Memory

Reflect on your experience comparing a memory (and photo) with your parent. In your blog, consider why there were similarities and differences in the way you remembered the event. What role does memory play in your identity, both as an individual and as part of a group, whether family or society in general? How do language and imagination contribute to the way that you know something?

There were a lot of similarities between both of our descriptions; the events surrounding the event were very similar and the people who were present were almost the same. The major difference was the location; we both said that the event happened in different countries, even though I was absolutely certain without a doubt in my mind that it happened where I said it did.

This difference in memories is caused by the malleability of our memories. If we remember a major part of an event, our memories will fill in the gaps with information that is essentially fiction, just to create a complete picture of what our mind thinks happened. Age can have an effect on how much we remember and how well we remember what actually happened because when you are a child your brain is not fully developed, especially the parts of the brain dealing with memory. Another major reason for this is because our knowledge of language is not fully developed and is actually very limited. Because we associate words to past experiences, and understand them due to the experiences we’ve had. As we can’t put our memories into linguistic form at that stage of development, the experience becomes faded overtime. This shows how the ways of knowing are connected, as language has an impact on memory.

Our memory is also connected to our emotions, another way of knowing; therefore, as our memories can be shaped and affected by other things, emotions can affect the value we have for things. Consequently, what we remember has a connection with what we value; we will remember things we value more than things we don’t value, this conveys our identity. Different people value different things due to past experiences and the environment they were brought up in; these experiences are captured in our memories, and therefore what we remember the most out of them is what we are most emotionally attached to and what we find we find most valuable.

Memory plays a role in your identity as part of a group as well because the group you spend the most time with is the group you’ll have the most memories about and the most descriptive memories about as you know them better. Their faces will be more engraved in your head and the way they speak…etc. will be more familiar to you.

Language and imagination are both ways of knowing. Memory is one of the mediums through which they give us knowledge. As explained above language has a great impact on memory, and because we fill those gaps with our own fiction, imagination has a great effect on how reliable our memories are, or how much of our memories are fact and how much are fiction. The way different people recall things differently can therefore be a way to study how imagination works differently for different people.