Psychologists have conducted studies on eyewitness testimony, for example, showing how easy it is to change someone's memories by asking misleading questions. We know this from many different sources of evidence. That makes them curiously susceptible to distortion, and often not nearly as reliable as we would like. Autobiographical memories are stitched together as and when they are needed from information stored in many different neural systems. They are mental reconstructions, nifty multimedia collages of how things were, that are shaped by how things are now. Sci-fi and fantasy fictions might try to persuade us otherwise, but memories are not discrete entities that can be taken out of one person's head, Dumbledore-style, and distilled for someone else's viewing. Memories are not filed away in the brain like so many video cassettes, to be slotted in and played when it's time to recall the past. When you ask people about their memories, they often talk as though they were material possessions, enduring representations of the past to be carefully guarded and deeply cherished. It is distinguished from semantic memory, which is memory for facts, and other kinds of implicit long-term memory, such as your memory for complex actions such as riding a bike or playing a saxophone. The sort of memory I have described is known as "autobiographical memory", because it is about the narrative we make from the happenings of our own lives. This is quite a trick, psychologically speaking, and it has made cognitive scientists determined to find out how it is done. I become a time traveller who can return to the present as soon as the demands of "now" intervene. I am back there, amid the sights and sounds and seaside smells. I am somehow able to reconstruct the moment in some of its sensory detail, and relive it, as it were, from the inside. When I cast back to an event from my past – let's say the first time I ever swam backstroke unaided in the sea – I don't just conjure up dates and times and places (what psychologists call "semantic memory"). It's no surprise, then, that there is fascination with this quintessentially human ability. "Our memory is our coherence," wrote the surrealist Spanish-born film-maker, Luis Buñuel, "our reason, our feeling, even our action." Lose your memory and you lose a basic connection with who you are. And, for better or worse, your remembered life story is a pretty good guide to what you will do tomorrow. To know who you are as a person, you need to have some idea of who you have been.
This Father’s Day, I’ll be remembering a father who I loved-and I pray other readers also mourning the loss of their fathers will take similar comfort from the richness of their memories.M emory is our past and future. In life, we have the opportunity to make good memories, and then, when our loved ones have gone, to revisit the many precious memories in which they feature. And, of course, sometimes the memories we might think most trivial, later prove themselves to offer the greatest comfort. Scientists have discovered that our brain is able to store petabytes of data, similar to the size of the entire internet! That’s hard to comprehend, and to me is further evidence that we are created by God, made in God’s image. However, it seems there’s a lot more room in our brains than we might have believed -particularly for memories. Reconnecting with God in his middle years brought Dad much peace, and he also valued the opportunity to give back in so many ways to The Salvation Army.Īrthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes famously likened the human brain to ‘a little empty attic’, saying it was important when stocking that attic with furniture only to bring in useful facts, since it was ‘a mistake to think that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent’. But, as we children grew up, Dad was recruited as a frequent and long-suffering youth group chauffeur and, eventually, The Salvation Army became Dad’s spiritual home. Having left his own church some years earlier, Dad was initially more of a Christmas and christenings church attender. My father’s connection with The Salvation Army began when he married my mum. We were able to give thanks for things that had brought meaning to his life-and the many ways Dad had enriched our lives as well. It was a strange coincidence to find myself working on this Father’s Day edition in the final couple of weeks of my own father’s life.Īs Dad was dying, we shared some special family times, with conversations that brought tears and laughter. Moral and Social Issues Council (MASIC).Research & Policy Te Rangahau me ngā Kaupapa Here.News & Events Ngā Rongo Kōrero me ngā Rā Nunui.Education & Learning Te Mātauranga me te Akoranga.
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