Memory and imagination

[vaneramos]

Tonight en route to Toronto I heard the CBC Radio program Ideas air an interview with Endel Tulving about the science of memory. Fascinating. The gist is that long-term memory has traditionally been lumped together, but he distinguishes episodic memory, which involves memories of past events and experiences, from semantic memory, which is

Comments

[blt4success66]

Thank you for sharing this information! It's rather interesting.

I hope you have a grand weekend!

[vaneramos]

You too!

If you like this kind of thing, you can listen to Ideas in streaming audio on CBC Radio weeknights at 9 p.m. (and you can choose from any of Canada's five time zones). Recently I've caught several programs while driving in the evening (one was about Darwin and another was about meat and ethical alternatives to vegetarianism), and liked them so much I'm going to try listening at home when I have the chance.

[bitterlawngnome]

We have no sense organ for perceiving it

Yeah, the mind. The Vedic traditions talk about "mind" as one of the senses, the one that informs us about ideas or abstractions. The Greeks talked about mind as the organ that perceived Logos. The Taoists talked about mind being vulnerable to illusions in the same way as vision or hearing.

[vaneramos]

Tulving made some other interesting statements about the mind. Scientists keep looking for organic traces of specific memories within the brain, but he doubts whether they exist, suggesting the mind is to the brain as music is to a piano. A piano does not contain music; it only produces music when certain factors act upon it. So the brain is more like an instrument than a record

[bitterlawngnome]

My mom does it all the time ... "forgets" things she doesn't want to know, invents things that never happened, replaces actual memories with ones that make more sense to her way of thinking. She's not stupid or suffering from Alzheimer's in this, she has always done it. I can't count the number of times I told her stuff as simple as "I'm going to the store and will be back in 5 minutes" and when I get back she's in a flap cause she doesn't know where I've gone and how long I'll be away. But she also forgets major, important stuff that she's been told repeatedly.

[pippasporch]

Wow, this touches me on so many levels! I also struggle remembering certain episodic things, and this most definitely has an effect on my perception of my relationships. When something goes wrong in a relationship, that disconnection stretches backwards, making me doubt the connection that was there, and forwards, making me fear for the future of the relationship - often upsetting the partner.

Employing my imagination when reality is less than satisfactory is a STRONG way of coping for me, and that all makes sense now. Though I do worry if it might finally scatter my perception of reality...

Thanks for sharing, Van. VERY insightful! And I KNOW that making a daily practice of focusing on something beautiful can have a powerful effect. May it bring you light in every way possible!

[vaneramos]

Yes, this program really fitted a piece of the puzzle for me. I've noticed that I don't remember things the way many people seem to, and sometimes I've worried that I'm already beginning to lose brain function. It was a little reassuring to realize that this is just one shade in the spectrum of human experience. It also gave me some clues for tools to work around the problem.

May our imaginations shed light!