Picture yourself sitting across from someone.
You see them.
You hear them.
You smell them.
You taste the food in your mouth.
You sense the temperature of the room.
Every one of these sensations is processed by a different organ, and in a different area of your brain.
What is a memory?
A memory is the reconstruction of all these sense experiences into a single package.
Literally - in the correct meaning of the word "literally" - a memory is re-living the moment.
The Difference.
The difference is that every time you reconstruct those sense experiences an re-live that memory, YOU are the person doing it. The YOU that is you today. Now. With all of your life experience that has happened between the memory and now.
And that filter colors the memory.
Which then gets re-stored in the place where those different sense memories go.
In the end, every single time you remember your favorite moment, you alter it irrevocably forever.
I was bothered by that for a long time. But I find it kind of comforting now, that the act of remembering adds a little bit of the "now me" to the "past me" of my memory, and creates a kind of continuum.
How does it make you feel...?
(None of what I wrote above is original or hard to find sources for. I am mostly interested in engaging on these ideas with my fellow Huskites...)
I enjoy saying " Literally, in the literal sense of the word" I'm reading this book right now called The Self Illusion and just finished the part about memory. It mentions Elizabeth Loftus who is this expert on false memory. When she was 14 her mother drown in a swimming pool and 30 years later her uncle mentioned that she found her mom. Even though it was actually her aunt who found her she had lucid memories of finding her mothers drown in a swimming pool for days until she found out. Edit: I have more too say, reading this book made me feel weird about it, mainly because they mention how our memories contribute to our "self" but also aren't even all that accurate. That is the bit that messed with me.
RIGHT?!? When you start unpacking all the implications of this memory-isn't-whatcha-think-it-is situation, other parts of your life become way less certain... "...our memories contribute to our "self" but also aren't even all that accurate. That is the bit that messed with me."
When I was 4 we moved to Singapore and a family who lived nearby had a small pet monkey While I grew up I remember - extremely clearly - when it escaped and climbed up onto a neighbour's roof and I was worried because it was howling and screaming .I was scared it would come into our house and ... well I don't know what I thought it would do but obviously mad, screaming monkeys in the house are undesirable. Some years later after we'd left Singapore I spoke to my mum about it and indeed there was a family with a pet monkey, but it had never escaped and run amok, although it did climb up onto their roof once, but I never saw that - I only heard about it. That set my head spinning. I couldn't imagine how something that I remember seeing so vividly wasn't true. I can easily understand how people can have different opinions or misremember details but to completely fabricate a memory like that? As far as I know I don't have any other completely false memories but it makes you wonder, not just about your own memories but other people's too.
I find this idea quite interesting. You say that our memories aren't our memories (in the title of this post), but aren't they more OUR memories if the act of remembering adds part of current you. I guess the question is what makes you, you. Memories? How we are now? How we were? What we have done? I think an interesting comment to add as well is that humans have a tendency to be cognitively dissonant. That means we can have inconsistent thoughts and memories because of our changing behavioral and attitudes. It's basically when we do something in the past, that we now believe at the present to be irrational, and so we think up of a new reason why we did it (rationalizing that past decision and changing your memory of what really happened). While this phenomenon is not exactly the same as the one you described, they're both part of how our brain changes its memories over time.
Maybe I was being too careless in my wording. Our impression of what memories are, is wrong. Your memory of a situation is actually a re-enactment of that situation, that you are undergoing now. When you remember that situation again in the future, you are re-enacting the last re-enactment, not going back to the "original memory" and remembering it again. .... and thinking about that just makes me want to write some Philip K. Dick sci-fi...
I always feel a sense of disconnect when I listen to music that I used to love, only to find that it no longer stirs any emotion within me. It's like your description of re-living a memory, yet all of 'packaged sense experiences' have wasted away. I don't feel like I used to when I listen to it. I don't find any meaning or value in it. It's kind of poignant in its complete lack of stimulation. I know that's not quite what you were talking about, but it's where my mind went.
The theory I heard a long time ago went: "You search in music the reflection of your emotions or the kind of emotions you want to have". I don't know how true that is. I know this, though: I used to listen a lot of music in minor, back when I was an angsty teenager. Now, I'm leaning towards jazz and rock, with the angsty dubstep rendering me unsettled. I used to listen to a lot of dubstep, too - presumably, as a reflection of my repressed anger. I still dabble in trap and electro to this day, but dubstep is no longer my tune. Some songs go with me through the years, though. I presume some of it has nostalgic value, reminding me of the times or the people associated with the song. I remember listening to The Prodigy back when I was about 12, at a camp where we had dance nights. I nagged the DJ to put on one of my favourites and enjoyed seeing it come to life, even though it may have been entirely inappropriate to the tone of the evening, now that I think about it. Still like the songs.