![]() ![]() ![]() William James wrote that “some events are so emotional as to leave a scar upon the cerebral tissues” ( James, 1890/1998), capturing this intuition that although memory is not always perfect, sometimes a memory can accurately preserve a moment in time. ![]() However, many of us nevertheless share the intuition that there are some moments in our lives that have been indelibly preserved: perhaps a wedding day, or the day a baby was brought home from the hospital. Many marital squabbles arise due to inconsistencies in how a past event is remembered, and nearly everyone has, at one time or another, struggled to remember when they were last in a particular location or why the person across the room looks familiar. Though we are not always aware of our memories’ errors, most of us would not be surprised to learn that memory is not perfect. We remember some pieces of an event but forget others, and the event details we recall often are shaped by our current mindset and molded by thoughts and experiences that have occurred between the original event and the moment of remembering. Even when we retain memories of past events, they never are exact reproductions of those initial experiences. We are left with durable and lasting traces of many events and yet we can forget other events just moments after their occurrence. “There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences.”Īs captured in this quotation from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, memory is both resolute and fragile. ![]()
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