Collective Memories

Memories are important, they are a personal record of our past experiences, and could be called the history book for our life. In the poem "The Heroes You Had as a Girl", author Bronwen Wallace tells the story of a woman who meets her high school hero later in her life, reflects on her memories of him, and ultimately decides not to talk to him. The effect that this topic has on everyone is the knowledge that we can be captivated and let our memories control us, and by knowing that our memories hold that much power, it may make it more mentally efficient to make accurate, and personal decisions in a fraction of the time. The topic and overall meaning that this idea holds convey a message that resonates with the idea that memories are in fact the central hub of our decision making. People remembering memories can affect their perspective on their lives to such an extent, that they prefer to immerse their mind in their past memories rather than the current reality.

Events in the past are preserved through photographs, writings and libraries. Can memories conserve the historical occurrence to the present? The theory of memory transmission states that a “massive trauma experienced by a group in the historical past can be experienced by an individual living centuries later who shares a similar attribute of the historical group” (Balaev 151). In the story “Cattle Car Complex” by Thane Rosenbaum, Adam Posner is a second generation survivor of the Holocaust. He displays symptoms of post-trauma when stuck in an elevator. Mr. Posner’s parents were prisoners of concentration camps and their memories transmit to him “so deeply as to seem to constitute memories” of his own (Hirsch 1). The Holocaust is a “Nazi Judeocide”

Memory is essential to society because memory gives society hope for the future. According to Elie Wiesel in his speech titled Hope, Despair, and Memory, he states, “Without memory,our existence would be barren and opaque, like a prison cell into which no light penetrates;like a tomb rejects the living.” Wiesel, in other words says that without memory,

Remembrance; the mental impression on the brain from a certain event. Each soldier in the book, The Things They Carried, experiences some sort of remembrance whether it be saddening or enlightening. Remembrance is consistently perceived as the ability our brains have to go back and revisit moments in time which either disturb us, or give to us a feeling of pure happiness. Its mere sound provokes thought along with curiosity. Generally, when we are alone, surrounded by a nonchalant atmosphere, our brain swirls with thoughts, taking us back to significant moments in our lives. These moments are never forgotten, they are always there for some sort of reason. By means of these memories we can continue to learn from our mistakes and better our lifestyle.

Dismissing your own individual opinions to reach group consensus, now that’s negative peer pressure! Peer pressure will always be a problem and can affect anyone. I say that because no matter where you’re from or who you are, peer pressure is lurking about. Anytime you’re pressured to do something and your conscience is telling you not to do it, and you follow through with the task anyway, that is dismissing your opinion just to please other group members. Not wanting to be ostracized by others is the basis of conformity. Peer pressure doesn’t discriminate against race, nationality, or social class. It’s like a plague waiting to spread like wildfire throughout your school, your

To continue, There are very raciel event that happened in history that know one wants to relive. In the paragraph, Monuments Honoring Killers, The people honor the killers who killed law enforcement,militia members that come from different races. They are making use remember harsh and bad things that happened in the past.

The book Silencing The Past is about how people “silence” the past through selective memories to benefit us in the present. We pick out certain events and either dramatize them or play them down to the point of no importance. This paper is about both our played up dramas and our forgotten realities.

In Joshua Foer’s essay, “The End of Remembering” (found in Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, published 2011) he explores the history and current state of remembering and how technology affects it.

Memory provides a sense of personal identity. Memories that were made from the past create the person that they have become today. It helps to ground judgments and with reasoning. As an illustration, one day a young girl was shopping at the mall with a group of friends and they deiced to steal a cute

The collective memories of people can change over time and generations. The meaning of collective memories can be altered by age, culture, or region. Considering this alteration in memory, in the Caesar Civil War Books and Lucan Civil War Books, there is an inconsistency in the recollection of memories of a major event. From a firsthand perspective, Caesar covers the events of 49-48 BC of the Roman Civil war in only three books. Lucan covers the events over a total of ten discontinued books by the order of Emperor Nero.

Memory – what it is, how it works, and how it might be manipulated – has long been a subject of curious fascination. Remembering, the mind-boggling ability in which the human brain can conjure up very specific, very lucid, long-gone episodes from any given point on the timeline of our lives, is an astounding feat. Yet, along with our brain’s ability of remembrance comes also the concept of forgetting: interruptions of memory or “an inability of consciousness to make present to itself what it wants” (Honold, 1994, p. 2). There is a very close relationship between remembering and forgetting; in fact, the two come hand-in-hand. A close reading of Joshua Foer’s essay, “The End of Remembering”, and Susan Griffin’s piece, “Our Secret”, directs us

The purpose of my memory artifact is to argue that epic poetry is a form of memory representation used to portray the collective memory of a nation and a civilization. An Epic poem is a long narrative poem that deals with an event significant or important to a culture or nation. I believe my presentation was quite successful since I was able to get my message across and make a connection with the audience. However, my presentation only incorporated the visual and oral components of WOVEN and failed to stand alone by itself. My presentation could be enhanced by fully utilizing the Prezi’s features by highlighting key ideas, adding colored fonts and by elaborating on definitions and historical contexts.

German and European Historian Alon Confino analysis the influence and issues that collective memory has within its predominant field of cultural history. Confino defines the term “memory” as “the ways in which a people construct a sense of the past.” In his introduction, he lays out a brief outline of his thesis, which is not to offer alternatives to “doing” memory, rather offer a new direction in the field. This new direction is to establish a way that memory can be used to build new connections between the representation and social experiences. In doing this, the author constructs his article focusing on three points, that he feels the main issues with the methods and theory of memory. Confino’s points revolve around the connection between

The idea that our memories change the way on which we see the world and ultimately change reality is a difficult one to understand. An answer to this question depends on the way we define reality. If we define reality as objective- then it can not be altered by memories. However if we define reality as subjective, then, yes, our memories can affect our reality. But what do we mean by memories? What do we mean by relationship? What follows is an attempt to answer some of these questions, and see whether and how our memories affect our reality.

Memory makes us. It is, to an extent, a collection of unique and personal experiences that we, as individuals, have amassed over our lifetime. It is what connects us to our past and what shapes our present and the future. If we are unable remember the what, when, where, and who of our everyday lives, our level of functioning would be greatly impacted. Memory is defined as or recognized as the “sum or total of what we remember.” Memory provides us the ability to learn and adjust to or from prior experiences. In addition, memory or our ability to remember plays an integral role in the building and sustaining of relationships. Additionally, memory is also a process; it is how we internalize and store our external environment and experiences. It entails the capacity to remember past experiences, and the process of recalling previous experiences, information, impressions, habits and skills to awareness. It is the storage of materials learned and/or retained from our experiences. This fact is demonstrated by the modification, adjustment and/or adaptation of structure or behavior. Furthermore, we as individuals, envision thoughts and ideas of the present through short-term memory, or in our working memory, we warehouse past experiences and learned values in long-term memory, also referred to as episodic or semantic memory. Most importantly, memory is malleable and it is intimately linked to our sense of identity and where we believe we belong in the world.