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Tag Archives: Memory

David Lynch on video and memory

16 Wednesday Jan 2019

Posted by memoirandremains in Memorization, Uncategorized

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David Lynch, Memory, video

Lynch also expressed disappointment with sharing videos on such platforms as YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. The director banned festival-goers from using their phones during his hour-long discussion on May 20, with everyone in the audience forced to put their mobile devices in locked cases that could only be unlocked once they’d left the venue.

Lynch argued that not only do video phones make people more occupied with capturing an experience than actually experiencing one, they also can’t provide people with the benefits of memory. The director said that camera phones “don’t shoot your interior,” so you’re better off reliving an event by relying on your memories of the emotional experience than by watching recorded video footage of whatever it is you’ve seen

https://www.indiewire.com/2018/05/david-lynch-social-media-television-guilty-pleasure-1201966844/

How to Create a Memory

20 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by memoirandremains in Apologetics, John, Psychology, Uncategorized

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Creating Memories, Memory, Plastic Memory, Psychology

Many researchers have created false memories in normal individuals; what is more, many of these subjects are certain that the memories are real. In one well-known study, Loftus and her colleague Jacqueline Pickrell gave subjects written accounts of four events, three of which they had actually experienced. The fourth story was fiction; it centered on the subject being lost in a mall or another public place when he or she was between four and six years old. A relative provided realistic details for the false story, such as a description of the mall at which the subject’s parents shopped. After reading each story, subjects were asked to write down what else they remembered about the incident or to indicate that they did not remember it at all. Remarkably about one third of the subjects reported partially or fully remembering the false event. In two follow-up interviews, 25 percent still claimed that they remembered the untrue story, a figure consistent with the findings of similar studies.

Read the rest

The trouble with eye witness testimony

What then can help guarantee a good memory? Notice that events which are traumatic are questionable. Notice that distant, vague events are questionable. Compare that to events which take place over a period of time, events which are witnessed by multiple persons, events subject to objective independent corroboration. And with the case of the Scripture, Jesus speaks of receiving supernatural assistance of the Spirit. John 14:26

You’re not as smart as the Internet makes you think you are

22 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by memoirandremains in Culture, Persuasion, Psychology, Uncategorized

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Book, Internet, Memory, Narrative, Pride, Psychology

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Journal of Experimental Psychology
2015, vol. 144, no. 3, 674-687
Matthew Fisher, Mariel K. Goddu, Frank C. Keil
“Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge”

Human beings can create systems for distributing tasks and information. Families and businesses do this sort of thing: work and information is distributed across all the members of the system. This permits the system to do more than any individual could do alone. Or to quote our authors,

By reducing redundancy, transactive memory systems work to encode, store and retrieve information more effectively than could be done by any individual.

Id., at p. 674. Now, our transactive partner in this memory storage and recall process could be a technological: indeed, the Internet has taken over as perhaps the primary source of information storage.

But the Internet goes far beyond what a spouse or business partner can provide in terms of information: it is always there, always ready, always responsive, nearly instantaneous and provides seemingly inexhaustible resources:

The Internet has been described as a “supernormal stimulus” in that its breadth and immediacy far surpass any naturally occurring transactive partner to which our minds have adapted.

Id. at p. 675. Thus, not surprisingly, the Internet has a profound effect upon how we understand our possession of knowledge. But rather than humbling us, the Internet plays to our pride and causes us to over-evaluate our self-understanding:

And in the case of the Internet, an especially immediate and ubiquitous memory partner, there may be especially large knowledge overestimations. As people underestimate how much they are relying on the Internet, success at finding information on the Internet may be conflated with personally mastered information, leading Internet users to erroneously include knowledge stored outside their own heads as their own.

Id. at p. 675.

The authors of the study note that there may be dangers in this freely accessible information. This unnoticed tendency to overestimate our intellectual abilities is coupled to a decreasing ability to retain and access “internal” information.

To draw this point out further, the Internet seems to have the ability to make us increasingly vulnerable to information: (1) we have decreasing ability to critique this information (granted the question of critique was not tested in the study, however, that seems like an inherent trouble with an atrophied cognitive mechanism: one merely “finds” the information, rather than segregates the information; and, the hideous ability to manipulate public opinion almost instantly through the “news” media seems proof of this point); and (2) when we ingest this information we are not realizing that it was sourced outside of ourselves, but rather come to believe that this is our “own” information.

News about brains, intelligence, talking to yourself, etc

17 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by memoirandremains in Psychology

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Memory, Psychology, Schizophrenia, Wi-fi

What this means is that there is clearly an established physiological mechanism through which colour and light can affect mood, heart rate, alertness, and impulsivity, to name but a few.

Their research was based on model that suggests intelligent people with “hyper brains” are more reactive to environmental stimulus and that “may predispose them to certain psychological disorders as well as physiological conditions involving elevated sensory and altered immune and inflammatory responses”.

Researchers have found no evidence to support the theory that video games make players more violent

The drive to be perfect in body, mind and career among today’s college students has significantly increased compared with prior generations, which may be taking a toll on young people’s mental health, according to research.

Scientists have identified a key chemical within the ‘memory’ region of the brain that allows us to suppress unwanted thoughts, helping explain why people who suffer from disorders such as anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and schizophrenia often experience persistent intrusive thoughts when these circuits go awry.

As far as our brain is concerned, talking to ourselves in our heads may be fundamentally the same as speaking our thoughts out loud, new research shows. The findings may have important implications for understanding why people with mental illnesses such as schizophrenia hear voices.

Humans brains are interconnected through type of ‘wi-fi’ which allows us to pick up far more information about other people than we are aware of, a leading professor claims.

Kierkegaard, “The Rotation Method” Part 4 (Either/Or)

11 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by memoirandremains in Biblical Counseling, Kierkegaard, Philosophy, Psychology, Theology of Biblical Counseling, Uncategorized

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Boredom, Either/Or, Fences, Forget, Forgetfulness, Kierkegaard, marriage, Memory, Philosophy, Psychology, remember, The Rotation Method

The remainder of the essay is how to engage in the “rotation method”: how to live in this world without becoming bored. First, there is the matter of what boredom is. Some just acquire boredom, but he spends more concern about boredom as “the result of a mistake effort to find diversion.”

He then makes this fascinating observation:

Boredom depends on the nothingness which pervades reality; it causes a dizziness like that produced by looking down into a yawning chasm, and this dizziness is absolute.

There is a pointlessness to existence. There is a grinding similarity. The endless emptiness produces boredom.

When I read that I think, Jesus could have not been bored. We see how people seek to invest trivial things which great importance (think of entertainers who often do little else than divert us).

The solution to this endlessly pointless world is treat the world even more pointlessness. I cannot help but read this and think of Oscar Wilde and “all art is useless.” To avoid the endless similarity of existence, we need diversion.

But, to obtain diversion we need two things (1) forgetfulness, and (2) a lack of commitment to anything.

He calls forgetfulness “an art”. It’s first element is how one remembers. We must experience an event as an experience, it is never quite clear, but there cannot be no more or spiritual reflection. An event exists merely as an experience to be enjoyed: “Enjoying an experience to its full intensity to the last minute will make it impossible either to remember or to forget.”

Forgetfulness is more than simply not being able to recall some detail, it is to not be bound by any event. Hence, “”Nature is great because it has forgotten that it was a chaos; but this thought is subject to revival at anytime.”

Hence forgetfulness permits one to obtain “freedom”:

The art of remembering and forgetting will also insure against sticking fast in some relationship of life, and make possible the realization of complete freedom.

Hence one must avoid friendship (“The essential thing is to never stick fast, and for this it is necessary to have oblivion back of one.”), marriage  (“Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.”), official positions.

This of course is a position which has risen to a level of moral permission, even obligation in the contemporary world. Appropriate psychological counsel for one in an unhappy marriage is often to not be bound by custom and tradition, but rather to “forget” vows, obligations and constriction and seek happiness.

I recently saw the truly wonderful movie Fences (it is well worth your time to watch). In that movie, the main character “forgets” his marriage because he desires some happiness from what this essayist would call boredom. But unlike our unattached essayist created by Kierkegaard, the character in Fences brings much suffering upon himself and others (interesting, I imagine this essayist would find that an acceptable cost because at least misery is not necessarily boring).

One must be “arbitrary”: “You go to see the middle of a play, you read the third part of a book….Arbitrariness in oneself corresponds to the accidental in the external world.” This reminds me of Cage’s attempt to make accidental music.

 

Remember Your Creator

16 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by memoirandremains in Ecclesiastes, Thomas Brooks, Uncategorized

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creator, Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiastes 12:1, Ecclesiastes 1:2, Memory, Preaching, remember, Rhetoric, Thomas Brooks

Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”;Ecclesiastes 12:1 (ESV)

‘Remember now thy Creator.’
Remember to know him,
remember to love him,
remember to desire him,
remember to delight in him,
remember to depend upon him,
remember to get an interest in him,
remember to live to him, and
remember to walk with him.

‘Remember now thy Creator;’ the Hebrew is Creators, Father, Son, and Spirit. To the making of man, a council was called in heaven, in the first of Genesis, and 26th verse. ‘Remember thy Creators:’

Remember the Father,
so as to know him,
so as to be inwardly acquainted with him.

Remember the Son,
so as to believe in him,
so as to rest upon him,
so as to embrace him, and
so as to make a complete resignation of thyself to him.

Remember the Spirit, so as to hear his voice,
so as to obey his voice,
so as to feel his presence, and
so as to experience his influence, &c.

‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth.’
He doth not say in the time of thy youth, but ‘in the days of thy youth,’ to note,
that our life is but as a few days.
It is but as a vapour,
a span,
a flower,
a shadow,
a dream;
and therefore Seneca saith well, that ‘though death be before the old man’s face, yet he may be as near the young man’s back,’ &c.

Man’s life is the shadow of smoke, the dream of a shadow.
One doubteth whether to call it a dying life, or a living death. (Aug. Confess. lib.i.)

Thomas Brooks, The Complete Works of Thomas Brooks, ed. Alexander Balloch Grosart, vol. 1, “Apples of Gold”, chapter 1 (Edinburgh; London; Dublin: James Nichol; James Nisbet and Co.; G. Herbert, 1866), 178–179.

The Good of Meditation

26 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by memoirandremains in Meditation, Richard Sibbes, Spiritual Disciplines

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Eschatology, Faith, Kingdom, Meditation, Memory, Richard Sibbes, The Saint's Safety in Evil Times

It is therefore Christian wisdom, to fix our souls on good meditations, to have them wedded to good thoughts, to have those comforting thoughts, befitting Christians, that may lead us comfortably in our way to heaven. Let a man think of God’s deliverances past, and that will strengthen his faith for the future deliverances. Let him think of future deliverances, and that will lead him to a kingdom, to praise God; and this praising of God will stretch his soul, for ever and for ever; as if there were no time sufficient to glorify God, that is so excellent and glorious. What a blessed condition is this, to have God’s Spirit warming our souls and perfuming our spirits with holy thoughts, continually putting us upon the employment of heaven, till at length it hath safely brought us thither.

Richard Sibbes, The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, ed. Alexander Balloch Grosart, vol. 1, “The Saint’s Safety in Evil Times” (Edinburgh; London; Dublin: James Nichol; James Nisbet and Co.; W. Robertson, 1862), 329.

A Neurosurgeon Explains: Your Brain Can’t Store Memories

12 Friday Dec 2014

Posted by memoirandremains in Anthropology

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Brain, Memory, Neurology, Thomas Aquinas

A singular consequence of the materialist-mechanical metaphysics that permeates our culture and our sciences is that we commonly hold basic beliefs that are abject nonsense. One such belief is the almost ubiquitous one — among ordinary folks as well as neuroscientists and surprisingly many philosophers — that the brain “stores” memories. The fact is that the brain doesn’t store memories, and can’t store memories.

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/12/recalling_nanas091821.html

Biblical Counseling, Depression Part IV

07 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by memoirandremains in Biblical Counseling, Hope, John Bunyan, Psalms

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1 Corinthians 11:23-26, And Can it Be, Apollyon, Depression, despair, Deuteronomy 7:17–19, Deuteronomy 8:10-18., emotions, Exodus 13:3, Faithful Feelings, Grace, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, Hope, Isaiah 48:5–7, John Bunyan, John Piper, Jonah 2:7, Memory, Pilgrim's Progress, Prayer, Preach to yourself, Psalm 119:55, Psalm 23:3-4, Psalm 42, Psalm 42:5, Psalm 43, Revelatinon 5:11-14, Romans 12:15, Romans 12:2, Romans 8:24-25, Spiritual Depression, The Soul's Conflict With Itself

COUNSELING PROBLEMS AND BIBLICAL CHANGE

BIBLICAL SOLUTIONS FOR DEPRESSION, PART FOUR

 

DEPRESSION AND MEMORY

Memory is a curious thing when it comes to depression: Depression has the effect of muddling up our memory. When a depressed person attempts to remember things going on in the recent past, they tend make mistakes.[1]

Yet, depression also feeds upon memory.  Emily Dickinson wrote a poem which begins, “Remorse is memory awake”. In the final stanza she writes

Remorse is cureless,—the disease

Not even God can heal;

For ’t is His institution,—

The complement of hell.

 

A 14th Century book from England is entitled Ayenbite of Inwyt – the Again-bite of In-wit [one’s inner thoughts]. One of the great pains of life is not our mere present circumstances, but our memory of how we came to this place.

For example, imagine a man in living alone in an apartment in Hollywood. If the man had recently immigrated from rural Laos, the apartment and the city might seem a wonder and joy.

Now consider another man: Six months earlier he had been married and living in Bell Aire. However, through a series of foolish and wicked choices he now finds himself divorced and living in an apartment in Hollywood.

Continue reading →

The Moon Has Lost Her Memory

11 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by memoirandremains in T.S. Eliot

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Memory, Night, Rhaposdy on a Windy Night, T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

TWELVE o’clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory 5
And all its clear relations
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark 10
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered, 15
The street lamp said, “Regard that woman
Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand, 20
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin.”

The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach 25
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard, 30
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.

Half-past two,
The street-lamp said,
“Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter, 35
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter.”
So the hand of the child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child’s eye. 40
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him. 45

Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.

The lamp hummed:
“Regard the moon, 50
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smooths the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory. 55
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells 60
That cross and cross across her brain.
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets, 65
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.”

The lamp said,
“Four o’clock, 70
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount. 75
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”

The last twist of the knife.

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