Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Wk 10 Discussion, Question 1
The concept from the book that I found to be the most interesting was false memory. False memory is information that is painful or unpleasant can be pushed aside, while things that never happened can be remembered as though they were true. I think this concept is very interesting because I think at some point in all of our lives this will happen to us. We will all experience some type of false memory. We all have painful experiences whether it be with our friends, family, coworkers, or even our community. When something terrible happens to us we try not to think about it. We try and replace it with positive thoughts. Sometimes those thoughts can be so overpowering that you come to believe that they are true. I've experienced false memory before. I was going through a really rough time with my ex boyfriend. We were fighting a lot and it was causing a lot of stress for both of us. When I would sleep I would have dreams about how I wanted everything to work out and how I wanted our next conversation to go. I would dream about this so often and so strongly that I would start thinking they were true when I woke up. After I got to thinking about it some more I realized that it was only a dream and not reality.
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False memory is an interesting favorite topic. I agree when you say that false memory is important and will happen to us in our lives. And that we all share painful experiences with the important people in our lives. I really appreciate how you brought your own true life story into it. That is a very interesting way to look at false memory and I can personally relate to it. I have also been fighting with a boyfriend and woke up to find that we were still in the same position and I had gotten my hopes up through my dreams. It is true that your thoughts can be so overpowering that you begin to believe them. It can be a scary yet true reality.
ReplyDeleteI agree that false memory is an interesting topic! It is crazy how it can happen, but it really does. I have definitely experienced this before and probably will do it again. There are times in our lives, just as you discuss, that we don’t wish to think about or remember thus having us block out the memories. There have been tough times and rough patches of my life in which it is better for me not to remember so I try not to think of them. There are memories in which my friends ask about if I remember and there are complete blanks. It is odd that this happens but it truly shows how powerful our mind it.
ReplyDeleteFalse memory is a crazy concept when you get to thinking about it. Most of us feel like we are rational beings who have a clear concept between reality and fiction. The fact that we can make stuff up in our own minds and believe it in the future isn't something that people want to accept. When i think of false memory it reminds me about how unreliable witnesses can be when identifying a suspect. A lot of people think that a witness identifying an attacker or suspect involved in a crime is with 100% accuracy when we are actually usually wrong. In some of these cases I'm sure a witness who had undergone stress or a traumatic event with their attacker could morph many people to look like their attacker. The credibility of witnesses are difficult to accept when you see all the information in this book about memory.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you brought up false memories. I too thought that this section was very interesting because of personal experiences that seem to support the notion that memories can be completely made up. For several years my sister has been telling me random stories of when we were young. The trouble is, I don't remember several things she tells me. At times I simply assumed that my memory was poor for these types of details. However, the more I questioned some of my sisters stories, the more I realized they may just be figments of her imagination. For one, several accounts she makes happen when the was one or two years old. Secondly, when I ask others about these stories they tell me they don't remember them either. Most of these "memories" are quite harmless, it just seems so amazing how real she believes these memories are.
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