A Memory Of Shadow Of When?

[Atheist-Lite]

Everyone who makes it to their forties alive must have accumulated a few of these. Vague recollections of places and times that can't be placed in the map you have of your life and times. Things that might have been, couldn't be yet are, could be called damaged or false memory and the start of the cognitive decline and dotage to come? because they do not accept placement in the chronological or emotional personal historical traces you carry? yet are they saying something deeper than you'll be a dribbling imbecile in a few short years?

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Was it the memory of a dream? Or the dream of a memory? Either way, she was fucking HAWT!!1!

[JimC]

The shadow memories are a vital part of me. They soften the edges of reality, which would otherwise shine with an unbearably bright scalpel edge...

[Audley Strange]

Yeah I've heard of this, however I've done a really good job of somehow not remembering most of my previous years and not concerning myself with what happened. It's amazing when people remind me of things I've done that I have no recollection of nor interest in recalling.

I can do it no problem if I try, I can weave my way back to events and times and places, but what the fuck for? Nostalgia is for those who care more about the past than the here and now. I'm too busy and having too much fun to dwell on it.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Sometimes I think about the sperm donor, who went to the same job for nearly forty years, with nothing more remarkable than an occasional trip down here from Indiana to break the monotony. The utter sameness of day-to-day life for him must have meant that he had very few "landmarks" in his life. Well, that's what he chose. I went a different route, and I have memories of things he never saw, and probably couldn't even understand. Those memories slid around in my mind, taking turns surfacing when some external stimulus invokes them. And they come back to me in my dreams, of course. See a solid mile of jungle burst into flames at almost the same instant. Waking up on a two-master in Montego Bay. Hearing bullets tweeee past my head. Laying my head on a tiger's chest to hear her breathe.

[Horwood Beer-Master]

Everyone who makes it to their forties alive must have accumulated a few of these. Vague recollections of places and times that can't be placed in the map you have of your life and times. Things that might have been, couldn't be yet are, could be called damaged or false memory and the start of the cognitive decline and dotage to come? because they do not accept placement in the chronological or emotional personal historical traces you carry? yet are they saying something deeper than you'll be a dribbling imbecile in a few short years?

FFS! - That describes most of my "memories" - and has done since I was young (I think)

[FBM]

Ah...yesterday. It seems like it was just 20 years ago.

[Jonesboy]

Everyone who makes it to their forties alive must have accumulated a few of these. Vague recollections of places and times that can't be placed in the map you have of your life and times. Things that might have been, couldn't be yet are, could be called damaged or false memory and the start of the cognitive decline and dotage to come? because they do not accept placement in the chronological or emotional personal historical traces you carry? yet are they saying something deeper than you'll be a dribbling imbecile in a few short years?

Another BigPharma whore. Yeh mate. Take meds. You feel decine so take meds. You feel a failure so take meds. Your bloody world will come crashing to an end, meds or no meds, because, at the end of the day, it was never there. Savvy?

[Jonesboy]

Everyone who makes it to their forties alive must have accumulated a few of these. Vague recollections of places and times that can't be placed in the map you have of your life and times. Things that might have been, couldn't be yet are, could be called damaged or false memory and the start of the cognitive decline and dotage to come? because they do not accept placement in the chronological or emotional personal historical traces you carry? yet are they saying something deeper than you'll be a dribbling imbecile in a few short years?

FFS! - That describes most of my "memories" - and has done since I was young (I think)

Hmm. You said "Since I was young I think".
Oh how ever-so.
Sycophantic prostitution. Just own up. You know you don't believe in that sort of crap. So it's quicker and easier if you say stuff you. Believe me.

[Jonesboy]

Sometimes I think about the sperm donor, who went to the same job for nearly forty years, with nothing more remarkable than an occasional trip down here from Indiana to break the monotony. The utter sameness of day-to-day life for him must have meant that he had very few "landmarks" in his life. Well, that's what he chose. I went a different route, and I have memories of things he never saw, and probably couldn't even understand. Those memories slid around in my mind, taking turns surfacing when some external stimulus invokes them. And they come back to me in my dreams, of course. See a solid mile of jungle burst into flames at almost the same instant. Waking up on a two-master in Montego Bay. Hearing bullets tweeee past my head. Laying my head on a tiger's chest to hear her breathe.

Is this important? Is your affected whimsy telling it how it is? or winding up clockwork phonies?

[apophenia]

Time for walkies?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Time for walkies?

He keeps trying. He keeps failing.

[Hermit]

The older I get the better I was.

Speaking of unreliable memories, an old friend and I compared notes one day of how we broke up years earlier. Neither could believe we were even speaking of the same event. She was as certain of the veracity of her version as I am of mine.

[apophenia]

The Biases of Memory

One of us (Carol) had a favorite children's book, James Thurber's The Wonderful O, which she remembers her father giving her when she was a child. ''A band of pirates takes over an island and forbids the locals to speak any word or use any object containing the letter O," Carol recalls. "I have a vivid memory of my father reading The Wonderful O and our laughing together at the thought of shy Ophelia Oliver saying her name without its O's. I remember trying valiantly, along with the invaded islanders, to guess the fourth O word that must never be lost (after love, hope, and valor), and my father's teasing guesses: Oregon? Orangutan? Ophthalmologist? And then, not long ago, I found my first edition The Wonderful O. It had been published in 1957, one year after my father's death. I stared at that date in disbelief and shock. Obviously, someone else gave me that book, someone else read it to me, someone else laughed with me about Phelia Liver, someone else wanted me to understand that the fourth O was freedom. Someone lost to my recollection."

Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) — Caroll Tavris, Elliot Aronson

This small story illustrates three important things about memory: how disorienting it is to realize that a vivid memory, one full of emotion and detail, is indisputably wrong; that even being absolutely, positively sure a memory is accurate does not mean that it is; and how errors in memory support our current feelings and beliefs. "I have a set of beliefs about my father," Carol observes, "the warm man he was, the funny and devoted dad who loved to read to me and take me rummaging through libraries, the lover of wordplay. So it was logical for me to assume — no, to remember — that he was the one who read me The Wonderful O."

The metaphors of memory fit our times and technology. Centuries ago, philosophers compared memory to a soft wax tablet that would preserve anything imprinted on it. With the advent of the printing press, people began to think of memory as a library that stores events and facts for later retrieval 1. (Those of us of a certain age still think of it that way, muttering about where we "filed" information in our cluttered mental cabinets.) With the inventions of movies and tape recorders, people started thinking of memory as a video camera, clicking on at the moment of birth and automatically recording every moment thereafter. Nowadays we think of memory in computer terms, and although some of us wish for more RAM, we assume that just about everything that happens to us is "saved." Your brain might not choose to screen all those memories, but they are in there, just waiting for you to retrieve them, bring out the popcorn, and watch.

These metaphors of memory are popular, reassuring, and wrong. Memories are not buried somewhere in the brain, as if they were bones at an archeological site; nor can we uproot them, as if they were radishes; nor, when they are dug up, are they perfectly preserved. We do not remember everything that happens to us; we select only highlights. (If we didn't forget, our minds could not work efficiently, because they would be cluttered with mental junk — the temperature last Wednesday, a boring conversation on the bus, every phone number we ever dialed.2) Moreover, recovering a memory is not at all like retrieving a file or replaying a tape; it is like watching a few unconnected frames of a film and then figuring out what the rest of the scene must have been like. We may reproduce poetry, jokes, and other kinds of information by rote, but when we remember complex information we shape it to fit it into a story line.

Because memory is reconstructive, it is subject to confabulation — confusing an event that happened to someone else with one that happened to you, or coming to believe that you remember something that never happened at all. In reconstructing a memory, people draw on many sources. When you remember your fifth birthday party, you may have a direct recollection of your younger brother putting his finger in the cake and spoiling it for you, but you will also incorporate information that you got later from family stories, photographs, home videos, and birthday parties you've seen on television. You weave all these elements together into one integrated account. If someone hypnotizes you and regresses you to your fifth birthday party, you'll tell a lively story about it that will feel terribly real to you, but it will include many of those post-party details that never actually happened. After a while, you won't be able to distinguish your actual memory from subsequent information that crept in from elsewhere. That phenomenon is called "source confusion," otherwise known as the “where did I hear that?” problem. Did I read it, see it, or did someone tell me about it?

1 See for example The Akashic Records.

2 This is being challenged by the phenomenon of Super-Autobiographical Memory. See also Endless Memory — 60 Minutes Segment on Super-Autobiographical Memory.

[Horwood Beer-Master]

Everyone who makes it to their forties alive must have accumulated a few of these. Vague recollections of places and times that can't be placed in the map you have of your life and times. Things that might have been, couldn't be yet are, could be called damaged or false memory and the start of the cognitive decline and dotage to come? because they do not accept placement in the chronological or emotional personal historical traces you carry? yet are they saying something deeper than you'll be a dribbling imbecile in a few short years?

FFS! - That describes most of my "memories" - and has done since I was young (I think)

Hmm. You said "Since I was young I think".
Oh how ever-so.
Sycophantic prostitution. Just own up. You know you don't believe in that sort of crap. So it's quicker and easier if you say stuff you. Believe me.

Could you translate any of that into English for me please?