"Moonwalking with Einstein"

[fiefoe]

How memory works:

• I had once read that the average person squanders about forty days a year compensating for things he or she has forgotten.
• We’ve gradually supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of external memory aids... Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.
• All of our memories are, like S’s, bound together in a web of associations.
• The nonlinear associative nature of our brains makes it impossible for us to consciously search our memories in an orderly way.
• Nondeclarative memories are the things you know unconsciously, like how to ride a bike.
• Freud first noted the curious fact that older memories are often remembered as if captured by a third person holding a camera, whereas more recent events tend to be remembered in the first person.
• The vital learning that we do during the first years of life is virtually entirely of the implicit, nondeclarative kind.
• Our species made its living as huntergatherers, and it was the demands of that lifestyle that sculpted the minds we have today.
• One of the tragic consequences of embedding narrative into the landscape is that when Native Americans had land taken from them by the U.S. government, they lost not only their home but their mythology as well.
• Our memories, the essence of our selfhood, are actually bound up in a whole lot more than the neurons in our brain. At least as far back as Socrates’s diatribe against writing, our memories have always extended beyond our brains and into other storage containers.
• The notion that memory and creativity are two sides of the same coin sounds counterintuitive... The Latin root inventio is the basis of two words in our modern English vocabulary: inventory and invention.
• Transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS... works by using focused magnetic fields to wreak havoc on the electrical firing of targeted neurons.

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