There are a number of “recurring themes” within my writing in this blog – no surprise there as my thoughts on particular topics are developed – and one of them is the subject of memories – an interesting topic in and of itself, but my particular area of thought is with regard to how real our memories are – both in terms of what (we think) we remember and also what we have banished or simply forgotten.<\/p>\n
I have read a lot around this topic and the more I learn the clearer it is to me that the boundary between “reality” and “fantasy” is often very blurred. It is certainly true that “memory is a funny thing”!!! We ‘remember’ quite clearly – and often in great detail – things that actually never happened and we forget details, or even the entirety, of really important events in our life.<\/p>\n
My last post (rant?) about the ability of the media to ‘manipulate’ what we learn about is relevant here – we will – inevitably – have our memories coloured by whatever we read about, see on tv or browse on the internet. A prime example of this was the reported story this week about the “murder that never was<\/a>“. This seems to have started out in all innocence – without any thought of ‘deception’ by the perpetrator. A series of tweets which detailed a particularly awful rape and murder.<\/p>\n The ‘problem’ was that the story was all too believable – even if i was such an extreme example of evil. Many people – including the “media” allowed themselves to treat the story as factual – thereby adding credence to a work of fiction. There are lots of aspects of this that I could comment on – for instance the fact that such depravity could be imagined – but, unfortunately, reality has thrown up worse than that in the not too distant past – I think here of some news stories that have come out of India over the last months.<\/p>\n Where I want to go with this post is more down “memory lane” – the story has now been implanted into the memory of many, many people – some of whom will remember it as a “great hoax”, some will, perhaps, never find out that it was ‘made up’ and the events didn’t really happen, some will – in months and years to come – completely forget that it was uncovered as a hoax and will recount it to someone else as if it had really happened.<\/p>\n Now – assuming that this “someone else” had no knowledge of the origins of the story – they will quite naturally accept it as “reality” – they might tell others – and so on – until there is a large number of people who HAD NEVER KNOWN that the whole thing had been made up.<\/p>\n My current reading is an anthology of short stories around the theme of “memory” – the authors are from an assortment of different genres and therefore the style of each story is quite different. That does mean that the treatment of the “theme” is also diverse. A couple of sub-themes have appeared in the stories that I have read so far. One is the ability to “record” memories and the other is (to all intents and purposes) creating false memories.<\/p>\n Anyone who has ever kept a diary will be very familiar with the first of these two – that, after all, is one part of the purpose of a diary – the historical recording of “what I did”. It can be very informative – and enlightening – to go back and read an old diary and compare that to the way in which the events have been remembered (or not). You find that details have been changed – bits have been forgotten – and, inevitably, some things have been added….<\/p>\n Just a minute – have you really made those up – or is it simply that not everything was recorded in the diary?<\/p>\n Here we have something that is a recurring difficulty with memory – and with lots of other aspects of life – we don’t know those things that we don’t know.<\/p>\n At the time of writing, the diary captured everything that “seemed important” at the time but it was – necessarily – a distillation – a summary – a precis – of the whole – leaving out those things that didn’t seem to matter (or that you didn’t want to be captured for posterity!!!) When you look back on it some time later it will remind you of all those things – but perhaps it is something quite different that sticks in your memory.<\/p>\n Without the confirmation from the ‘diary’ we can never know whether that extra thing was simply something that wasn’t seen as important at the time – or something that we have since “created” because it makes a good story. I have written about some similar stuff before including in “Selective Memory<\/a>“.<\/p>\n It is almost certain that I will come back to this topic – how to tell whether our memories are real or not – in future posts – by which time I will probably have forgotten what I wrote previously – or perhaps have a ‘false’ memory of having fully covered the subject already!!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are a number of “recurring themes” within my writing in this blog – no surprise there as my thoughts on particular topics are developed – and one of them is the subject of memories – an interesting topic in and of itself, but my particular area of thought is with regard to how real … Continue reading “The Reality Of The Past”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[79,96,119],"class_list":["post-347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ignorance","tag-cognition","tag-learning","tag-worldview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":348,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347\/revisions\/348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}