Pre-Internet diversions
The CenturyLink modem was misbehaving yesterday, and our little home technology raft was dead in the water. Instead of writing a blog post and wandering around the Internet "looking things up," I cleaned out two closets, vacuumed and dusted the entire basement, did some laundry, played my ukulele and worked on a MOHAI project. So much for "Internet productivity."
In the top of a closet I found a box with old letters, college exam papers, souvenirs from Europe and my daily diaries from 1969-1975. Aha! We were living in Oxnard, California on Earth Day 1970, and I was a student at Ventura Community College. There was always a protest of some sort going on.
On April 22, I didn't mention Earth Day in my diary, or even going to class. We were strapped for money and I wrote about a little scam job I was trying to get selling cosmetics. Of all things! Surely if I'd been part of some big environmental demonstration I would have written about it. I know I went went to marches and sit-ins, but perhaps on another day, another year, another campus.
Which makes you wonder about the nature of long-term memory, and those stories the mind repeats. Not exactly lies, but a cobbled-up version of the truth. When we can't remember the past exactly, I guess the mind is happy to make something up using wishful thinking, fantasies and similar experiences.
This is from a psychology paper titled Memory Distortion: An Adaptive Perspective from the Department of Psychology, Harvard:
It is now widely recognized that human memory is not an exact reproduction of past experiences but is instead an imperfect process that is prone to various kinds of errors and distortions. Memory is inherently a reconstructive process, whereby we piece together the past to form a coherent narrative that becomes our autobiography.
In the top of a closet I found a box with old letters, college exam papers, souvenirs from Europe and my daily diaries from 1969-1975. Aha! We were living in Oxnard, California on Earth Day 1970, and I was a student at Ventura Community College. There was always a protest of some sort going on.
On April 22, I didn't mention Earth Day in my diary, or even going to class. We were strapped for money and I wrote about a little scam job I was trying to get selling cosmetics. Of all things! Surely if I'd been part of some big environmental demonstration I would have written about it. I know I went went to marches and sit-ins, but perhaps on another day, another year, another campus.
Which makes you wonder about the nature of long-term memory, and those stories the mind repeats. Not exactly lies, but a cobbled-up version of the truth. When we can't remember the past exactly, I guess the mind is happy to make something up using wishful thinking, fantasies and similar experiences.
This is from a psychology paper titled Memory Distortion: An Adaptive Perspective from the Department of Psychology, Harvard:
It is now widely recognized that human memory is not an exact reproduction of past experiences but is instead an imperfect process that is prone to various kinds of errors and distortions. Memory is inherently a reconstructive process, whereby we piece together the past to form a coherent narrative that becomes our autobiography.
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