Memory
131 quotes
Biography
"Anyone who’s taken statements from multiple witnesses to the same event will know how malleable memory is."
"Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth."
"Reg, as he insisted on being called, had a memory that he himself had once compared to the Queen Alexandra Birdwing Butterfly in that it was colorful, flitted prettily hither and thither, and was now, alas, almost completely extinct."
"Everyday experience suggests that highly emotional events are often the most memorable, an observation supported by psychological and pharmacological studies in humans. Although studies in animals have shown that nondeclarative emotional memory (behaviors associated with emotional situations) may be impaired by lesions of the amygdala, little is known about the neural underpinnings of emotional memory in humans, especially in regard to declarative memory (memory for facts that can be assessed verbally). We investigated the declarative memory of two rare patients with selective bilateral amygdala damage. Both subjects showed impairments in long-term declarative memory for emotionally arousing material. The data support the hypothesis that the human amygdala normally enhances acquisition of declarative knowledge regarding emotionally arousing stimuli."
"Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again."
"As my memory rests, but never forgets what I lost."
"Look at it out here! It's all falling apart. I'm erasing you, and I'm happy! You did it to me first. I can't believe you did this to me. Clem! Did you hear me? By morning, you'll be gone! The perfect ending to this piece of sh*t story!"
"Developmental changes in imitation were examined in three experiments with 6- to 24-month-old infants. In all experiments, infants in the demonstration condition observed an experimenter perform three specific actions with a puppet. Their ability to reproduce those actions was assessed for the first time during the test in the absence of prior practice. Infants in the control condition received equivalent exposure to the puppet and the experimenter but were not shown the target actions. The results of Experiment 1 showed that 12-, 18-, and 24-month-old infants exhibited clear evidence of imitation following a 24-hour delay (deferred imitation). In addition, the findings of Experiment 1 demonstrated that the 18- and 24-month-old infants reproduced more of the target actions during the test than the 12-month-olds. The results of Experiment 2 showed that 6-month-olds performed as well as 12-month-olds when they were tested in the absence of a delay (immediate imitation). Finally, the results of Experiment 3 showed that, with additional exposure to the target actions, even 6-month-old infants exhibited deferred imitation following a 24-hour delay. Taken together, these findings have important implications for current theories of the development of imitation and memory during the first 2 years of life."
"For more than a century, scientific investigators and clinicians have noted the potential for memory distortions associated with hypnosis. Moll, a noted nineteenth-century authority, commented that "Retroactive hallucinations are of great importance in law. They can be used to falsify testimony. People can be made to believe that they have witnessed certain scenes, or even crimes." (Moll 1889/1958, pp. 345-346). The pioneer hypnosis practitioner, Bernheim, observed, "I have shown how a false memory can cause false testimony given in good faith, and how examining magistrates can unwittingly cause false testimony by suggestion" (Bernheim, 1891/1980, p. 92). Similar findings have been observed by later legal commentators, as will be noted in the following discussion."
"God gave us memories that we might have roses in December."
"Historically, infants and very young children were thought incapable of explicit memory. As a result of changes in theoretical perspective and methodological developments, this assumption was challenged in the latter part of the 20th century. Substantial progress was made in describing age-related changes in explicit memory in the first two years of life. These developments permitted the first steps toward construction of a neuro-developmental account of the changes. By considering the timing and course of development of the neural substrate responsible for explicit memory we are able to bring greater specificity to the question “what develops?” Thus far, behavioral and electrophysiological methods (event-related potentials: ERPs) have revealed both individual and age-related variability in encoding and in consolidation and storage processes; the variability is systematically related to variability in long-term explicit memory. Suggestions are made for additional research to further our understanding of relations between brain and behavioral development in the first years of life."
"Coincident with developments in the temporal-cortical explicit memory network, long-term recall abilities are newly emergent late in the first year of human life. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in 9-month-olds as an index of the integrity of the neural substrate underlying a task thought to reflect explicit memory, namely, deferred imitation. ERP measures of recognition memory 1 week after unique laboratory experiences predicted whether and how much infants recalled of the experiences 1 month later. The findings further imply that memory storage and consolidation processes are a major source of variability in long-term recall memory late in the first year of life."
"Memories weigh something. They drag you down."
"The precise nature of the engram, the physical substrate of memory, remains uncertain. Here, it is reported that RNA extracted from the central nervous system of Aplysia given long-term sensitization training induced sensitization when injected into untrained animals; furthermore, the RNA-induced sensitization, like training-induced sensitization, required DNA methylation. In cellular experiments, treatment with RNA extracted from trained animals was found to increase excitability in sensory neurons, but not in motor neurons, dissociated from naïve animals. Thus, the behavioral, and a subset of the cellular, modifications characteristic of a form of nonassociative long-term memory in Aplysia can be transferred by RNA. These results indicate that RNA is sufficient to generate an engram for long-term sensitization in Aplysia and are consistent with the hypothesis that RNA-induced epigenetic changes underlie memory storage in Aplysia."
"Memories are like flagstones, time and distance work upon them like drops of acid."
"It's good to have a short memory because it keeps life fresh."
"A baby is expected. A trip is expected. News is expected. Forgetfulness is expected. An invitation is expected. Hope is expected. But memories are not expected. They just come."
"Memory is the storehouse in which the substance of our knowledge is treasured up."
"When you've played a memory over and over in your head a few hundred times, it becomes difficult to know what you actually saw at the time and what details your mind has edited in after the fact."
"Whereas memories of events and public records are potentially faithful impressions of what happened at a particular place and a particular time, autobiographical memories and personal diaries "...are infused with the idiosyncratic perspectives emotions, and thoughts of the person doing the remembering" (Wheeler, 2000, p. 597)."
"Another feature of autobiographical memories is that they entail a sense of conscious awareness that one is reexperiencing an event that happened at some point in the past (Rubin, 1998; Tulving, 1985a, 1985b, 1993; Wheeler, 2000)."
"Indeed for James, "Memory requires more than the mere dating of a fact in the past. It must be dated in my past...I must think that I directly experienced its occurrence (p. 612)."
"One of the more consistent predictors of later recall of events is their uniqueness or distinctiveness. Specifically, events that are unique tend to be better remembered, relative to single episodes of events that occur more frequently (e.g., Brewer, 1988; Wagenaar, 1986). For example, in White's (1982, 1989, 2002) examinations of how own memories from the year 1979, the uniqueness of an event t the time it was experienced was strongly related to how well it was remembered: The less unique the event, the worse was White's recall of it. This pattern may be accounted for by interference schematization, or both. Interference from other, similar experiences makes it more difficult to retrieve the features of any specific experience. Similarly, schematization occurs as the features that are common across experiences are abstracted and the representation condensed to include only the common elements. The result is that, "...repeated encounters of similar kinds blend and the details of any single event may be forgotten..." (Barclay DeCooke, 1988, p. 106)."
"The affective intensity of an event is another predictor of later recall: Events that are "affectively charged," or have high levels of emotionality associated with them, either positive or negative, tend to be well recalled (e.g., Brewer, 1988; Thompson, 1998; Wagenaar, 1986; White, 2002)."
"A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose."