Monday 8 December 2008

Reminiscence

Who's memory is it anyway?

How can we decide who's memory is actually their own?


When telling stories about our past, they tend to become more and more distorted and fabricated with each time we tell them. This could be due to the fact that we do actually share our memories with many other people in the world, who ever might have experenced anything the same as you.
When you sit with friends and reminice about 'the good old days', you tend to all chip on with your own flashes of memory. You and up with a story complete with muddled, mismatched memories, which would not actually make sense to anyone who was listening from the outside. You then go away with this adapted 'memory' of an event; so you in fact add other people's memories to your own. This brings me back to who's memory is it anyway?!


Some of our most favourite memories which we love to tell, are the ones about ourselves. The ones where we tend to have done something stupid or embarrassing when we were younger, or drunk. We tell these as our own memories, however, they are in fact made up of other people's memories. They are fragments from what other people tell you about yourself.
I think this could be becasue when we store memories, we only store fragments, images or words. And when we come to retreive these memories, they do not come to the surface of out mind in one linear narrative: but in short segments, which linked would not make any sense. This might be a reason for prefering to tell these stories about ourselves, through our friends memories'.

Just an interesting thought . . .

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