourselves, over and over until it becomes a belief. If we listen to ourselves carefully we can start to hear how the story changes over years. Then we start to have doubts about what really happened.

These moments that we remember for a moment of our life that are may have little importance as events that mark us for life on September 11th, JFK death, the loss of a love one ... we can not "forget we remember the moment of exactly what we were doing.
The insignificant moments have a reason for this memory, something that memory has retained.
Pogo, for your last sentence:

But yes, a story that we tell ourselves again and again until it becomes a belief. If we listen carefully, we can begin to hear how the story changes over the years. Then we begin to have doubts about what really happened.

What comes to say that we have not really lived the moment? or at least not at all the way we perceive?

D'accord. We lived it the way we tell ourselves we lived it. When we recall a memory we're telling ourselves a story just as we would tell someone else. I think we probably embellish the latter more than the former because it's hard to bullshit yourself if you already know differently. Once we do that we're into self-delusion.

 

[Dalia]

Vastator, The brain forgets and keeps some of our dreams I do not understand how it works The brain is a very complex (machine) that one does not completely use just a small percentage.
and some dreams seem so real that we almost believe we've lived the moment we dream of what supports Pogo's words when it's like that.
.

 

[Dalia]

I ask a simple question but perhaps not so simple to answer.

Why are some memories so fresh in our memory and others erased forever?

A memory of little importance that dates from a long time is intact while a closer memory is erased.

What is the reason , the explanation ?

My first memory is of my baby sister being born.

I was 2 1/2 years old.

Seems like only yesterday.

I can remember it clear as day.

yiostheoy, My first memory is not so far. 5 years that I had. it was at school again one of those moments without much importance. a valentine card that we offered in a small box in our little desk and one of the cards was so pretty that I still remember it. that it's touching and strange at the same time.
.

 

[Dalia]

The study of human memory stretches back at least 2,000 years to Aristotle’s early attempts to understand memory in his treatise “On the Soul”. In this, he compared the human mind to a blank slate and theorized that all humans are born free of any knowledge and are merely the sum of their experiences. Aristotle compared memory to making impressions in wax, sometimes referred to as the "storehouse metaphor", a theory of memory which held sway for many centuries.
In antiquity, it was generally assumed that there were two sorts of memory: the “natural memory” (the inborn one that everyone uses every day) and the “artificial memory” (trained through learning and practice of a variety of mnemonic techniques, resulting in feats of memory that are quite extraordinary or impossible to carry out using the natural memory alone).