From The Psychology of Judgment and Decision-making, Scott Plous, p. 31:
"Try an exercise suggested by Myers (1990): Close your eyes and recall a scene in which you experienced something pleasurable. Don't read any further until you have finished replaying your experience...
(SCROLL DOWN. Blogger suckingly does not have a built-in lj-cut type functionality and I do not trust myself to do the editing of the html of my template to use the various bits of code I found other people using.)
Did you see yourself in the scene? Most people do. But if you saw yourself, then you must have reconstructed the scene (unless, of course, you were looking at yourself during the original experience).
...Memories are not like copies of our past experiences on deposit in a memory bank. Instead, they are constructed at the time of the withdrawal. The 'materials' used in the split-second reconstruction are logical inferences that fill in missing detail, associated memories that blend in with the original memory, and other relevant information."
Recent memory-checks from talking to my parents have revealed the following:
(1) My parents' dog when I was very young was a chihuahua, not a dachshund. The dachshund belonged to a friend of my mom's who we knew years later. I was shocked to discover this, yet for a couple of years now I have had a photograph of this dog with our white cat in a photo collection hanging in the hallway of my apartment that provides clear evidence that it was not a dachshund. Somehow, even seeing what the dog actually looked like did not over-ride my belief that he was a dachshund. And though I am not great with recognizing dog breeds, I am very clear in my mind as to what a dachshund looks like. (So not only are memories falliable, so is perception.)
(2) The gigantic turtle that mysteriously appeared on the porch of my parents' house when I was a kid really was huge, even to my mother. I mean, bigger than the circle formed by stretching your hands out and touching your fingers in front of you. (Robert helpfully identified the beast from my mom's description as a snapping turtle.) After a while, it went back down the stairs, down the hill of the driveway, and wandered its way up the street. What the hell this turtle was up to remains a mystery. It really freaked out the cat (who was also not a dachshund).
(3) I had basically come to believe that my memory of wearing braces on my legs when I was a little kid was false, but apparently, I truly did.
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4 comments:
Hmm. I don't see myself in my memories at all. Ever.
Well, I have a few third-person memories form when I was very young, but they're really old and weird, and I remember experiencing them third-person too (like I said, weird).
But I do agree about the reconstruction thing.
What about memories that come up unbidden, where you are reminded of something by association or relevance? Do they have this property?
I don't remember things third person, either - if I can call up a visual memory of an event at all, I generally see it "First Person Shooter" style. It is, in fact, quite difficult for me to call a memory where I am 'seeing' it third person - virtually all of them are flashes of scenes, virtually all from first-person perspective, and many/most seemingly 'generic' other than that they are attached in my mind to notable events.
Two examples - my memory of the day when the cat my grandparents had when I was born - it was my mother's generation's pet - was put to sleep is a generic scene looking from my grandparents' front porch watching a fairly generic 1970 something car driving away. I associate that image with the event, and assumably actually saw the car driving away with the cat, but there is nothing which occurs in the memory which would be unique to or particularly connected to the event - no people or animals are even visible in the scene.
My memory of a car accident when I was four or so is entirely bound up in a shadowy scene where I am looking down a dark hall at the hospital, and see a stretcher wheeled across which I associate with my grandmother - she had hurt her back and so they ran precautionary x-rays. Otherwise I have absolutely no memory of the accident whatsoever, and for good reason. I slept through the crash (a tire blew out, and we ended up going off-road and rolling over 3 times, landing upside-down) and slept through the ambulance ride to the hospital. The paramedics were convinced I was in shock - otherwise they wouldn't have gone 'lights and sirens', since no one had emergency-level injuries - but my mother was certain (correctly, I expect) that I just hadn't woken up, yet. I have a 'visualization' from outside the car after the accident which I know is a reconstruction and I remember as a being a reconstruction based on other people's descriptions (I never really saw the events which I 'see'), not as a 'memory' of the event per se.
The only memory I see 'third person' that I can recall is one where there is a pretty good explanation. I was running up to the back door of my aunt's house in Michigan, tripped, and slammed my forehead against the corner of a concrete step. I have utterly no memory of the event, even shadowy ones, other than a view from across the living/dining room of the house toward the door, where someone is kneeling and someone else (me, I guess) is lying on the ground. I'm told I wasn't knocked out entirely, but I don't remember it - no memory of pain, no memory of going to the hospital and getting stitches, no memory of HAVING stiches or getting them taken out, nothing. My memory is entirely a reconstruction or reimagining from a generic third-party perspective. I assume I had a concussion or some such - even adults often don't remember head traumas.
I'm not even sure I can call up a third-party perspective 'memory', even in trying to 'rotate' perspective of first person memories, unless I can visualize actual photographs of me in that context.
I think I saw myself in the memory I conjured up (standing at the lake at Epcot with Mosch), but I'm not sure. I was more focused on the feelings of the memory than on the visuals. I'm not terrifically visual about memories. But I think I do tend to see myself in them.
I've noticed it's nearly impossible to recount an event without building the interpretation into the recounting, the way it is built into the memory. For instance, it seems perfectly possible to report a conversation that happened in one language in a different language without any sense of translation.
When I pulled up my memory for this, it happened to be one that no one had told me about and that I haven't told as any kind of story (it was a mundane memory of eating a piece of cheesecake at Thanksgiving). And it was definitely in third person. A lot of mine are, or at least switch in perspective between first and third person.
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