Jacob Bronowski, The Reach Of Imagination

In the last half century several theories have emerged with regard to the best model for human memory. In each of these models there was a specific way to help people recall words and

Memory is a powerful concept. Often when an individual undergoes a traumatic situation, the ramifications of these actions seep into an individualfs psyche unknowingly. In effect this passes through memory and becomes sub-consciously buried within a personfs behavioural patterns generally. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink explores the concept of a young mans subconscious desire for a woman whom he gcanft remember to forgeth (1Memento) as she is so deeply inlaid within his soul.

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.

In my opinion, I think that the author is successful in creating an interesting piece about memory due to how well he was able to organize his content. For example, the author starts by explaining his own childhood memory at the lake that took place many years ago; then, as the story progress, he is tentative to point out to the readers what has changed in the lake over the years; what

The two texts, "Excerpt from Martin Sloane: A Novel", by Michael Redhill and "Ode to a Box of Tea" by Pablo Neruda have several things in common. These things relate to how the authors of each text talk about their memories and the objects that go along with those memories.

The human mind is vast and intricate, yet responsive. Everyone has their own special abilities and talents. Eidetic memory, artistic brilliance, and mathematical mastery are all special skills possessed by very few, but the one that Gladwell glorifies in his non-fiction story, “Blink”, is the power of thinking without thinking. He discusses how certain people’s subconscious mind has the capacity to respond to complex dilemmas and situations in less than two seconds. Similar to talents such as photographic memory and musical mastery, Gladwell states that the adaptive unconscious can be strengthened and improved.

Messages become shorter when passed from one person to the next. Memories can be modified to fit one’s personal social experiences (i.e., conventionalization). Memory is unreliable, sensory stimuli are not stored as is but are actively transformed by the brain for storage depending on individual factors such as personal relevance and expectations. The most essential information is better remembered, but what is considered “most essential” may depend on an individual’s experiences. This suggests memory does not function as a video recording, but is a highly complex process that is influenced by an individual’s levels of attention, motivation, expectations, experiences, emotional state, etc. It also suggests that memory is an active process that involves constructing narratives out of events rather than passively recording

An essay written by Gary J. Kornblith, the main focus is on a purely imaginative subject. The use of this counterfactual approach is widely accepted as a methodology in research of causation. According to Kornblith, counterfactual exercises are necessary to “think more clearly about causation and to distinguish between essential factors and coincidental developments”(79). He uses the counterfactual method to present the idea that if Henry Clay had been elected in 1844, which he goes on to prove as plausible, we would be in a much different country. The thesis as a whole is stated as “… My focus is on a different pair of wars: the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 and the American Civil War of 1861-1865… Rather than project a different military outcome, I posit the absence of the Mexican-American War…The key to peace in my counterfactual scenario is a victory by Henry Clay over James K. Polk in the very close presidential election of 1844… As a result Texas would almost certainly have remained an independent republic in 1845, and the United States would not have gone to war with Mexico the following year. Based as it is on a highly plausible turn of events, this counterfactual scenario promises to advance our understanding of the causes of the Civil War”(77). He then adds the fact that there are two viewpoints that come from this counterfactual exercise; Revisionists, who believe that the Civil War could have been avoided, despite the sectional differences, and

F. Scott Fitzgerald understands that memory is a double-edged sword, and he illustrates this thought in two of his short stories, Babylon Revisited and Winter Dreams. In his story Babylon Revisited, the protagonist, Charles Wales, is tormented by memories of his past. His wife is dead, and his old friends won’t stop interfering in his life. His sister-in-law is basing her current ideas of him on the fact that he was an irresponsible person in the past, and it hurts his life greatly. Winter Dreams takes a slightly different approach. In this tale, the memories of the protagonist, Dexter Green, start off as pleasant but are later warped by new information. With these two works, Fitzgerald describes the problems that memories can cause in

Human is smarter than other animals because we have a strong ability to learn and to remember. We have memories so we don’t need to relearn everything every time when we see have to use these knowledges. Then, if I ask a question, “Can you trust everything that you remembered?” Most people may say “Yes!”. However, according to the speech given by Elizabeth Loftus, a psychological scientist who studies false memory for decades, the truth might be different from what most of us think.

  Memories are works of fiction, selective representations of experiences actual or imagined. They provide a framework for creating meaning in one's own life as well as in the lives of others. In Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, memory is a dangerous and debilitating faculty of human consciousness. Sethe endures the tyranny of the self imposed prison of memory. She expresses an insatiable obsession with her memories, with the past. Sethe is compelled to explore and explain an overwhelming sense of yearning, longing, thirst for something beyond herself, her daughter, her Beloved. Though Beloved becomes a physical manifestation of these memories, her will is essentially defined by and tied to the

If we think of our corporeal imagination being composed of layers of memory and experience, with some phenomena being

Loftus and Palmer support the reconstructive memory hypothesis. They believe that information gathered at the time of an icident is

It is compiled with the use of many sources such as The Universe Within by Morton Hunt. The amount of sources included in this source confirms its reliability. The source is valid as it is similar to many other sources on the topic of the brain and human memory

Bartlett found that story recall depends on how memory is reconstructed, and that there would be selective omissions of information, rationalization, a dominant theme, and transformation of information and sequence, and general blending of information. Bartlett constructed a new framework for memory and explained the importance of prior experience in one’s memory for narrative information, which was different than the theories of the time that assumed memory was more like an exact replica of incoming information (Solso, 2008). Bartlett felt that readers used their prior experience to construct expectations about what should occur in a story. These expectations would influence how a text was remembered because the reader would interpret incoming information using what he or she already knew and expected. These prior experiences were labeled “schemata”.