Memory Processing Quotes

We all remember things, it's what we remember that determines how we live.

The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.

I think that I cannot immediately see the route by which we should really understand memory and the workings of the brain.

Anything processed by memory is fiction.

You realize yourself when you start reflecting - because I don't live in the past, although your past is so much a part of what you are - that you can't ignore it. But I don't look at scrapbooks.

When it comes to memories, the good and the bad never balance.

Memory works like the collection glass in the Camera obscura: it gathers everything together and therewith produces a far more beautiful picture than was present originally.

La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.

Memories must enter the bloodstream, must churn awhile through the heart's mill, must be crushed and polished, be nearly forgotten or cling like burs to other stories before they spill forth in purple patterns, shapes of small bones and worm rot, shapes of clouds and the spaces between leaves.

Memory is a big one: our ability to use the memory and move things in and out efficiently - that affected what we were able to do more than anything.

When we're awake, cortisol can fragment memories - one reason eyewitness crime scene accounts are so unreliable. But at night that very fragmentation allows creative recombinations of ideas.

Rather than studying the most complex form of memory in a very complicated animal, we had to take the most simple form - an implicit form of memory - in a very simple animal. So I began to look around for very simple animals. And I focused in on the marine snail Aplysia.

My dad thinks I have a photographic memory.

We don't remember everything that happens to us on a given day: sometimes, we remember something simply because it's emotional, while, at other times, we work our way through mundane details to figure out why something matters.

While the hippocampus itself doesn't store memories, it serves to triage our experiences based upon their survival significance.

The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.

Yeah, a memory's never finished, if you really think about it.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

It's during dream sleep where we start to actually take the sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional experiences that we've been having. And sleep almost divorces that emotional, bitter rind from the memory experiences that we've had during the day.

We're told that when we remember, the same parts of our brain light up as when we experienced the event we're remembering. Your brain lives through it again.

As soon as anything is processed by memory, it’s fiction.

Deep non-REM sleep almost hits the save button on those recently acquired informational pieces so that when you wake up the next morning, you have remembering rather than forgetting.

Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you'll find an edge to cut you.

I like to make little movies or fake stories about something that happened in my life. I will make a movie in my mind that would translate the same feeling or emotion that I had in whatever just happened.

This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest.