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Our autobiographical memories are memories of our personal history…

• Autobiographical memory refers to memory for one’s personal history. Robyn Fivush
• Autobiographical memories are the memories of significant personal events and experiences from an individual’s life. Qi Wang
• Autobiographical memory is memory for specific, genuine events that are personally experienced and when compiled, they form a long-lasting personal narrative. It is high in self-reference and is subject to personal interpretation. Lauren Gregory
• Memory is the personal journalism of the soul. Richard Schickel
• Memory… is the diary that we all carry about with us. Oscar Wilde

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…memories of our life experiences…

• All experience is memory. Joe Haldeman
• To me, life is memories and experiences. Renzo Gracie
• We are made of memories and formed by experience. Sue Halpern
• .. is the diary that we all carry about with us. Oscar Wilde
• A man’s age represents a fine cargo of experiences and memories. Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story. Daniel Kahneman
• It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. Jon Krakauer
• The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory. William James
• Through the experience of memory, you recall what you have done, and you therefore attach yourself to it and perceive yourself through prior experience. Frederick Lenz
• Through the experience of memory, you recall what you have done, and you therefore attach yourself to it and perceive yourself through prior experience. Frederick Lenz
• Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. Walter Benjamin
• As I travel through life, I gather experiences that lie imprinted on the deepest strata of memory, and there they ferment, are transformed, and sometimes rise to the surface and sprout like strange plants from other worlds. Isabel Allende
• Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time. Joshua Foer
• Once in a while, our thoughts drift and fade, back into the recessed hiding places where our memories are stored. At times we recall them- the memories of our loves, our youths, our life experiences. These dreams appear to us, and for seconds, minutes, or hours we are there once again. James Michael

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…allowing us to relive the past

• I am somehow able to reconstruct moments of the past in some of its sensory detail, and relive it, as it were, from the inside. I am back there, amid the sights and sounds and seaside smells. I become a time traveller who can return to the present as soon as the demands of “now” intervene. Charles Fernyhough

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Our autobiographical memories give us a sense of time flowing…

• History is the memory of time. John Smith
• All memory implies a time elapsed. Aristotle
• Time is just memory Mixed in with Desire. Tom Waits
• Time is the metre, memory the only plot. Derek Walcott
• At the heart of memory, is the stillness of time. Manu Joseph
• Time moves in one direction, memory in another. William Gibson
• Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all. Pat Conroy
• The object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed. Aristotle
• Time takes life away and gives us memory, gold with flame, black with embers. Adam Zagajewski
• Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed. Umberto Eco
• Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Jonathan Safran Foer
• Sweet Memory! wafted by thy gentle gale, Oft up the stream of Time I turn my sail. Samuel Rogers
• Because memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present. Garth Stein
• Time doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist in any way. It’s more subjective than real. Time doesn’t exist. I believe in memory. Memory is the real inspiration. Memory creates time. Memory is pure power. Arman
• I think the relationship between memory and time is a very deep and tricky one, to tell you the truth. I don’t consider memory another sense. I do consider memory that which allows us to think that time flows. Brian Greene
• We know that time has an impact on memory, but it is also memory that creates and shapes our experience of time. Our perception of the past moulds our experience of time in the present to a greater degree than we might realize. It is memory that creates the peculiar, elastic properties of time. It not only gives us the ability to conjure up a past experience at will, but to reflect on those thoughts through autonoetic consciousness — the sense that we have of ourselves as existing across time — allowing us to re-experience a situation mentally and to step outside those memories to consider their accuracy.   Claudia Hammond

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…while also warping our sense of time

• The work of memory collapses time. Walter Benjamin
• Memories seem to surface in no particular order, with no time attached. Yesterday can seem as distant as last year. My life now consists of fragments where some are so blinding in their intensity that they make everything else indistinguishable. Linda Olsson
• Memory warps time, as it does the sights and sounds and smells of reality; for what shapes it is emotion, which can twist what seems clear, just as the surface of a pond seems to bend the stick thrust into the water. Sherwood Smith

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Our memories shape our perceptions in the present

• Perception: Recognition and interpretation of sensory stimuli based chiefly on memory. Oxford Dictionery
• That is the beauty of memory, isn’t it? Our reality is always clouded by our perceptions of truth. Sherrilyn Kenyon
• Attention is narrowed perception. It is a way of looking at life bit by bit, using memory to string the bits together. Alan Watts
• Perception is the mental lens though which we perceive our experiences. It is the mind’s interpretation of the sensory stimuli we receive into our awareness, based on our memory and beliefs. Anthony Lambert
• Q: Surely, perception is not imagination! M: What else? Perception is recognition, is it not? Something entirely unfamiliar can be sensed, but cannot be perceived. Perception involves memory. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Memory is therefore, neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present, for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. Aristotle

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Our memories effect our beliefs

• We never stop to consider that our beliefs are only a relative truth that’s always going to be distorted by all the knowledge we have stored in our memory. Miguel Angel Ruiz

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Our memories determine how we act and behave in the present

• Without memory we are nothing. The things you say; the way you feel; the way you act in certain situations… it’s because you have a memory of something. Mauro Remiddi
• Memory is who you are. It’s all those experiences that have happened in the past. Those stories make up your life. They determine what you believe, what you value, the decisions that you make. It really does affect how you act…not just the decisions that you make but what you don’t do. Matthew Woodget
• Autobiographical remembering serves important functions for the self, including being able to effectively guide our future behavior, as well as to form and strengthen social bonds. Louise Vanden Poel

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In so doing, our memories affect our future

• The future is created through memory. Dacia Maraini
• Memory is set up to use the past to imagine the future. Daniel Schacter
• Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future. Corrie Ten Boom
• Memories are not just about the past. They determine our future. Jeff Bridges
• Memory is the keyword which combines past with present, past and future. Elie Wiesel
• The human brain is like a memory system that records every thing that happens to us and makes intelligent predictions based on those experiences. Daniel Tammet
• We don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. Even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories. Daniel Kahneman
• Neuroscientists point to common systems in the brain underlying both imagination and memory, and an evolutionary argument is made for memory being as much about predicting the future as providing a detailed account of the past. Charles Fernyhough
• The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future. Yukio Mishima
• We approach experience much as an artificial intelligence (AI) program does, with our brains continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the future. Michael Pollan
• Memory is our past and future. To know who you are as a person, you need to have some idea of who you have been. And, for better or worse, your remembered life story is a pretty good guide to what you will do tomorrow. “Our memory is our coherence,” wrote the surrealist Spanish-born film-maker, Luis Buñuel, “our reason, our feeling, even our action.” Lose your memory and you lose a basic connection with who you are. Charles Fernyhough
• Memory can lead us astray, but then it is a machine with many moving parts, and consequently many things that can go awry. Perhaps even that is the wrong way of looking at it. The great pioneer of memory research, Daniel Schacter, has argued that, even when it is failing, memory is doing exactly the thing it is supposed to do. And that purpose is as much about looking into the future as it is about looking into the past. There is only a limited evolutionary advantage in being able to reminisce about what happened to you, but there is a huge payoff in being able to use that information to work out what is going to happen next. Similar neural systems seem to underpin past-related and future-related thinking. Memory is endlessly creative, and at one level it functions just as imagination does. Charles Fernyhough

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Our autobiographical memories give us a sense of continuity of our consciousness…

• Memory is the evidence for the continuity of consciousness (continued identity). Jamie Slagel
• We enjoy this illusion of continuity and we call it memory. Which explains, perhaps, why our worst fear isn’t the end of life, but the end of memories. Tom Rachman
• Our personal memories give us a sense of continuity — the same person (or sense of self) moving through time. They provide important details of who we are and who we would like to be. Laura Jobson
• Helm argues that memory is not important for our identity, but it is an epistemic ability—memory allows us to know that our consciousness has not changed between T1 and T2, but does not actually provide our identity. Jamie Slagel
• Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be. Sebastian Faulks
• As far as [a] consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now as it was then; and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done. John Locke
• John Locke famously identified the self with memory. Whereas Descartes had found the self in the immediate conscious experience of thinking (“I think, therefore I am”), Locke found identity in the extension of consciousness backward in time. In Locke’s view, a person’s identity extends to whatever of his or her past he or she can remember. Consequently, past experiences, thoughts, or actions that the person does not remember are not part of his identity. For Locke, identity and selfhood have nothing to do with continuity of the body, or even continuity of mind. Selfhood consists entirely in continuity of memory. A person who remembers nothing of his or her past literally has no identity. Dr Kevin Hull
• One idea is that minimal phenomenal self may also act as a thread through our autobiographical memories, helping us to build a narrative through our own life story. Anil Ananthaswamy

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…the sense of being the same person as someone in the past

• My memory testifies, not only that this was done, but that it was done by me who now remember it. Thomas Reid
• Memory of past episodes provides a sense of personal identity—the sense that I am the same person as someone in the past. Ben Davis
• Nichols put it; “Memory for past episodes provides a sense of personal identity – the sense that I am the same person as someone in the past.” Jamie Slagel
• When any one reflects upon a past action of his own, he is just as certain of the person who did that action, namely himself, the person who now reflects on it, as he is certain that the action was at all done. Butler
• To this I answer, that the proper evidence I have of all this is remembrance … my memory testifies, not only that this was done, but that it was done by me who now remember it. If it was done by me, I must have existed at that time, and continued to exist from that time to the present. Thomas Reid
• How do you know—what evidence have you—that there is such a permanent self which has a claim to all the thoughts, actions, and feelings which you call yours? To this I answer, that the proper evidence I have of all this is remembrance … my memory testifies, not only that this was done, but that it was done by me who now remember it. If it was done by me, I must have existed at that time, and continued to exist from that time to the present. Thomas Reid

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We create a sense of self from our memories…

• Memory… is the diary that we all carry about with us. Oscar Wilde
• A sense of identity over time is given by autobiographical memory. Paul Jackson
• One of the most intuitive explanations of identity is our memories. As Klein and
• Memory alone… ‘tis to be considered… as the source of personal identity. David Hume
• Memories are therefore rather complicated building blocks of the self. Julian Baggini
• It is often thought that memory is what gives us all our unique identity. Jamie Slagel
• The interdependence of memory and personal identity has rarely been doubted. Romin W. Tafarodi
• Our sense of self over time is the story that we tell ourselves that keeps us together. Luis Buñuel
• The idea of being a person, an ego, is nothing other than an image held together by memory. Jean Klein
• Autobiographical memory plays an important role in the construction of personal identity. Anne E. Wilson
• We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors. Jorge Luis Borges
• What we are at this very moment is determined by the sum total of all our experiences till this moment. Abhijit Naskar
• We are all the pieces of what we remember. As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss. Cassandra Clare
• The autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. Antonio Damasio
• Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit – unconscious and conscious. Siri Hustvedt
• Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me. Daniel Kahneman
• Interpreting and linking past events enables us to construct a personal identity and maintain a stable sense of self. Louise Vanden Poel
• In addition to viewing the self as a concept or as an image, it is useful to think of the self as one’s memory for oneself. Dr Kevin Hull
• If we lose our memory, we lose ourselves. Forgetting is one of the symptoms of death. Without memory we cease to be human beings.  Ivan Klíma
• Memory-based accounts of personal identity remain popular to this day; indeed, they embody what is perhaps the dominant contemporary view. Rebecca Roache
• The sense of identity derives from two components, one delivering the content of the memory and the other generating the sense of mineness. Stanley B. Klein
• Through the experience of memory, you recall what you have done, and you therefore attach yourself to it and perceive yourself through prior experience. Frederick Lenz
• It is commonly accepted that identity or a sense of self is constructed by and through narrative – the stories we tell ourselves and each other about our lives. Nicola King
• The autobiographical knowledge base contains knowledge of the self, used to provide information on what the self is, what the self was, and what the self can be. A Conway
• What is this “I”? You will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by “I” is the ground-stuff upon which all experiences and memories are collected. Erwin Schrodinger
• I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved, all the cities I have visited. Jorge Luis Borges
• A self is, by its very essence, a being with a past. One must look lengthwise backwards in the stream of time in order to see the self, or its shadow, now moving with the stream… Josiah Royce
• You probably feel pretty attached to your memories — they’re yours, after all. They define who you are and where you came from, your accomplishments and failures, your likes and dislikes. Craig Good
• Memory seems intuitively to be so important to personal identity, but is not enough to fix it, because it is the primary but not only source of psychological connectedness and continuity. Julian Baggini
• Autobiographical memory is a process of reflective thinking through which we form links between elements of life and self. It can be considered as an indirect index of identity integration. Paola Bozzatello
• I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist – I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don’t have to solve that problem. It’s up to God, if any. Jorge Luis Borges
• We are a collage of our interests, our influences, our inspirations, all the fragmentary impressions we’ve collected by being alive and awake to the world. Who we “are” is simply a finely curated catalog of those. Maria Popova
• When we remember, we experience a strong sense of identity with the subject of the remembered experiences. Memory has been viewed by many philosophers since John Locke as key to explaining personal identity through time. Rebecca Roache
• Memory plays an important part of identity formation and creating a positive sense of self. Memory also helps young people make better choices in the future by calling to mind mistakes previously made and correcting future behavior. Ben Davis
• My sense of permanency and identity is due to memory, which is so evanescent and unreliable. How little I remember, even of the recent past! I have lived a life-time, and now what is left with me? A bundle of events, at best a short story.  Maurice Frydman
• A crucial building block of selfhood is the autobiographical self, which allows us to recall the past, project into the future and view ourselves as unbroken entities across time. Key to this is the formation of memories of events in our lives. Graham Lawton
• Our memory helps make us who we are. From fondly recollecting childhood events to remembering where we left our keys, memory plays a vital role in every aspect of our lives. It provides us with a sense of self and makes up our continual experience of life. Kendra Cherry
• John Locke’s memory theory of personal identity, however, associates existence of the self with consciousness—that is, memory—instead. According to Locke, one’s personal identity extends as far as their consciousness. In essence, you exist in the context of your memories. Ayesha Habib
• Because memory and identity are so closely intertwined, it is in those formative years, when we’re constructing our identity and finding our place in the world, that our memory latches onto particularly vivid details in order to use them later in reinforcing that identity.  Claudia Hammond
• Our memories tell us who we are and they cannot be achieved through committee work, by consulting other people about what happened. That doesn’t mean that at all times memories are telling us the absolute truth, but that the main source of who we are is that memory, flawed or not. Tobias Wolff
• We don’t forget…. Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which came back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we are. Alexander McCall Smith
• The concept of personal identity is connected to a recall of autobiographical memories, a process of reflective thinking through which we form links between disparate elements of our life and the self. In this view, autobiographical memory can be considered an indirect index of the level of identity integration and coherence. Paola Bozzatello
• John Locke proposes that one’s personal identity extends only so far as their own consciousness. The connection between consciousness and memory in Locke’s theory has earned it the title of the “memory theory of personal identity.” Despite criticism, Locke’s memory theory of personal identity is a prominent subject of discussion among modern philosophical circles. Ryan A. Piccirillo
• Autobiographical memory provides both a sense of continuity over time and a sense of identity. The sense of continuity over time is given by the fact that autobiographical memory provides a template of the past against which new experiences can be assimilated. The sense of identity is generated by the fact that all these experiences are related to me, rather than to someone else. Paul Jackson
• The conscious possession of experiences [is] the final criterion of identity. The continuity of the self is established by memory; disputes about the validity of memory reports will hang on whether the claimant had as hers the original experience. Puzzles about identity will be described as puzzles about whether it is possible to transfer, or to alienate memory (that is, the retention of one’s own experience) without destroying the self. Amelie Rorty
• Autobiographical memory plays an important role in the construction of personal identity. We review evidence of the bi-directional link between memory and identity. Individuals’ current self-views, beliefs, and goals influence their recollections and appraisals of former selves. In turn, people’s current self-views are influenced by what they remember about their personal past, as well as how they recall earlier selves and episodes. People’s reconstructed evaluations of memories, their perceived distance from past experiences, and the point of view of their recollections have implications for how the past affects the present. on our side. Anne Wilson
• Locke’s identification of the self with memory proved very popular over the years. David Hume generally affirmed the connection between identity and memory, adding that the role of memory is to permit us to comprehend the causal relations among events. This ability, however, enables us to extend our identity beyond those acts and experiences that we can personally remember, so that our self-narrative also includes events that we know must have happened, given what we do remember — whether they actually happened or not. Thus, while Locke’s view of the self-as-memory is based on our ability to reproduce our experiences from memory, Hume’s is based as well on our ability to reconstruct our experiences in memory. Dr Kevin Hull

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…and the “story of self” we create from our memories…

• The brain’s own storytelling is the centripetal force of the self. Maria Popova
• Who are you?’ someone asks. ‘I am the story of myself,’ comes the answer. Scott Momaday
• Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself. Simone de Beauvoir
• Beautiful memories tell our story, and wrap themselves in ribbons of the heart. Flavia Cacace
• Our sense of self over time is the story that we tell ourselves that keeps us together. Luis Buñuel
• Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story. Daniel Kahneman
• The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn’t imagine ourselves through a day without it. Robert Coover
• We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes. Jonathan Safran Foer
• Life’s events are scattered throughout time, yet we often recall different events in the context of an integrated narrative. Brendan I Cohn-Sheehy
• A new brain imaging study shows that the hippocampus is the brain’s storyteller, connecting separate, distant events into a single narrative. UC Davis
• Memories are just stories we tell ourselves about our past; and that’s often why they don’t match when we’ve shared the same experiences with someone. John Slattery
• Things that happen in real life don’t always connect directly, but we can remember the details of each event better if they form a coherent narrative. Brendan Cohn-Sheehy
• Our practice of construing our lives as self-authored narratives requires the existence of a self that might serve as author and the bearer of other properties. Derek Parfit
• It is through narrative that we create and recreate selfhood, that self is a product of our telling and not some essence to be delved for in the recesses of subjectivity. Jerome Bruner
• What is a memory? Not a storehouse, not a trunk in the attic, but an instrument that constantly refines the past into a narrative, accessible and acceptable to oneself. Stanley Kauffmann
• We tend to organize memories as narratives that involve characters with motivations, to which events happen and to which they respond according to their predicaments and personalities. Charles Fernyhough
• Telling our stories is what saves us. The story is enough… The very act of storytelling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of narrative is, by definition, holy. James Carroll
• So many versions of just one memory, and yet none of them were right or wrong. Instead, they were all pieces. Only when fitted together, edge to edge, could they even begin to tell the whole story. Sarah Dessen
• We all have narratives. People form beliefs and values, and then develop explanations within their memories for these beliefs and values. We’re all creating stories. Our lives are stories in that sense. James McGaugh
• Narrative provides a temporal scaffold for putting the pieces of a memory back together. Some, in fact, have argued that acquiring the ability to do narrative allows young children to begin to tell stories about their pasts, explaining why, in adulthood, our very early years are lost to us. Charles Fernyhough
• Memory plays an important part of identity formation and creating a positive sense of self. As a child develops and has experiences, there is a part of the brain that creates a story from these experiences and over time there is a sense of self that develops. This is known as Autobiographical Memory (AM). Dr Kevin Hull
• The problems begin with encoding, even before a memory has been stored. Our brain is constantly filtering information, and constructing its own reality. Our brains evolved to construct a narrative of what’s going on, lending attention to what matters most.  The running story your brain puts together isn’t a faithful rendition. Craig Good
• The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy. We tell stories because we can’t help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us. James Carroll
• The sort of memory I have described is known as “autobiographical memory”, because it is about the narrative we make from the happenings of our own lives. It is distinguished from semantic memory, which is memory for facts, and other kinds of implicit long-term memory, such as your memory for complex actions such as riding a bike or playing a saxophone. Charles Fernyhough
• We are all novelists when we are remembering. We start off with some sensory impressions of an event, along with factual knowledge about who we were then and what was going on for us. We put that information together in ways that reflect who we are now as well as who we were back then. Sometimes we put in information that shouldn’t really be there. Each time we cast back into the past, we demonstrate our capacity to narrativize ourselves.  Charles Fernyhough
• To emphasise its narrative nature is not to undermine memory’s value. It is simply to be realistic about this everyday psychological miracle. If we can be more honest about memory’s quirks, we can get along with it better. When I think back to my first attempt at solo swimming, it doesn’t bother me that I have probably got some of the details wrong. It might be a fiction, but it’s my fiction, and I treasure it. Memory is like that. It makes storytellers of us all. Charles Fernyhough
• If we wish to know about a man, we ask ‘what is his story–his real, inmost story?’–for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us–through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives–we are each of us unique. Oliver Sacks
• There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, which is different in every individual to begin with, and differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever they are recollected. . . . Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves—the stories we continually recategorize and refine. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory, and follows from its basis and mechanisms in the human brain.   Oliver Sacks
• That’s how I think we should value memory: as a means for endlessly rewriting the self. It’s important not to push the analogy with storytelling too far, but it’s a valuable one. Writing about her novel, Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel has explained how she brought the protagonist Thomas Cromwell alive for the reader by giving him vivid memories. When writers create imaginary memories for their characters, they do a similar kind of thing to what we all do when we make a memory. They weave together bits of their own personal experience, emotions and sensory impressions and the minutiae of specific contexts, and tailor them into a story by hanging them on to a framework of historical fact. They do all that while making them fit the needs of the narrative, serving the story as much as they serve truth. Charles Fernyhough

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…believing we are the sum total and product of our life experiences

• Identity is an accumulation of perceptions. David Eagleman
• What we are at this very moment is determined by the sum total of all our experiences till this moment. Abhijit Naskar
• We do not know the truth of a living thing’s existence until we discern its entire history from development to demise. Kilroy J. Oldster
• Many of us don’t realize the connection between memory and self. Who you are is the sum total of all that you’ve experienced. Karl Pribram
• Through the experience of memory, you recall what you have done, and you therefore attach yourself to it and perceive yourself through prior experience. Frederick Lenz
• What is this “I”? You will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by “I” is the ground-stuff upon which all experiences and memories are collected.  Erwin Schrodinger
• But how do we actually know who we are? It may seem simple – we are a product of our life experiences, which we can be easily accessed through our memories of the past. Giuliana Mazzoni
• I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved, all the cities I have visited. Jorge Luis Borges
• We are a collage of our interests, our influences, our inspirations, all the fragmentary impressions we’ve collected by being alive and awake to the world. Who we “are” is simply a finely curated catalog of those. Maria Popova

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Our story of self, based on memory, is continually being constituted

• The narrativity approach reflects a deep-seated disillusionment with the classical philosophical project. It sees the search for the self understood as an entity as hopelessly confused: given the failure of that search to reach any agreed-upon solution, we should instead think of the self as an ongoing process of self-constitution. Derek Parfit

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Our story of self, based on memory, give us a sense of order

• We live entirely… by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images. Joan Didion
• Narrative identity takes part in the story’s movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder Paul Ricoeur
• We impose order and narrative on everything in order to understand it. Otherwise, there’s nothing but chaos. Julianne Moore
• We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience. Joan Didion
• The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• The real world is devoid of narratives, after all. Narratives are just a thing that our brains do with facts in order to draw a line around the incomprehensible largeness of reality and wrestle it into something learnable and manipulable. Charles Stross

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Our story of self, based on memory, helps us create a sense of meaning and significance

• Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door. Saul Bellow
• It is much easier to live with the fantasy, because the fantasy gives meaning to the suffering.  Yuval Noah Harari
• Memories were moving pictures in which meaning was constantly in flux. They were stories people told themselves. Melissa de la Cruz
• As we go about our day-to-day lives, we impart a kind of narrative meaning to things. Ultimately these narratives assume large form. Robert Wright
• Our narrating self would much prefer to continue suffering in the future, just so it won’t have to admit that our past suffering was devoid of all meaning. Yuval Noah Harari
• Narratives tell us which events and actions are significant and which can be ignored. The interrelationship of events in our lives is explained by these narratives. William Grassie
• We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience. Joan Didion
• Life is coherent when one is able to discern understandable patterns in it to make the wholeness comprehensible. In other words, meaning as coherence is seen to be about ‘the feeling that one’s experiences or life itself makes sense.’ Frank Martela
• We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. We snatch our freeze-frame of life from the simultaneity of existence by holding on to illusions of permanence, congruence, and linearity; of static selves and lives that unfold in sensical narratives. Maria Popova
• Stories about self and society are how humans construct the “horizons of meaning” that form the critical background for social relations and life choices. Narratives always represent a kind of movement in moral space. They are our way of constructing coherence and continuity in our lives. Charles Taylor
• The least livable life is the one without coherence-nothing connects, nothing means anything. Stories make connections. They allow us to see our past, our present, and our future as interrelated and purposeful…. The stories we value most reassure us that life is worth the pain, that meaning is not an illusion, and that others share our experience with us. Daniel Taylor 

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Our story of self, based on memory, affects our perceptions and interpretations in the present

• The world is nothing but my perception of it. I see only through myself. I hear only through the filter of my story. Byron Katie
• The whole world is simply my story, projected back to me on the screen of my own perception. All of it. Byron Katie

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Our story of self, based on memory, affects the plans we make for the future

• We view our lives as narratives that we are simultaneously living out and making up. By viewing ourselves as both the author and the central character in the story of our lives, we achieve the ability to formulate long-term plans and projects, work out subordinate goals, and thus avoid paralysis each time we are presented with a new opportunity for action. Derek Parfit

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Our story of self, based on memory, affects our personalities

• We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that’s the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread. Paul Auster

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Our story of self, based on memory, impacts our well-being

• Narrative is the beginning of recovery. Amanda Ripley
• Narrative coherence is associated with more positive emotional responses in the face of traumatic or stressful experiences. Lauranne Vanaken
• I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness. Sue Monk Kidd
• Telling our stories is what saves us. The story is enough… The very act of storytelling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of narrative is, by definition, holy. James Carroll
• Narrating about personal experiences in a coherent manner is assumed to be beneficial for one’s well-being, as this implies that the individual has been able to make meaning out of that particular experience Louise Vanden Poel
• There are considerable differences in the ways in which individuals remember and try to make meaning out of past personal experiences. One autobiographical memory characteristic that has been receiving growing attention is narrative coherence, or the extent to which an individual is able to construct coherent accounts of their autobiographical memories. Differences in narrative coherence have been found to be related to well-being, with more coherent individuals displaying higher levels of well-being. Louise Vanden

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Some argue that if we lose our memories (and thus our story of self), we lose our identities

• Have you ever wondered just what it is that makes you, you? If all your memories were to fade away, would your identity dissolve along with them? Bobby Azarian
• Substantial research has shown that memories shape a person’s identity. People with profound forms of amnesia typically also lose their identity. Giuliana Mazzoni
• I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist – I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don’t have to solve that problem. It’s up to God, if any.  Jorge Luis Borges
• When scholars have reflected on the psychological impact of dementia they have frequently referred to the loss of the “self” in dramatic and devastating terms, using language such as the “unbecoming of the self” or the “disintegration” of the self. Christian Jarrett
• According to John Locke’s “memory theory”, a person’s identity only reaches as far as their memory extends into the past. In other words, who one is critically depends upon what one remembers. Thus, as a person’s memory begins to disappear, so does his identity. Ben Davis
• Like all knowledge, self-knowledge must be derived a posteriori from experiences of sensation and reflection. Without the capacity to record such experiences in memory, there can be no self — just an organism responding reflexively to environmental stimuli. On the other hand, the notion of self as memory makes no sense unless there is a person, namely oneself, to be represented in the memory. Dr Kevin Hull

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Loss of memory can thus be seen to be a kind of death

• Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die. Samuel Butler
• If we lose our memory, we lose ourselves. Forgetting is one of the symptoms of death. Without memory we cease to be human beings. Ivan Klíma
• Everything has a narrative, really, and if you can’t understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you’re not really alive at all. Catherynne M. Valente

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The truth is that our memories are highly fallible and unreliable…

• Memory is a great betrayer. Anais Nin
• Thank God for the potholes on memory lane. Randy Newman
• Memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing. Elizabeth Loftus
• Any study of memory is, in the main, a study of its frailty. David Kortava
• Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was. Marilynne Robinson
• The truth is that our memories are extremely fallible, creating a fictitious sense of self. Anthony Lambert
• Memory distortions are basic and widespread in humans, and it may be unlikely that anyone is immune. Lawrence Patihis
• We all have memories that are malleable and susceptible to being contaminated or supplemented in some way. Elizabeth Loftus
• Memory, like so much else, is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals. Anna Funder
• Memories are fallible; different people, experiencing the same events, may interpret and remember them in very different ways. Kip Thorne
• Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do. Stefan Zweig
• Only everyone forgets how seldom our memory is accurate. Having more memory is just a way of distorting a greater amount of the past. Craig Clevenger
• Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record. Andre Maurois
• We, as human beings, are landed with memory systems that have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections — but also great flexibility and creativity.  Oliver Sacks
• Although our memories always feel true, they’re extremely vulnerable to errant suggestions, clever manipulations and the old fashioned needs of storytelling. William Saletan
• Our memories are anything but airtight. They are vague, porous, plastic, and fallible. Sometimes, without realizing it, we are capable of manufacturing false ones. Dan Reisberg
• The problem with memory is that is changes whatever it touches. It is never that accurate. As a result, I end up modifying and revising my own experiences. It’s myth making. Li-Young Lee
• What if I were to tell you that your cherished memories aren’t as reliable as you think? Or that I can get you to ardently believe things that have never even happened to you? Julia Shaw
• Memory of things past is also fraught with uncertainty; it is not the reading-out of information from the brain’s neurological data bank, but an ongoing construct subject to error and bias. Brockman
• Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain – not falsification, but a shifting. Gunter Grass
• But it’s also true that my memory is a card shark, reshuffling the deck to hide what I fear to know, unable to keep from fingering the ace at the bottom of the deck even when I’m doing nothing more than playing Fish in the daylight with children. Lorene Cary
• Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features. Primo Levi
• I learned that I never really know the true story of my guests’ lives, that I have to content myself with knowing that when I’m interviewing somebody, I’m getting a combination of fact and truth and self-mythology and self-delusion and selective memory and faulty memory. Terry Gross
• As artists, illusionists, movie makers, and more recently experimental psychologists have repeatedly shown, conscious experience is highly manipulatable and context-dependent. Our memories are also largely abstracted reinterpretations of events — we all hold distorted memories of past experiences. Sam Harris
• Our memories shape how we think about the past, how we plan for the future, and how we think about ourselves. Yet our memories are also constantly being reinvented: we often remember our experiences differently from how they truly happened, and can even remember experiences that never happened at all. Robert A. Nash
• The truth is, none of our memories is sacrosanct. No matter how good you think your recall is, I can show how our brains and social environments twist recollections so that you’ll have every reason never to trust your memory again. It may leave you wondering just how much you truly know about yourself… Julia Shaw
• Memory is slippery. It bends to our understanding of the world, twists to accommodate our prejudices. It is unreliable. Witnesses seldom remember the same things. They identify the wrong people. They give us the details of events that never happened. Memory is slippery, but my memories suddenly feel slipperier. Holly Black
• Memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously. Isabel Allende
• Computers are good at swift, accurate computation and at storing great masses of information. The brain, on the other hand, is not as efficient a number cruncher and its memory is often highly fallible; a basic inexactness is built into its design. The brain’s strong point is its flexibility. It is unsurpassed at making shrewd guesses and at grasping the total meaning of information presented to it. Jeremy Campbell

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…including our collective memory

• Our collective memory, like individual memory, is shockingly fallible. Laura Spinney
• Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us – is rewritten – we lose the ability to sustain our true selves. Haruki Murakami

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In other words, memory is not like a video recorder that accurately stores everything

• People often think of memory as something like a video recorder, accurately documenting and storing everything that happens with perfect accuracy and clarity. In reality, memory is very prone to fallacy. Kendra Cherry
• For the previous century, the accepted view was that once captured and stored in neural circuits in the brain, a memory could be retrieved but could not be rewritten. In that view, every time an experience is relived, it is the same, over and over. Susan Young Rojahn
• At retrieval of a memory, we reconstruct the episode in question from its constituent parts. Crucially, we don’t record events like a video camera for later playback; we reconstruct them at the moment we need to remember, from lots of different kinds of information stored at locations around the brain. Charles Fernyhough
• For a number of scientists, the idea that memory is a recording device rests on an unrealistic fantasy of accuracy and permanence. Instead of practices that facilitated ‘reliving’ a permanent record, they sought out ways to reveal an ineradicable role of interpretation… in the construction of knowledge and memory. Alison Winter
• People often think of memory as something like a video recorder, accurately documenting and storing everything that happens with perfect accuracy and clarity. In reality, memory is very prone to fallacy. People can feel completely confident that their memory is accurate, but this confidence is no guarantee that a particular memory is correct. Kendra Cherry
• When you ask people about their memories, they often talk as though they were material possessions, enduring representations of the past to be carefully guarded and deeply cherished. But this view of memory is quite wrong. Memories are not filed away in the brain like so many video cassettes, to be slotted in and played when it’s time to recall the past. Sci-fi and fantasy fictions might try to persuade us otherwise, but memories are not discrete entities that can be taken out of one person’s head, Dumbledore-style, and distilled for someone else’s viewing. They are mental reconstructions, nifty multimedia collages of how things were, that are shaped by how things are now. Autobiographical memories are stitched together as and when they are needed from information stored in many different neural systems. That makes them curiously susceptible to distortion, and often not nearly as reliable as we would like. Charles Fernyhough
• As we have seen from the work of [Frederick] Bartlett [(Bartlett 1932)], memory is not a veridical copy of the world, unlike a DVD or video recording. It is perhaps more helpful to think of memory as an influence of the world on the individual. Indeed a constructivist approach describes memory as the combined influences of the world and the person’s own ideas and expectations. […] So an event, as it occurs, is constructed by the person who experienced it. Later, when we come to try to remember that event [for instance, watching a movie], some parts of the film come readily to mind, whereas other parts we may re-construct—based on the parts that we remember and on what we know or believe must have happened. […] In fact, we are so good at this sort of re-construction (or “filling in the gaps”) that we are often consciously unaware that it is happening. […] This is an especially worrying consideration when we reflect on the degree to which people can feel that they are “remembering” crucial features of a witnessed murder or a personally experienced childhood assault, when—instead—they may be “reconstructing” these events and filling in missing information based on their general knowledge of the world.  Jonathan K. Foster

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Instead, we actively construct and create our memories, often using the power of our imagination

• Most of our oldest memories are the product of repeated rehearsal and reconstruction. Ulric Neisser
• Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original… it is a continuing act of creation. Rosalind Cartwright
• We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst? Chris Marker
• Our memories are not literal representations of the past. Instead, ‘facts’ are unconsciously constructed to fit our schemata. Allan Snyder
• We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective. Umberto Eco
• True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’. Arthur Rimbaud
• The mind and its memory do not just record and retrieve information and experiences, but also infer, fill in gaps, and construct. Bryan Boyd
• I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape. Jean-Paul Sartre
• Hindsight is anything but 20 20. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life. And sometimes memory is downright creative. Robert Waldinger
• Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original… it is a continuing act of creation. Dream images are the product of that creation. Rosalind D. Cartwright
• Remembering is not like playing a video from the past in your mind – it is a highly reconstructive process that depends on knowledge, self image, needs and goals. Giuliana Mazzoni
• When we remember something, we’re taking bits and pieces of experience – sometimes from different times and places – and bringing it all together to construct what might feel like a recollection but is actually a construction. The process of calling it into conscious awareness can change it, and now you’re storing something that’s different. We all do this, for example, by inadvertently adopting a story we’ve heard. Elizabeth Loftus
• Ulric Neisser, the “father of cognitive psychology”, famously likened memory retrieval to palaeontology, writing in 1967: “Out of a few stored bone chips, we remember a dinosaur.” Put simply, if we think an event should have happened in a certain way on the basis of our previous experiences, we are likely to think that the event did indeed happen this way. So memory is not simply a recording of the past. It is a deliberate piecing together of retrieved information in an effort to make sense of the past. Lauren Knott
• Memory distortions in humans may occur simply with the passage of time. This is partly because, over time, memories typically become less episodic (highly detailed and specific) and more semantic (more broad and generalised), as the information is repeatedly retrieved and re-encoded in varying contexts.We do this not because memory is fundamentally flawed but because it is reconstructive. That is, our memory of events is not a verbatim playback of what happened. Rather, it’s a reconstruction based on the retrieval of some stored remnants of the original experience that may have persisted in memory, along with our conceptual framework for other similar previous experiences, that serves to make the memory coherent. Lauren Knott
• For researchers in the early twentieth century, memories were imprints in the brain (as for Socrates they were analogous to impressions made in soft wax) — imprints that could be activated by the act of recollection. It was not until the crucial studies of Frederic Bartlett at Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s that the classical view could be disputed. Whereas Ebbinghaus and other early investigators had studied rote memory — how many digits could be remembered, for instance — Bartlett presented his subjects with pictures or stories and accounts of what they had seen or heard were somewhat different (and sometimes quite transformed) on each re-remembering. These experiments convinced Bartlett to think in terms not of a static thing called ‘memory,’ but rather a dynamic process of ‘remembering.’ He wrote: Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience. . . . It is thus hardly ever really exact.  Oliver Sacks

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Our faculty of memory cannot be separated from our faculty of imagination

• Memories and imaginings can be phenomenologically indistinguishable. Oliver Sacks
• There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory. Josh Billings
• But sometimes what we call ‘memory’ and what we call ‘imagination’ are not so easily distinguished. Leslie Marmon Silko
• Memory and the imagination are almost identical. It’s the same place in the brain and the same thing is happening. Paul Auster
• Memory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer which records things; it is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention. Alain Robbe-Grillet
• Imaginations blossom amidst memories. One judiciously separates them – but is there really any point in that? Doesn’t truth suffer when one amputates it from its context of dreams? Jean Helion
• The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories. Siri Hustvedt
• Neuroscientists point to common systems in the brain underlying both imagination and memory, and an evolutionary argument is made for memory being as much about predicting the future as providing a detailed account of the past. Charles Fernyhough
• The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams. Marcel Proust
• Memory and the imagination are almost identical. It’s the same place in the brain and the same thing is happening. When you think about your own life, there are no memories without place. You are always situated somewhere. I think the imagination – the narrative imagination at least – situates you in a specific space when you start to think of a story. I often use places I know. I put my characters inside rooms and houses that I’m familiar with – sometimes the houses of my parents or grandparents or previous apartments I’ve lived in. Paul Auster

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There is a saying that memory feeds imagination…

• Memory feeds imagination. Amy Tan
• Imagination is merely the exploitation of our memory. Pierre Bonnard
• It is the power of memory that gives rise to the power of imagination. Akira Kurosawa
• In literature and art memory is a synonym for invention. It is the life-blood of imagination, which faints and dies when the veins are empty. Robert Aris Willmott

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…but in many ways, it is actually imagination that feeds memory

• Memory is imagination. Joko Beck
• On the stem of memory imaginations blossom. Patrick Kavanagh
• Our memories become the products of an active imagination. Anthony Lambert
• Where beams of imagination play, the memory’s soft figures melt away. Alexander Pope
• Sometimes imagination and memory become confused. Sometimes we confuse an imagining for a memory.  Charles Fernyhough
• The imagination is a palette of bright colors. You can use it to touch up memories — or you can use it to paint dreams.  Robert Brault
• Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination. Oliver Sacks
• Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so. William James.
• An imagination is a powerful tool. It can tint memories of the past, shade perceptions of the present, or paint a future so vivid that it can entice… or terrify, all depending upon how we conduct ourselves today. Jim Davis
• Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts. Philip Roth
• The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness. Tim O’Brien
• The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams. Marcel Proust
• It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a luster obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment – but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer? Lord Byron
• Over time, we forget information about cognitive operations associated with memories of imaginings, and we also forget perceptual and contextual information associated with memories of external events, making it easier to confuse memories of long-past external events with memories of long-past imaginings. Rebecca Roache
• There’s basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I’m using a bunch of lies that I’ve made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I’m using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized. Isabel Allende
• A healthy brain quickly forgets most of what passes into conscious awareness. The fragments of experience that do get encoded into long-term memory are then subject to “creative editing.” To remember an event is to reimagine it; in the reimagining, we inadvertently introduce new information, often colored by our current emotional state. A dream, a suggestion, and even the mere passage of time can warp a memory. David Kortava
• I’ve often tried to describe how memory works. I’ve suggested this to students, and told them to close their eyes and try to remember what I look like. Then I ask them if they remember what I look like. But when you open your eyes you will be surprised how different what you thought I looked like is to what I actually look like. Because the imagination is a different raw material from actual vision. Memory is very different from the thing itself. Lore Segal
• It is worth repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiæ of experience, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and storied residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations to human existence. George Eliot

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We change our memories every time we retrieve them

• We change the past every time we remember it. Anthony Lambert
• We don’t really remember the original; we remember the revised version. Daniela Schiller
• Activating a memory also makes it temporarily fragile and vulnerable to change. Benedict Carey
• When we recall something, the act of recalling activates a biochemical process that can solidify and reorganize the memory that is stored. Andre Fenton
• The act of retrieving memories also has a component of storage. Using the metaphor of computer memory, reading information also results in writing. James B. Glattfelder
• Remembering is a dynamic process. At a biochemical level, memories are not pulled from the shelf like stored videos but pieced together — reconstructed — by the brain. Benedict Carey
• We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection. Oliver Sacks
• Every time we access a long term memory, it gets rewritten, with new errors, back into memory. The mere act of remembering something from long ago actually changes that memory. This is a common source of one of the most interesting errors, the false memory. Craig Good
• Researchers now understand that that the process of recalling a memory actually changes it. Each time you retrieve a memory it undergoes this storage process, That means the memory is in an unstable state, rewritten and remodeled every time it is retrieved. Susan Young Rojahn
• Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn’t a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words. Siri Hustvedt
• A memory is not simply an image produced by time traveling back to the original event – it can be an image that is somewhat distorted because of the prior times you remembered it. Your memory of an event can grow less precise even to the point of being totally false with each retrieval. Donna Bridge
• All memory is colored with bits of life experiences. When people recall, they are reconstructing. “It doesn’t mean it’s totally false. It means that they’re telling a story about themselves and they’re integrating things they really do remember in detail, with things that are generally true. James McGaugh
• Our memories are not static. Each time we reach for one, we refresh and form new neuron connections, in fact changing the memory itself via our contemplation of it. this is true not just in some metaphorical sense, but in a real, tangible, physical way — the act of recall alters the neuron structures forever! Olga Werby
• It is now well known that memories become ‘labile’ and ‘fragile’ when we pull them into our consciousness – and it also exposes related memories to distortion, too. As a result, recalling one element of an event may strengthen our memory for that detail, but often leads us to forget related information that is not actively recalled. David Robson
• Whenever we try to recall the past, the brain appears to reconstruct the event, selecting the details that seem most likely to have happened. Behind the scenes the brain is doing a lot of things in selecting and testing information.  It’s testing out how strong should those memories seem and then suppressing the ones that aren’t relevant.  David Robson
• Memories don’t just fade, as the old saying would have us believe; they also grow,’ wrote Loftus et al. ‘Every time we recall an event, we must reconstruct the memory, and with every recollection the memory may be changed … Truth and reality, when seen through the filter of our memories, are not objective facts but subjective, interpretive realities.’ Julian Baggini
• Memory isn’t stored the way computer files are and it also doesn’t always stay the same over time. Each time we remember something we are reconstructing a past event and this reconstruction isn’t entirely reliable. We may suppress a negative memory that is damaging to our self-esteem, or we may do the opposite, living in nightmarish memories that we embellish. Dr Marc Siegel
• There are countless reasons why tiny mistakes or embellishments might happen each time we recall past events, ranging from what we believe is true or wish were true, to what someone else told us about the past event, or what we want that person to think. And whenever these flaws happen, they can have long-term effects on how we’ll recall that memory in the future. Robert Nash
• Your memory is less like data on a hard drive than like a cryptic shorthand on a chalk board. Memories can be smudged, overwritten, and just plain fade away. Imagine using a computer that changed the contents of its files every time you opened them. You can already see how what the brain has stored is compressed, distorted data. Even more errors come into play when you try to retrieve it. Craig Good
• Whatever of my memories hadn’t crumbled into dust must surely by now have been altered by the passage of time. I tend to agree with the theory that if you want to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the last time you recalled it. With tiny differences creeping in at each cycle, the exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us farther away.  Sally Mann
• What accounts for the unreliability of memory? One factor must be that remembering is always re-remembering. When I remember, I know that I am not remembering the event so much as my last act of remembering it. Like a game of Chinese whispers, any small error is likely to be propagated along the chain of remembering. The sensory impressions that I took from the event are likely to be stored quite accurately. It is the assembly – the resulting edit – that might not bear much resemblance to how things actually were. Charles Fernyhough
• At first glance, this experimental observation seems incongruous. After all, we like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them. But they aren’t. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes. The larger moral of the experiment is that memory is a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information. It shows us that every time we remember anything, the neuronal structure of the memory is delicately transformed, or reconsolidated. William Saletan
• Memory storage is idiosyncratic and strangely disjointed. The mind breaks each memory into its component parts—names, faces, locations, contexts, how a thing feels to the touch, even whether it is living or dead—and sends the parts to different places, then calls them back and reassembles them when the whole is needed again. A single fleeting thought or recollection can fire up a million or more neurons scattered across the brain. Moreover, these fragments of memory move around over time, migrating from one part of the cortex to another, for reasons entirely unknown. It’s no wonder we get details muddled. Bill Bryson

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Each memory is coloured by the present circumstances in which the memory arises

• I construct my memories with my present. Jean-Paul Sartre
• Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events. Albert Einstein
• Memory is dramatic present tense. You create it as you remember it. Allen Wier
• Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present. Mario Vargas Llosa
• Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers. Kazuo Ishiguro
• …yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present. Jamaica Kincaid
• A man’s memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become. Fawn M. Brodie

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We also change our memories when we retell them to others

• Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories. Alice Munro
• Our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other and ourselves—the stories we continually recategorize and refine. Oliver Sacks
• How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves. Julian Barnes
• When we recount an experience to someone, the act of recounting it changes the memory of it. So if we reshape the story a bit each time—omitting inconvenient facts, exaggerating convenient ones—we can, over time, transform our actual belief about what happened. Which presumably makes it easier to convince others that our story is true. Robert Wright
• The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true, only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture. Karen Joy Fowler
• When we describe our memories to other people, we use artistic license to tell the story differently depending on who’s listening. We might ask ourselves whether it’s vital to get the facts straight, or whether we only want to make the listener laugh. And we might change the story’s details depending on the listener’s attitudes or political leaning. Research shows that when we describe our memories differently to different audiences it isn’t only the message that changes, but sometimes it’s also the memory itself. This is known as the “audience-tuning effect”. Robert Nash

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In the retelling, our memories get converted into words and then, with time, we forget what’s behind them

• Memories fade but words hang around forever. Daniel H. Wilson
• No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. Roger Zelazny
• Our memory fragments don’t have any coherence until they’re imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense. Siri Hustvedt
• Language is the memory of man. Without it he has no past, a paltry present, and an empty future. With it he can bring his dreams to life. Edward R. Murrow
• When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space. Jamais Cascio
• Facts can’t be recounted; much less twice over, and far less still by different persons. I’ve already drummed that thoroughly into your head. What happens is that your wretched memory remembers the words and forgets what’s behind them. Augusto Roa Bastos
• But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously. Julio Cortazar
• When you think about the special cognitive tricks involved in autobiographical memory, it’s perhaps no surprise that it takes a while for children to start doing it right. Many factors seem to be critical in children’s emergence from childhood amnesia, including language and narrative abilities. When we are able to encode our experience in words, it becomes much easier to put it together into a memory. Charles Fernyhough
• We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory. Selma Fraiberg

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Memories can be corrupted by other memories

• The enemy of memory isn’t time; it’s other memories.  David Eagleman
• Often, we get our memories mixed up and combine two or more separate events into one false recollection. Ayesha Habib
• No memory is ever alone; it’s at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations. Louis L’Amour
• Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Thomas Merton
• Memories are shifting entities. They muddle into one another over time, getting tangled across years. Ayesha Habib
• Existing knowledge and other memories can also interfere with the formation of a new memory, causing the recollection of an event to be mistaken or entirely false. Kendra Cherry
• We all have our own narratives of life. You have a “version” of that life that is a story you tell to yourself and others, about what your life has been. But it is only that, a story, and it is just one version of a possible number of stories. I realised that the version of my life that I has told myself is based on a recollection of an event that is inherently wrong. I came to realise that the distortion of memory can change anything and everything that I had believed true for so long. Lauren Knott

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Memories can be supplanted by photographs

• Photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories. Sally Mann
• Sometimes you don’t know if your memory is because you really experienced it or because you look at your old pictures. Anton Corbijn
• One particular difficulty with early memories is their susceptibility to contamination by visual images, such as photographs and video. I’m sure that several of my childhood memories are actually memories of seeing myself in photos. When we look back into the past, we are always doing so through a prism of intervening selves. Charles Fernyhough

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Like a wiki, memories are malleable and always changing

• Even your own memory changes over time because of circumstances or even because your body changes. Martha Ronk
• Research shows your memory works more like a Wikipedia page — a transcription of history created by multiple people’s perceptions and assumptions that’s constantly changing. Jacque Wilson
• Studies have shown that memory is dynamic and labile and changeable over time, that this lability affects behavior, that older memories can be extinguished by excess retrievals and that memory adapts and changes to fit the expectations of a person’s latest experience. Dr Marc Siegel
• We’re constantly changing facts, rewriting history to make things easier, to make them fit in with our preferred version of events. We do it automatically. We invent memories. Without thinking. If we tell ourselves something happened often enough we start to believe it, and then we can actually remember it. S.J. Watson
• A growing body of evidence suggests that the information entered into memory is often altered in various ways over time—and these alterations can reduce its accuracy and change its meaning. Such changes fall under two major headings- memory distortion, alterations in what is retained and later recalled, and memory construction, the addition of information that was not actually present. Anthony Lambert
• [M]any people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn’t true. Our memories are constructive. They’re reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people. Elizabeth Loftus
• Memory is not a fixed and permanent record, like a document in a filing cabinet. It is something much more hazy and mutable. As Elizabeth Loftus told an interviewer in 2013, “It’s a little more like a Wikipedia page. You can go in there and change it, and so can other people.”  Bill Bryson

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Memories are like this because they are designed to be adaptive

• But why is memory like this? Such a reconstructive memory system is designed to be very adaptive. It is likely that memory evolved not as a system that retains verbatim information about past experience but rather one that helps us understand, experience, and interpret the world around us. It works well for what it is intended: guiding current and future behaviour. Lauren Knott

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Memories can also be distorted by a number of memory biases

• Memory bias is a collection of dozens of cognitive biases. Anne-Laure Le Cunff
• Memory bias entails preferential recall of a certain kind of information over another. Saurabh Maheshwari
• A memory bias is a cognitive bias that either impairs or enhances the recall of a memory by altering the content of what we remember. These memory distortions show that memories are not stored as exact replicas of reality. Rather, our memories are reconstructed during recall. The recall process makes them prone to manipulation and errors. Anne-Laure Le Cunff

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We construct our memories to fit in with our sense of self…

• Life is a rough biography. Memories smooth out the edges. Terri Guillemets
• No matter how stark the reality, a human being fits it into a narrative that is palatable. Joshua Prager
• What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it. Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
• Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears. Rollo May
• It is often said that we construct our sense of self from our memories, but in some ways we construct our memories from our sense of self. Julian Baggini
• What is a memory? Not a storehouse, not a trunk in the attic, but an instrument that constantly refines the past into a narrative, accessible and acceptable to oneself. Stanley Kauffmann
• Our natural memory isn’t actually perfectly accurate. Research shows that we often create false memories about the past. We do this in order to maintain the identity that we want to have over time – and avoid conflicting narratives about who we are. Giuliana Mazzoni
• The act of remembering is an act of creating. When we remember something, we are recalling past events through the lens of our current selves. The memories we conjure are constantly evolving and shifting alongside our self-perception. Remembering, then, is a constant discovery of oneself. Ayesha Habib
• Crucially, there are upsides to our malleable memory. Picking and choosing memories is actually the norm, guided by self-enhancing biases that lead us to rewrite our past so it resembles what we feel and believe now. Inaccurate memories and narratives are necessary, resulting from the need to maintain a positive, up-to-date sense of self. Giuliana Mazzoni

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… not committing to memory facts that conflict with the way we see ourselves

• We all ignore and do not commit to memory facts and events that conflict with the way we see ourselves and the world. We remember selectively, usually without conscious effort or desire to do so. And yet because we believe memory records facts, objectively, we fail to see that all this means that we are constructing ourselves and the world. Julian Baggini

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We only remember what fits into a coherent story of self

• Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist. Steven Pinker
• The ninety percent of human experience that does not fit into established narrative patterns falls into oblivion. Mason Cooley
• Narratives tell us which events and actions are significant and which can be ignored. The interrelationship of events in our lives is explained by these narratives. William Grassie
• Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Steven Pinker

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We tend to remember in a way that reflects favourably on us

• Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory… Joseph Conrad
• Egocentric bias is when we recall our accomplishments as being more impressive than they actually are. Taylor Bennett
• You would expect us to tell (and believe) not just coherent stories about ourselves but flattering stories about ourselves. Robert Wright
• Self-Serving Bias: When remembering an event, individuals will often perceive themselves as being responsible for desirable outcomes, but not responsible for undesirable ones. Anne-Laure Le Cunff
• Egocentric bias. We recall the past in a self-serving manner, such as remembering our exam grades as being better than they really were, or remembering a caught fish as bigger than it was. Anne-Laure Le Cunff
• We have a tendency to overestimate our positive qualities and underestimate negative traits — the ‘superiority illusion’. This means we’re more likely to remember the good things we do and quietly forget the times our significant other does the dishes. Dr. Julia Shaw
• Our egocentric biases are  aided  and  abetted  by  the  way    Though certain  painful  events  get  seared  into  our  memories—perhaps  so  we  can  avoid repeating the mistakes that led to them—we are on balance more likely to remember events  that  reflect  favorably  on  us  than  those  that  don’t.  And  we  remember  positive experiences  in  greater  detail  than  negative  experiences,  as  if  the  positive  events  are specially  primed  for  sharing  with  the  public  in  rich  detail.  No  such  asymmetry  of narrative detail is found in our memory of positive and negative things that happen to other people. Robert Wright
• When we look at how memories are constructed by the brain, the unreliability of memory makes perfect sense. In storyboarding an autobiographical memory, the brain combines fragments of sensory memory with a more abstract knowledge about events, and reassembles them according to the demands of the present. The memory researcher Martin Conway has described how two forces go head to head in remembering. The force of correspondence tries to keep memory true to what actually happened, while the force of coherence ensures that the emerging story fits in with the needs of the self, which often involves portraying the ego in the best possible light. Charles Fernyhough

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We distort memories in order to bring them in line with our motives

• Another important cause of distortion in memory involves our motives. We often distort our memories in order to bring them in line with whatever goals we are currently seeking. Anne-Laure Le Cunff
• Memory and motive are the two edges of the blade by which we slice experience out of events and carve out history – personal, political, civilizational – from the trunk of life. Both are highly selective – memory retrospectively so and motive prospectively.  Maria Popova
• Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart’s desire. John Dewey

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We distort memories to bring them in line with what we wish to be true

• Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be. David Halberstam
• Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart’s desire. John Dewey

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Our memories can also be distorted by negative feelings

• Negative feelings increase the chances of creating a false memory—or just an incorrect perception of an event. Ayesha Habib
• Fear warps perception and heightens risk and fear memories may be altered and embellished each time they are retrieved and applied to new circumstances. This is one of the reasons why a patient may suffer for years from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, anxiety and phobias. Dr Marc Siegel

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We weave our stories of self using only peak moments and end results

• The narrating self follows the peak-end rule. It forgets the vast majority of events, remembers only a few extreme incidents and gives a wholly disproportionate weight to recent happenings. Yuval Noah Harari
• Just as in Kahneman’s cold-water experiment, in politics too the narrating self follows the peak-end rule. It forgets the vast majority of events, remembers only a few extreme incidents and gives a wholly disproportionate weight to recent happenings. Yuval Noah Harari
• It is forever busy spinning yarns about the past and making plans for the future. Like every journalist, poet and politician, the narrating self takes many short cuts. It doesn’t narrate everything, and usually weaves the story using only peak moments and end results. Yuval Noah Harari  
• The narrating self is forever busy spinning yarns about the past… Like every journalist, poet and politician, the narrating self takes many short cuts. It doesn’t narrate everything, and usually weaves the story using only peak moments and end results. Every time the narrating self evaluates our experiences, it discounts their duration and adopts the ‘peak-end rule’ – it remembers only the peak moment and the end moment, and assesses the whole experience according to their average. The narrating self doesn’t aggregate experiences – it averages them. Yuval Noah Harari

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We tend to remember the past as being better than it really was

• A human being survives by his ability to forget. Memory is always ready to blot out the bad and retain only the good. Varlam Shalamov
• Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed. Brené Brown
• It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory. Vladimir Nabokov
• 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 Arthur Schopenhauer
• We tend to remember the past as having been better than it really was, which leads to judging the past disproportionately more positively than we judge the present. As the Romans said: memoria praeteritorum bonorum, or “the past is always well remembered.” Anne-Laure Le Cunff
• I often remember in this false, distorted way, and the memories are often cloaked in the colour of the sun. Sometimes I feel nostalgia for things I knew I hated when they were happening, for days spent at the beach or the swimming pool with my sisters. When I pick my memories apart, I realise my mind has merely played back the objective ingredients, the clichéd apparatus of happiness, the sun, the sound of splashing water, ice-cream on parched lips and cold fizzy drink on a hot tongue, and laugher too. My memory often peddles on the falsehood of past happiness. I should know this. J. Hyland

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We are more likely to remember what is novel

• The key to the reminiscence bump is novelty. The reason we remember our youth so well is that it is a period where we have more new experiences than in our thirties or forties. It’s a time for firsts — first sexual relationships, first jobs, first travel without parents, first experience of living away from home, the first time we get much real choice over the way we spend our days. Novelty has such a strong impact on memory that even within the bump we remember more from the start of each new experience.  Claudia Hammond

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We are more likely to remember things that create an emotion in us…

• We remember things that create an emotion. That is, we remember what we feel. Shawn Callahan
• Emotional memories that are stored in the process are much more difficult to extinguish than other memories, with central details of the experience remembered best. Dr Marc Siegel
• Strong emotions affect how we remember. Fear or traumatic memories are more ingrained in our brains. But they are not always completely accurate, even if we are positive that they are. Dr Marc Siegel
• Even highly emotional memories are susceptible to distortion. The term “flashbulb memory” describes those exceptionally vivid memories of momentous events that seem burned in by the fierce emotions they invoke. Charles Fernyhough
• The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. Tennessee Williams
• Research suggests that experiences with a high degree of emotional impact have a higher chance of being encoded in our long-term memories. Memories that drastically exceed the threshold of what our mainframe registers as a normal event often stay with us our entire lifetime. Curime Batliner
• Emotions play a role. Scenes, sounds and sensations leave a deeper neural trace if they stir a strong emotional response; this helps you avoid those same experiences in the future. Memory is protective, holding on to red flags so they can be waved at you later, to guide your future behavior. Benedict Carey
• For all of us, the stronger the emotion attached to a moment, the more likely those parts of our brains involved in memory will become activated. You wouldn’t remember every commute you took to work each day. But if along one you witnessed a deadly crash, you would likely remember that one. Memories that stick with us are tinged with emotion. James McGaugh

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…and especially things that are painful or traumatic

• The devil!… what beastly incidents our memories insist on cherishing! . . . the ugly and disgusting . . . the beautiful things we have to keep diaries to remember. Charles Marsden
• When something horrible happens, your brain doesn’t process the memories right. It stores everything– sounds, pain, smells, feelings– all mixed up. It doesn’t matter if you believed it or it made sense; it gets stored. Cherise Sinclair

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We are more likely to remember what is in line with our beliefs

• Confirmation bias: The tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with one’s existing beliefs. Bettina J. Casad
• Confirmation bias. Our tendency to seek and interpret memories in a way that confirms our prior hypotheses or personal beliefs. Anne-Laure Le Cunff
• Our malleable memories, combined with confirmation bias, are a key factor in the Dunning-Kruger effect, the inability to perceive one’s own incompetence in a given area. Craig Good

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We are more likely to remember what is in line with our level of self-esteem

• People with high self-esteem will remember more positive content and people with low self-esteem will remember more negative content to maintain their self-esteem. Saurabh Maheshwari

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We are more likely to recall memories in line with our emotional state

• People with depression also tend to structure their life story differently and report more negative life stories. Laura Jobson
• By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames. Emile M. Cioran
• People with depression tend to remember more negative personal memories and fewer positive personal memories than those without depression. Laura Jobson
• Mood-congruent memory bias. We better recall memories that are consistent with our current mood. For instance, feeling relaxed may bring back relaxing memories; feeling stressed may bring back stressful memories. Anne-Laure Le Cunff
• Mood congruence: Information that is consistent with the valence of one’s emotional state tends to be more readily remembered than information that is inconsistent or unrelated. So, for example, recalling the past week’s minor triumphs is easier when one is elated than depressed, independent of how one felt at the time of those events. Successes are inherently positive and therefore consistent with a happy state. Romin W. Tafarodi

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Due to these biases, our memories are highly selective…

• To begin with, our perception of the world is deformed, incomplete. Then our memory is selective. Claude Simon
• The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark. Jeanette Winterson
• Identity is often not a truthful representation of who we are anyway – even if we have an intact memory. Research shows that we don’t actually access and use all available memories when creating personal narratives. It is becoming increasingly clear that, at any given moment, we unawarely tend to choose and pick what to remember. Giuliana Mazzoni
• Beyond any human lifetime, and often within it, what is recorded is what is remembered, the records gradually displacing the actuality of lived events. And what is recorded is a fraction of what is thought, felt, acted out, lived – a fraction at best edited by the very act of its selection, at worst warped by rationalization or fictionalized by a deliberate retelling of reality.  Maria Popova
• We see then that the self too is an imaginary story… Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we’ve seen, novels we’ve read, speeches we’ve heard, and daydreams we’ve savoured, and out of all that jumble it weaves a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going. Yuval Noah Harari
• One benefit of the past is that it is a dramatically shortened, edited version of the present, even the best days of our lives contain a range of dull or uncomfortable moments but in memory, like skilled editors of hours of raw and often uninspired footage, we can look onto the most consequential moments and therefor construct sequence that feel a great deal more meaningful than the setting that generated them. Hours of mediocrity can be reduced to a final set of perffect images. Nostalgia is the past enhanced by the editing machine. Alain de Botton
• There is, perhaps, one universal truth about all forms of human cognition: the ability to deal with knowledge is hugely exceeded by the potential knowledge contained in man’s environment. To cope with this diversity, man’s perception, his memory, and his thought processes early become governed by strategies for protecting his limited capacities from the confusion of overloading. We tend to perceive things schematically, for example, rather than in detail, or we represent a class of diverse things by some sort of averaged “typical instance. Jerome Bruner
• We see then that the self too is an imaginary story… Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we’ve seen, novels we’ve read, speeches we’ve heard, and daydreams we’ve savoured, and out of all that jumble it weaves a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going. This story tells me what to love, whom to hate and what to do with myself. We all have our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories. Yuval Noah Harari

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…and highly edited

• Even if you were your memories, they are highly edited and transient and represent nothing even close to truth. Anthony Lambert
• The narrating self goes over our experiences with a sharp pair of scissors and a thick black marker. Yuval Noah Harari
• Evidence shows that our memory isn’t as consistent as we’d like to believe. What’s worse, we’re often guilty of changing the facts and adding false details to our memories without even realising. Robert Nash

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Combine this with the fact that our memories fade with time…

• Time’s the thief of memory. Stephen King
• Time is eating away my memory. Tan Twan Eng
• The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten. Cesare Pavese
• As time passes, the day will come when everything will fade to memories. Chica Umino
• Experience had taught me that even the most precious memories fade with the passage of time. Nicholas Sparks
• I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die. Ruth Ozeki
• In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember. Edgar Allan Poe
• Mostly what you lose with time, in memory, is the specificity of things, their exact sequence. It all runs together, becomes a watery soup. Portmanteau days, imploded years. Like a bad actor, memory always goes for effect, abjuring motivation, consistency, good sense. James Sallis

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…especially memories that tend towards being unpleasant

• Fading affect bias. Our emotions associated with unpleasant memories fades more quickly than our emotions associated with pleasant memories. Anne-Laure Le Cunff
• Because with time blocking out the bad, memory is always bound to be a bit naive and stupidly optimistic. Guy Delisle
• Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do. Stefan Zweig

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Many of our memories are forgotten altogether

• The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten. Cesare Pavese
• The years leech at a man’s memories, even those he has vowed never to forget. George R. R. Martin
• I’ve a grand memory for forgetting. Robert Louis Stevenson
• Memory shrinks until it fits in a fist. Fady Joudah

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Taking all this into account, our story of self, based on memory, can be compared to a documentary that is a highly edited and biased fraction of what is real

• Your opinion about yourself is like a documentary. All documentaries are hopelessly biased in that they only show you a tiny part of the big picture. Out of an entire lifetime of experience – literally hundreds of thousands of hours of archival ‘film footage’—our thinking self-selects a few dramatic memories, edits them together with some related judgements and opinions and turns it into a powerful documentary entitled This Is Who I Am! Russ Harris

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At best, our memories are highly subjective

• Memoir is the art of inventing the truth. William Zinsser
• Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt. Mary Karr
• Obviously memoir is subjective truth: It is my memory, my perspective, that’s the beauty. Cheryl Strayed
• There are always three sides to every memory…yours, theirs, and the truth, which lies somewhere in between the two. Sherrilyn Kenyon
• Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. Neil Gaiman

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In many ways, memory can be described as a fiction…

• All memory is fiction. Kwame Dawes
• The thing is, all memory is fiction. Robert Goolrick
• Anything processed by memory is fiction. David Shields
• Pretty much all memory is fiction and heavily edited. Iain Reid
• Memory is like fiction; or else it’s fiction that’s like memory. Haruki Murakami
• Memory is a selectively remembered and highly edited fiction of the mind. Anthony Lambert
• I sometimes feel fiction is the ideal preservation for real memories. Fiction is such a good place to keep things. Wim Wenders
• Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire. J. G. Ballard
• Our sense of self is a kind of construct. It is in some ways like a novel, and it’s like a fabric of fictions that we patch together from memory. Dan Chaon
• Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives. Isabel Allende
• Memory is like fiction… no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn’t even there anymore. Haruki Murakami
• The thing is, all memory is fiction. You have to remember that. Of course, there are things that actually, certifiably happened, things you can pinpoint the day, the hour, the minute. When you think about it, though, those things, mostly seem to happen to other people. Robert Goolrick
• As you may know, my motto is: “All memory is fiction.” It could just as easily be: “All fiction is memory.” Unpacked, these two statements defy the ease of logic, but offer some really important truths about narrative art, at the very least, and about memory. So I would say that all art is personal. Kwame Dawes
• To look back on one’s life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. … the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography. P. D. James
• I like the idea all memory is fiction, that we have queued a couple of things in the back of our minds and when we call forth those memories, we are essentially filling in the blanks. We’re basically telling ourselves a story, but that story changes based on how old we are, and what mood we’re in, and if we’ve seen photographs recently. We trust other people to tell us the story of our lives before we can remember it, and usually that’s our parents and usually it works, but obviously not always. And everybody’s interpretation is going to be different. Steven Tyler

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…and even a lie…

• Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies. Julio Cortazar
• The biggest lie of human memory is that it feels true. Jonah Lehrer
• The saddest thing that can happen to a person is to find out their memories are lies. Juan Gabriel
• How memories lie to us. How time coats the ordinary with gold. How it breaks the heart to go back and attempt to re-live them. How crushed we are when we discover that the gold was merely gold-plating thinly coated over lead, chalk and peeling paint. Henry Rollins

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…and increasingly so as we grow older

• But memory, after a time, dispenses its own emphasis, making a feuilleton of what we once thought most ponderable, laying its wreath on what we never thought to recall. Hortense Calisher
• Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird’s chirp. George Santayana
• When you are in your twenties, even if you’re confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later.. later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches. Julian Barnes
• Memories are shifting entities. They muddle into one another over time, getting tangled across years. The older I get, the less of my childhood I recall. My earliest memories are vague and distant, and often I am never quite sure if they are real or just a dream. As more time passes, each memory becomes a recollection of a recollection, distorting with every iteration like a game of telephone. Certain details stay afloat, while others sink to the murky bottom of my consciousness. Ayesha Habib

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Our memories are more invention and embellishment than truth

• Memories are truths we have chosen. C.E. O’Grady
• Memoir is the art of inventing the truth. William Zinsser
• The biggest lie of human memory is that it feels true.  Jonah Lehrer
• I’m always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact. Diane Sawyer
• Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be. David Halberstam
• Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin. Barbara Kingsolver
• Depiction can override truth the same way that memory can override experience. Cynthia Daignault
• I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth. Igor Stravinsky
• I sometimes wonder if our memories are a myth. We think we remember, but we are remembering the story and not the actual event? Peter Orner
• But the involuntary tricks of memory and the voluntary ones of imagination make always such terrible havoc of facts that truth, be it ever so much sought and cared for, appears in history and biography only in a more or less disfigured condition. Frederick Niecks
• Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own. Salman Rushdie
• I’m interested in the parallel narrative of our fantasy lives. How the moment of ‘now’ that is palpably real, is surrounded by our memories, our dreams and hopes, the stories and connections that our brains make as we navigate a universe of fantasy, or unreality, or surreality. I’m keen to explore this very human experience, how our minds create our own realities, a blend of fact and interpretation of fact. Dave McKean
• The truth is impossible to comprehend even when one is willing to tell it. For the truth resides in memory and memory is clouded with repression and a desire to embellish. The recollections of any individual are conditioned by the general truths to which he or she has tried to live. To recall an event is to interpret it, so the truth is altered by the very act of remembering. Therefore the truth, like God, does not exist – only the search for it. Frank Hardy
• There is, it seems, no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth, or at least the veridical character, of our recollections. We have no direct access to historical truth, and what we feel or assert to be true depends as much on our imagination as our senses. There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, which is different in every individual to begin with, and differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever they are recollected. . . . Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves—the stories we continually recategorize and refine. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory, and follows from its basis and mechanisms in the human brain. The wonder is that aberrations of a gross sort are relatively rare, and that, for the most part, our memories are relatively solid and reliable. Oliver Sacks

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In many ways, our memories are illusory and deceptive

• Memory is the great deceiver. Neil Gaiman
• Memory itself is an internal rumour. George Santayana
• Few things are more deceptive than memories. Carlos Ruiz Zafón
• I’m always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact. Diane Sawyer
• Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take. Burnt Norton
• We should never confuse our memories with facts, truth or reality. Anthony Lambert
• You don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened. John Green
• What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed. Julian Barnes
• Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending. Ray Bradbury
• There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers. Rebecca Wells
• Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were. Marcel Proust
• I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions… Bob Dylan
• I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is. Alan Watts
• We line our lives with beautiful things to create a cushion of stability: the illusion of a cohesive past, the promise of an unclouded future. Holland Cotter
• But opinions, judgments, memories, dreaming about the future—ninety percent of the thoughts spinning around in our heads have no essential reality. Charlotte J. Beck
• Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics. Steven Pinker
• Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They’re just an interpretation, they’re not a record, and they’re irrelevant if you have the facts. (Leonard Shelby, Memento) Christopher Nolan
• Every memory you have ever had is chock-full of errors. I would even go as far as saying that memory is largely an illusion. This is because our perception of the world is deeply imperfect, our brains only bother to remember a tiny piece of what we actually experience, and every time we remember something we have the potential to change the memory we are accessing.  Julia Shaw

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Our memories are nothing but a painted over version of the past; no longer a faithful record

• Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record. Andre Maurois
• Memory is the greatest of artists and effaces from your mind what is unnecessary. Maurice Baring
• Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day. Grandma Moses
• Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. Walter Benjamin
• Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture. Jodi Picoult

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Our memories are only phantoms of our original experiences…

• All our lives we are engaged in preserving our experiences and keeping them fresh by artificially sprinkling the water of memory over them. They have ceased to retain their original smell and fragrance. Do you call it life— this effort at the preservation of a phantom freshness in something that is withered and gone? Vimala Thakar

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…something written over something partially erased

• Memory is strange. Scientifically, it is not a mechanical means of repeating something. I can think a thousand times about when I broke my leg at the age of ten, but it is never the same thing which comes to mind when I think about it. My memory of this event has never been, in reality, anything except the memory of my last memory of that event. This is why I use the image of a palimpsest – something written over something partially erased – that is what memory is for me. It’s not a film you play back in exactly the same way. It’s like theater, with characters who appear from time to time. Gore Vidal

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Sometimes we create memories that are entirely false, even of things that never happened

• Every day we create false memories. Daniela Schiller
• Passing time adds false memories and modifies real ones. Stephen King
• False memories form more readily when enough time has passed that the original memory has faded. Kendra Cherry
• Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events. Adrienne Rich
• In real life, as well as in experiments, people can come to believe things that never really happened. Elizabeth Loftus
• There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened. Harold Pinter
• Even when we correctly rely on our memories, they can be highly inaccurate or outright false: we often make up memories of events that never happened. Giuliana Mazzoni
• False memories are everywhere. In everyday situations we don’t really notice or care that they’re happening. We call them mistakes, or say we misremember things. Julia Shaw
• The brain can update or ‘edit’ poorly-formed memories with the wrong information, potentially causing confusion, anxiety disorders like PTSD and, in extreme cases, false memories. Dr Raphael Zinn
• False memory is a psychological phenomenon whereby an individual recalls either an actual occurrence substantially differently from the way it transpired, or an event that never even happened. Ayesh Perera
• Less benignly, it is also possible to create—using suggestions and misleading information—memories for “events” that the individual believes very strongly happened in their past but which are, in fact, false. Jonathan K. Foster
• Memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus has demonstrated through her research that it is possible to induce false memories through suggestion. She has also shown that these memories can become stronger and more vivid as time goes on. Kendra Cherry
• A false memory is a fabricated or distorted recollection of an event. Such memories may be entirely false and imaginary. In other cases, they may contain elements of fact that have been distorted by interfering information or other memory distortions. Kendra Cherry
• The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories. Richard Dawkins
• Memories are very malleable, they can be distorted and changed easily, as many studies in our lab have shown. For example, we have found that suggestions and imagination can create memories that are very detailed and emotional while still completely false. Giuliana Mazzoni
• Some years ago, a psychologist at the University of California at Irvine, Elizabeth Loftus, discovered that it is possible through suggestion to implant entirely false memories in people’s heads. She could show many people pictures of themselves as a child in which the image had been manipulated to make them look as if they were in a hot-air balloon, and often the subjects would suddenly remember the experience and excitedly describe it, even though in each case it was known that it had never happened. Bill Bryson
• It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened — or may have happened to someone else. I suspect that many of my enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, have arisen from others’ suggestions, which have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten. Oliver Sacks
• False memories can be complete fabrications or they can be imagined details your mind makes up to fill the forgotten gaps in real memories. They are mostly a result of suggestion from an outside source, emotion—negative feelings increase the chances of creating a false memory—or just an incorrect perception of an event. Often, we get our memories mixed up and combine two or more separate events into one false recollection.  Ayesha Habib
• The most horrifying idea is that what we believe with all our hearts is not necessarily the truth.” We all know that we forget things but to discover that a recollection is completely fabricated is something else. It is shocking because it makes us question our own minds. If we all can vividly remember events that never happened, then this undermines the reliability of memory and ultimately the reality of our self. This is because part of the self illusion is that we know our own minds and recognize our own memories. But we are often mistaken. Bruce Hood

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Experiments have shown false memories can be intentionally planted

• Memories can be planted in someone’s mind if they are exposed to misinformation after an event, or if they are asked suggestive questions about the past. Erika Hayasaki
• Even for the healthy mind false memories are surprisingly easy to implant. In one experiment, psychologists in New Zealand and Canada secretly doctored subjects’ photos to suggest that they had been on a hot-air balloon ride. When interviewed about the photo, 50% of the participants concocted a story about the event, innocently believing that it had actually occurred. David Robson

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Research has also shown we cannot tell the difference between a true and false memory

• We can’t reliably distinguish true memories from false memories. Elizabeth Loftus
• Without independent corroboration, little can be done to tell a false memory from a true one. Elizabeth Loftus
• Some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them. And that happens to be the case even with memories that are not true. Daniel Kahneman
• Just because someone thinks they remember something in detail, with confidence and with emotion, does not mean that it actually happened… False memories have these characteristics too. Elizabeth Loftus
• False memory differs from simple memory errors. While we are all prone to memory fallibility false memory is more than a simple mistake; it involves a level of certitude in the validity of the memory. Kendra Cherry
• What is clear in all these cases — whether of imagined or real abuse in childhood, of genuine or experimentally implanted memories, of misled witnesses and brainwashed prisoners, of unconscious plagiarism, and of the false memories we probably all have based on misattribution or source confusion — is that, in the absence of outside confirmation, there is no easy way of distinguishing a genuine memory or inspiration, felt as such, from those that have been borrowed or suggested, between what the psychoanalyst Donald Spence calls ‘historical truth’ and ‘narrative truth.’ Oliver Sacks

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Even brain-scans cannot tell the difference

• I collaborated on a brain imaging study in 2010, and the overwhelming conclusion we reached is that the neural patterns were very similar for true and false memories. We are a long way away from being able to look at somebody’s brain activity and reliably classify an authentic memory versus one that arose through some other process. Elizabeth Loftus

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False memories can even feel more real that true memories

• The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant. Salvador Dali

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False memories have been responsible for false accusations and convictions

• Researchers have found that false memories are one of the leading causes of false convictions, usually through the false identification of a suspect or false recollections during police interrogations. Kendra Cherry
• Much of what you recall about your life never happened, or it happened in a very different way. Sometimes our false memories have done terrible things. They have sent innocent people to jail. They have ruined families with accusations of sexual abuse. William Saletan

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If our memories are largely a fiction, then it’s true to say our narrative of self is also a fiction

• STORY, n. A narrative, commonly untrue. Ambrose Bierce
• Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory. William Faulkner
• Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself. Simone de Beauvoir
• Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable. Ann-Marie MacDonald
• We are a story our brain tells itself, and our brains are motivated, skilled, pathological liars. Craig Good
• The false self lives mainly through memory and anticipation. Past and future are its main preoccupation. Eckhart Tolle
• I sometimes wonder if our memories are a myth. We think we remember, but we are remembering the story and not the actual event? Peter Orner
• What happens when we fabricate a significant memory? If we are the sum of our experiences, how do false memories affect our identities? Ayesha Habib
• Our sense of self is a kind of construct. It is in some ways like a novel, and it’s like a fabric of fictions that we patch together from memory. Dan Chaon
• So not only was it possible to implant false new memories in the brain, but people embraced and embellished them, unknowingly weaving fantasy into the fabric of their identity. David Eagleman
• If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive. Errol Morris
• I’m interested in memory because it’s a filter through which we see our lives, and because it’s foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.  Kazuo Ishiguro
• The left brain weaves its story in order to convince itself and you that it is in full control.… What is so adaptive about having what amounts to a spin doctor in the left brain? The interpreter is really trying to keep our personal story together. To do that, we have to learn to lie to ourselves. Michael Gazzaniga
• How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves. Julian Barnes
• Our identity is the sum of our memories, but it turns out that memories are fluid, modified by context and sometimes simply confabulated. This means we cannot trust them, and our sense of self is compromised. Note how this leaves us with a glaring paradox—without a sense of self, memories have no meaning, and yet the self is a product of our memories. Bruce Hood
• Our self illusion is so interwoven with personal memories that when we recall an event, we believe we are retrieving a reliable episode from our history like opening a photograph album and examining a snapshot in time. If we then discover the episode never really happened, then our whole self is called into question. But that’s only because we are so committed to the illusion that our self is a reliable story in the first place. Bruce Hood
• Every moment the biochemical mechanisms of the brain create a flash of experience, which immediately disappears. Then more flashes appear and fade, appear and fade, in quick succession. These momentary experiences do not add up to any enduring essence. The narrating self tries to impose order on this chaos by spinning a never-ending story, in which every such experience has its place, and hence every experience has some lasting meaning. But, as convincing and tempting as it may be, this story is a fiction. Yuval Noah Harari
• I like the idea all memory is fiction, that we have queued a couple of things in the back of our minds and when we call forth those memories, we are essentially filling in the blanks. We’re basically telling ourselves a story, but that story changes based on how old we are, and what mood we’re in, and if we’ve seen photographs recently. We trust other people to tell us the story of our lives before we can remember it, and usually that’s our parents and usually it works, but obviously not always. And everybody’s interpretation is going to be different. Steven Tyler
• We see then that the self too is an imaginary story… Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we’ve seen, novels we’ve read, speeches we’ve heard, and daydreams we’ve savoured, and out of all that jumble it weaves a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going. This story tells me what to love, whom to hate and what to do with myself. We all have our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories. Yuval Noah Harari
• Most of us identify with our narrating self. When we say ‘I’, we mean the story in our head, not the onrushing stream of experiences we undergo. We identify with the inner system that takes the crazy chaos of life and spins out of it seemingly logical and consistent yarns. It doesn’t matter that the plot is full of lies and lacunas, and is rewritten again and again, so that today’s story flatly contradicts yesterday’s. The important thing is that we always retain the feeling that we have a single unchanging identity from birth to death (and perhaps even beyond). This gives rise to the questionable liberal belief that I am an individual, and that I possess a clear and consistent inner voice that provides meaning to the entire universe. Yuval Noah Harari
• The life sciences, however, undermine liberalism, arguing that the free individual is just a fictional tale concocted by an assembly of biochemical algorithms. Every moment the biochemical mechanisms of the brain create a flash of experience, which immediately disappears. Then more flashes appear and fade, appear and fade, in quick succession. These momentary experiences do not add up to any enduring essence. The narrating self tries to impose order on this chaos by spinning a never-ending story, in which every such experience has its place, and hence every experience has some lasting meaning. But, as convincing and tempting as it may be, this story is a fiction. Medieval crusaders believed that God and heaven provided their lives with meaning; modern liberals believe that individual free choices provide life with meaning. They are all equally delusional. Yuval Noah Harari

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The real world is devoid of narratives

• The real world is devoid of narratives, after all. Narratives are just a thing that our brains do with facts in order to draw a line around the incomprehensible largeness of reality and wrestle it into something learnable and manipulable. Charles Stross

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Be tolerant of the memory mistakes of others

• This does not make the authors of those narratives liars; it makes them servants of fallible human memory and perception. Tom Bissell
• My work has made me tolerant of memory mistakes by family and friends. You don’t have to call them lies. I think we could be generous and say maybe this is a false memory. Elizabeth Loftus

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Be cautious of any memory, even if you feel certain it is true

• Even being absolutely certain that you know something does not mean it is, in fact, true. Peter Bloch
• To be cautious, one should not take high confidence as any absolute guarantee of anything. Elizabeth Loftus
• Just because you’re absolutely confident you remember something accurately doesn’t mean it’s true. Julia Shaw
• When someone looks at me and earnestly says, “I know what I saw,” I am fond of replying, “No you don’t.” You have a distorted and constructed memory of a distorted and constructed perception, both of which are subservient to whatever narrative your brain is operating under. Steven Novella

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Some memories may plague us and we may wish we could forget them

• Memories beautify life, but the capacity to forget makes it bearable. Honore de Balzac
• Slavery is a memory of something we cannot remember, and yet we cannot forget. Bill T. Jones
• Memory is ever active, ever true. Alas, if it were only as easy to forget! Ninon de L’Enclos
• Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it. Michel de Montaigne
• That was what she really wanted. To forget so thoroughly she’d never have another memory again, the bitter so bitter you gave up the sweet. Janet Fitch
• When you put so much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory. Then you have to forget the forgetting, and that too is memorable. Steve Toltz
• Your memory is a monster; you forget – it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you – and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you! John Irving
• Forgetting isn’t enough. You can paddle away from the memories and think they are gone. But they will keep floating back, again and again and agian. They circle you, like sharks. Until, unless, something, someone? Can do more than just cover the wound. Sara Zarr
• But nobody ever forgot anything, not really, though sometimes they pretended, when it suited them. Memories were permanent. Sorrowful ones remained sad even with the passing of time, yet happy ones could never be recreated – not with the same joy. Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain. Rohinton Mistry

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Some argue we can intentionally forget memories we wish to erase

• Live with your memories and keep them as memories and that’s great. Forget the bad times just remember the good ones and you know and hope tomorrow is a good day. Roger Meddows Taylor
• To intentionally forget is to remember differently, on purpose. Importantly, for scientists and therapists, intentional forgetting also may be an ability that can be practiced and deliberately strengthened. Benedict Carey
• I used to believe having a good memory meant being able to remember everything in perfect detail. Now I believe having a good memory means being able to selectively forget. It’s not what I’ll remember, it’s what I’ll forget that matters. Amber Dermont

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We can also intentionally change and update our memories if we wish to

• Your imagination is yours. You can remember the past you choose. Roger Delano Hinkins
• You are always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past. Richard Bach
• We aren’t a slave to our past. If you are stuck with a bad memory, it is just one version; it’s not exactly the truth and you can revise it. Daniela Schiller
• But there is a positive side to our moldable memories. The memory of traumatic events plague many lives and can even lead to psychiatric illness. The new understanding of memories means they can be “updated.” Susan Young Rojahn
• Memory is a form of time travel. That’s something we do during the course of the day, every single day. The idea of actually being able to physically adjust that and change it instead of being haunted by it is a really human thing. Rian Johnson
• The past doesn’t exist except as a memory, a mental story, and though past events aren’t changeable, your stories about them are. You can act now to transform the way you tell the story of your past, ultimately making it a stalwart protector of your future. Martha Beck
• How often do we stand convinced of the truth of our early memories, forgetting that they are assessments made by a child? We can replace the narratives that hold us back by inventing wiser stories, free from childish fears, and, in doing so, disperse long-held psychological stumbling blocks. Benjamin Zander
• Our capacity to move forward as developing beings rests on a healthy relationship with the past. Psychotherapy, that widespread method for promoting mental health, relies heavily on memory and on the ability to retrieve and organize images and events from the personal past. If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us—to write the first draft and then return for the second draft—we are doing the work of memory.  Patricia Hampl

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At the very least, we can release emotions around painful memories

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

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Our memories take our attention out of the present and focus it on the past

• Memory overshadows the present and dims the future. Vladimir Nabokov
• Because memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present. Garth Stein
• What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation. Alfred North Whitehead
• In reality there is nothing to fear in the present. Fear is projected onto the present by memory. Deepak Chopra
• Memory, the priestess, kills the present and offers its heart to the shrine of the dead past.  Rabindranath Tagore
• It often feels like I’m not so much living for the present as I am busy making memories for the future. Amy Krouse Rosenthal
• The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter. Charles de Lint
• It is children only who enjoy the present; their elders either live on the memory of the past or the hope of the future. Nicolas Chamfort
• When the mind is full of memories and preoccupied by the future, it misses the freshness of the present moment. In this way, we fail to recognize the luminous simplicity of mind that is always present behind the veils of thought. Matthieu Ricard
• Learn and practise mindfulness strategies. Instead of dwelling on painful memories, a focus on the present moment (such as attending to your breath, focusing on what you can currently see, smell or hear) can help break a negative cycle. Laura Jobson
• We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between a causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. Alan Watts

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The past is an illusion consisting of largely fictitious memories arising in the present moment

• The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one’s toes on the gravestones. Emile Zola
• The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Albert Einstein
• The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember. Harold Pinter
• Time is an illusion. Time only exists when we think about the past and the future. Time doesn’t exist in the present here and now. Marina Abramovic
• The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions. Eckhart Tolle
• The one wholly true thought one can hold about the past is that it is not here. To think about it at all is therefore to think about illusions. Esther Hicks
• I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking there’s some kind of change. Bob Dylan
• But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know? Alan Lightman
• The only goal worth attaining is complete freedom to be yourself, without illusions and false beliefs.The past and the future exist only in imagination. Everything you did before has no reality. Everything you will do afterward has no reality. Only the thing you are doing now is real. Deepak Chopra

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Given that the past exists only as illusory memories in our heads, we should learn to let them go

• You can only live in the past inside your mind. Augusten Burroughs
• Past and future only exist as thoughts in your head. Eckhart Tolle
• The past is never there when you try to go back. It exists, but only in memory. To pretend otherwise is to invite a mess. Chris Cobbs
• The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory. Jorge Luis Borges
• Past and future exist only in our memory. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it’s Eternity. Paulo Coelho
• People don’t realize that now is all there ever is; there is no past or future except as memory or anticipation in your mind. Eckhart Tolle
• Forget about your history. Forget about your future. Both are just the play of memory, and highly edited, inaccurate, and incomplete memory at that. Scott Morrison
• Forget about the past. It does not exist, except in your memory. Drop it. And stop worrying about how you’re going to get through tomorrow. Life is going on Right Here, Right Now — pay attention to that and all will be well. Neale Donald Walsch
• The past is only an unreliable memory held in the present. The future is only a projection of our present conceptions. The present itself vanishes as soon as we try to grasp it. So why bother with attempting to establish an illusion of solid ground? Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

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The timeless present is all that is indisputably true and real

• It’s being here now that’s important. There’s no past and there’s no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can’t relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don’t know if there is one. George Harrison
• I don’t believe there’s anything in life you can’t go back and fix. The ancient Vedas – the oldest Hindu philosophy – and modern science agree that time is an illusion. If that’s true, there’s no such thing as a past or a future – it’s all one huge now. So what you fix now affects the past and the future. Alan Arkin
• We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between a causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. Alan Watts

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Do not live in your memories for that creates an empty life

• I have memories – but only a fool stores his past in the future. David Gerrold
• Living in memories is an empty gesture. Rajneesh
• You can only live in the past inside your mind. Augusten Burroughs
• Anyone who limits her vision to memories of yesterday is already dead. Lilly Langtry

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Focus instead on the present, realising that life is always now

• When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable. Martin Amis
• Memory should be the starting point of the present. Dwight D. Eisenhower
• NOW is the only reality. All else is either memory or imagination. Rajneesh
• Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. Albert Camus
• The only moment ever available to you is the present moment. Everything else is memory or imagination. Leonard Jacobson
• Love in the past is only a memory. Love in the future is only a fantasy. True love lives in the here and now. Gautama Buddha
• Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going. Tennessee Williams
• The past is in memory, the future – in imagination. A thing focused in the now is with me, for I am ever present. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory. Haruki Murakami
• I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is. Alan Watts
• The Present only has a being in Nature; things Past have a being in the Memory only, but things to come have no being at all; the Future but a fiction of the mind. Thomas Hobbes
• Witness your thoughts, moods, and behaviors. They represent your memories of the past, and by witnessing them in the present, you liberate yourself from the past. Deepak Chopra
• The past is an illusion. You must learn to live in the present and accept yourself for what you are now. What you lack in flexibility and agility you must make up with knowledge and constant practice. Bruce Lee
• Each day is a new life. Each moment is really a new life. What we call memories are really present thoughts. What we call anticipations are really present thoughts. No one has ever lived in any moment except the present. Emmet Fox
• Forget about the past. It does not exist, except in your memory. Drop it. And stop worrying about how you’re going to get through tomorrow. Life is going on Right Here, Right Now — pay attention to that and all will be well. Neale Donald Walsch
• The present moment is really all that we have. The only place you can really love another person is in the present. Love in the past is a memory. Love in the future is a fantasy. To be really alive, love – or any other experience – must take place in the present. Jack Kornfield
• Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is. Eckhart Tolle
• There is no past. That’s another illusion. Everything that has ever happened to you, to me, to anyone in this world, happened in the present moment. That’s all there ever is. So your relationship to life isn’t your relationship to your past, it’s your relationship to the present moment. Wayne Dyer
• Our past is a fictional representation, and the only thing we can be even somewhat sure of is what is happening now. It encourages us to live in the moment and not to place too much importance on our past. It forces us to accept that the best time of our lives, and our memory, is right now. Julia Shaw
• The present moment is changing so fast that we often do not notice its existence at all. Every moment of mind is like a series of pictures passing through a projector. Some of the pictures come from sense impressions. Others come from memories of past experiences or from fantasies of the future. Henepola Gunaratana
• Living in the present moment requires discretion toward memory. Without memory we’d have amnesia. What good would there be in that? Offer discretion and discernment for our past with a broad spectrum of forgiveness. As for our present moment, delight. And dedication to remain fully present to all the possibility. Mary Anne Radmacher
• We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. Alan Watts
• The universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. There is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it. Terry Pratchett
• Without memories to cloud it, the mind perceives with absolute clarity. Each observation stands out in stark relief. In the beginning, when there’s not yet a smudge, the slate still blank, there is only the present moment: each vital detail, shocked color, the fall of light. Like film stills. The mind relentlessly open to the world, deeply impressed, even hurt by it: not yet gauzed by memory. Nicole Krauss
• Understanding all the shortcomings that our memory system presents allows us to adhere to a whole new ethos. Our past is a fictional representation, and the only thing we can be even somewhat sure of is what is happening now. It encourages us to live in the moment and not to place too much importance on our past. It forces us to accept that the best time of our lives, and our memory, is right now. Julia Shaw
• The past is an interpretation. The future is on illusion. The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead, time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness. If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment. Shams Tabrizi
• The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. Robert M. Pirsig
• Most of our difficulties, our hopes, and our worries are empty fantasies. Nothing has ever existed except this moment. That’s all there is. That’s all we are. Yet most human beings spend 50 to 90 percent or more of their time in their imagination, living in fantasy. We think about what has happened to us, what might have happened, how we feel about it, how we should be different, how others should be different, how it’s all a shame, and on and on; it’s all fantasy, all imagination. Memory is imagination. Every memory that we stick to devastates our life. Joko Beck
• What you think of as they past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. When you remember the past, you reactivate a memory trace — and you do so now. The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind. When the future comes, it comes as the Now. When you think about the future, you do it now. Past and future obviously have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power, and reality of the eternal present. Their reality is “borrowed” from the Now. Eckhart Tolle

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By focusing on being happy now, we create happy memories for the future

• Mankind are always happier for having been happy; so that if you make them happy now, you make them happy twenty years hence by the memory of it. Sydney Smith
• Happiness
• I believe the true function of age is memory. I’m recording as fast as I can. Rita Mae Brown

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Our memories, and the sense of self we create with them, keeps us trapped in the egoic belief we are a separate self…

• The idea of being a person, an ego, is nothing other than an image held together by memory. Jean Klein
• Your sense of identity, of self, is reduced to a story you keep telling yourself in your head. “Me and my story.” Eckhart Tolle
• A self is, by its very essence, a being with a past. One must look lengthwise backwards in the stream of time in order to see the self, or its shadow, now moving with the stream… Josiah Royce
• Memory is a dead thing. Memory is not truth and cannot ever be, because truth is always alive, truth is life; memory is persistence of that which is no more. It is living in ghost world, but it contains us, it is our prison. In fact it is us. Memory creates the knot, the complex called the I and the ego. Rajneesh
• To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions. Eckhart Tolle
• The past lives in you as memories, but memories in themselves are not a problem. in fact, it is through memory that we learn from the past and from past mistakes. It is only when memories, that is to say, thoughts about the past, take you over completely that they turn into a burden, turn problematic, and become part of your sense of self. Your personality, which is conditioned by the past, then becomes your prison. Your memories are invested with a sense of self, and your story becomes who you perceive yourself to be. This “little me” is an illusion that obscures your true identity as timeless and formless Presence. Eckhart Tolle

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… a sense of self that spiritual finders and philosophers have been saying for millennia is an illusion

• What you assume yourself to be doesn’t exist. Charlie Hayes
• The story of “you” is a time-bound, thought-based illusion. Scott Kiloby
• The separate self is an optical delusion in Consciousness. Albert Einstein
• Everything generated by the mind including our thoughts and emotions is an illusion. It’s fabricated reality. Adyashanti
• When you awaken, you realize that the separate person you took yourself to be is just a construct, a mental fabrication. Stephan Bodian
• This bundle of ideas that we have held as being who we are is not actually the one who can make progress in the spiritual realm. Alice Gardner
• The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark. Jeanette Winterson
• The ego is an illusion. In fact, no one has ever seen or been able to produce a shred of solid evidence supporting the existence such an entity. Leo Hartong
• The separate self is not an entity; it is an activity: the activity of thinking and feeling that our essential nature of pure Awareness shares the limits and the destiny of the body and mind. Rupert Spira
• The sense of self that is derived from our thinking—which includes all one’s memories, one’s conditioning, and one’s sense of self—is a conceptual one that is derived from the past. Eckhart Tolle
• If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive. Errol Morris
• When we really start to take a look at who we think we are… we start to see that while we may have various thoughts, beliefs, and identities, they do not individually or collectively tell us who we are. And yet it is astounding how completely we humans define ourselves by the content of our minds, feelings, and history. Adyashanti
• When you think or speak about yourself, when you say, “I,” what you usually refer to is “me and my story.” This is the “I” of your likes and dislikes, fears and desires, the “I” that is never satisfied for long. It is a mind-made sense of who you are, conditioned by the past and seeking to find its fulfillment in the future. Can you see that this “I” is fleeting, a temporary formation, like a wave pattern on the surface of the water? Who is it that sees this? Who is it that is aware of the fleetingness of your physical and psychological form? I am. This is the deeper “I” that has nothing to do with past and future. Eckhart Tolle

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Given that our memories are simply illusory thoughts in the head, we should stop defining ourselves in this way

• The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions. Eckhart Tolle

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What we are goes far deeper than our narrative self

• What is this I? If you analyze it closely you will, I think, find it is just a little more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected . . . Yet if a skilled hypnotist succeeded in blotting out entirely your earlier reminiscences, you would not find that he killed you. In no case is there a loss of personal experience to deplore. Nor will there ever be. Robert Lanza
• We first encounter the ordinary self, which conceives of itself as an entity in time and space, bounded by the body, possessing a sense of agency, and functioning as the subject of all experiences. We can first recognize it as a narrative self, for it is a way we know ourselves, including the story of our personal history and the stories from others. Upon further inquiry, we recognize that the narrative self is a later development and that the sense of self has deeper roots. A. H. Almaas

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Even if we lose some or all of our memories, we still retain our sense of I.

• According to Helm, it would be possible for memory swaps to occur, but that the identity of the original owners of each memory would not swap with the memories. Jamie Slagel
• It becomes clear that identity exists beyond merely memory—if some divine being suddenly erased one single memory from my mind, it seems intuitive that I would not be a different person. Jamie Slagel

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Break free from the story of self

• This is true freedom: Stepping out of your story. Eckhart Tolle
• Love is who we are without our stories. Byron Katie
• When you are present in this moment, you break the continuity of your story, of past & future. Then true intelligence arises, and also love. Eckhart Tolle
• Our past is a story existing only in our minds. Look, analyze, understand, and forgive. Then, as quickly as possible, chuck it. Marianne Williamson
• In the moment, life is fresh and alive. The past and future lose their heaviness. I no longer identify with my story. I let go of my story. It’s secondary. Now is primary. Eckhart Tolle
• “When you understand,” Brandy says, “that what you’re telling is just a story. It isn’t happening anymore. When you realize the story you’re telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan,” Brandy says, “then we’ll figure out who you’re going to be.” Chuck Palahniuk
• It seems to me, that this, too, is how memory works. What we remember of what was done to us shapes our view, molds us, sets our stance. But what we remember is past, it no longer exists, and yet we hold on to it, live by it, surrender so much control to it. What do we become when we put down the scripts written by history and memory, when each person before us can be seen free of the cultural or personal narrative we’ve inherited or devised? When we, ourselves, can taste that freedom. Rebecca Walker

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Through meditation, go beyond memory and investigate what lies beneath

• When we meditate, we go beyond the swirl of thoughts, memories and emotions that tend to keep us stuck in our ego’s story of who we are. We enter an expanded state of awareness and discover our own inner fountain of joy, a source of happiness that isn’t dependent on anyone or anything. Deepak Chopra

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Ask “Who am I right now, without my memories?”

• So, who am I? If you ask most people that question, they’d probably reply with a story about who they think they are. They’d give you a description about what they’ve done in the past and maybe what they dream of doing in the future. They might tell you a story about their role in life – that they are a father or mother, or a business person or baker -where they work and live, and how many children they have. They’ll quite literally tell you a story about the past and future. They’ll basically tell you a story about who they were in the past and who they think they will be in the future – not who theyare in this moment. But the question is, ‘Who are you now?’ Jeff Foster

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In this way, transcend the narrative self and come to know the experiencing self

• Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me. Daniel Kahneman

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Far from being the story of our past experiences, we are actually that which is aware of memories coming and going

• Our memories are limited and selective, but consciousness has always been our deepest companion. Robert Lanza
• I am not my experiences, but that which experiences them; that which makes experience possible. Anthony Lambert
• Who are you? You are not the sum of your experiences. Wouldn’t you be you even if your experiences had been different?  Anthony Lambert
• Memories can arise in my awareness but no memory can be aware. No memory can be aware of being aware.  Therefore, memories are not essential what I am.  Anthony Lambert
• It is your memory that makes you think the world continues. Myself, I don’t live by memory. I see the world as it is, a momentary appearance in consciousness. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• You are more than the sum of your experiences. You are more than the sum of all you have ever experienced. You are the awareness of all you experience within and around you. Peter Wilberg
• You will see that you’re literally taking all your memories, pulling them together in an orderly fashion, and saying that’s who you are. But you are not the events; you’re the one who experienced the events. Michael Singer
• When we really start to take a look at who we think we are… we start to see that while we may have various thoughts, beliefs, and identities, they do not individually or collectively tell us who we are. [And yet] it is astounding how completely we humans define ourselves by the content of our minds, feelings, and history. Adyashanti
• What is this ‘I’? If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by ‘I’ is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected. Erwin Schrodinger

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In other words, we are consciousness, not our memories

• Our memories are limited and selective, but consciousness has always been our deepest companion. Robert Lanza
• In the great mirror of consciousness, images arise and disappear and only memory gives them continuity. And memory is material – destructible, perishable and transient; on such a flimsy foundation we built a sense of personal existence – vague, intermittent, dreamlike. This vague persuasion: “I-am-so-and-so” obscures the changeless state of pure awareness and makes us believe that we are born to suffer and to die. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• The second, very different, line of research involves the exploration of subjective experience. People who have delved into the nature of the actual experience of self have discovered that the closer they examine this sense of “I” , the more it seems to dissolve. Time and again they find there is no independent self. There are thoughts of “I”, but no “I” that is thinking them. They find that what we take to be a sense of an omnipresent “I” is simply consciousness itself. There is no separate experiencer; there is simply a quality of being, a sense of presence, an awareness that is always there whatever our experience. They conclude that what we experience to be an independent self is a construct in the mind—very real in its appearance but of no intrinsic substance. It, like the choices it appears to make, is a consequence of processes in the brain. It has no free will of its own. Peter Russell

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Everything you think you know about another person is also just memories, mostly illusions

• Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories. Haruki Murakami

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Let go of your memories of another and meet them as if for the first time

• We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger. S. Eliot
• Genuine listening means suspending memory, desire, and judgment—and for a few moments, at least, existing for the other person. Michael P. Nichols

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Know yourself more by your dreams for the future than your memories of the past

• Never let your memories be greater than your dreams. Doug Ivester
• I am not my memories. I am my dreams. Terry Hostetler
• Our dreams must be stronger than our memories. We must be pulled by our dreams, rater than pushed by our memories. Jesse Jackson

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Live out of your imagination more than your memory

• We should use our imagination more than our memory. Shimon Peres
• It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards. Lewis Carroll
• Education: The development of the memory at the expense of the imagination. Owen Johnson
• To be successful we must live from our imaginations, not from our memories. Stephen Covey
• Memory marks the horizon of our consciousness, imagination its zenith. Amos Bronson Alcott
• It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’ says the White Queen to Alice. Lewis Carroll
• I can change. I can live out of my imagination instead of my memory. I can tie myself to my limitless potential instead of my limiting past. I can become my own creator. Stephen Covey
• The secret is to consciously respond based on inspiration, imagination, intuition and divine intelligence, not to simply react based on memory, conditioning, and impulse. Geraldine Evans
• Imagine for a moment your own version of a perfect future. See yourself in that future with everything you could wish for at this very moment fulfilled. Now take the memory of that future and bring it here into the present. Let it influence how you will behave from this moment on. Deepak Chopra

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• If you could erase some of your memories, would you?  Which ones?
• Which is more important – experience or memory of experience? If you could have an hour of ecstasy that you’d forever remember as torture, or an hour of torture that you’d forever remember as ecstasy, which would you prefer? Daniel Gilbert

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• Neural scientists at M.I.T. say they can plant false memories in your brain. No, that is not new. Politicians have been doing that for years. They’re called campaign promises. Jay Leno

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