Your Memories Are Like Paintings
People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different f
... See moreTed Chiang • Exhalation: Stories
We reinterpret or reconstruct our memory in light of what our mental set is in the present. In this sense, it is more accurate to say the present causes the meaning of the past, than it is to say that the past causes the meaning of the present [italics mine]. . . . Our memories are not “stored” and “objective” entities but living parts of ourselves... See more
Benjamin Hardy • Personality Isn't Permanent
In the parable of the blind men and the elephant, each paid attention to a different aspect of the creature. The brain may do something similar by mapping out the qualities of perceptions, experiences and abstract concepts along various dimensions, with the help of the same system that it uses to map out physical spaces.
Jordana Cepelewicz • The Brain Maps Out Ideas and Memories Like Spaces | Quanta Magazine
Sometimes it is helpful to think of maps as stories, fictions, artworks. Making up stories doesn’t seem avoidable. Stories just appear in the mind, bidden or unbidden, like the sight of a tree when you round a bend. There is nothing wrong with making things up. You blame yourself, you blame other people, you guess at reasons—these are examples of m
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