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.
Memories are often our own creations. If our memories are fallible, then our beliefs are shaped by them as well. My tendency is to value rationality and believe that there is one true version of events, or one realized history, but it is often difficult, if not impossible, to arrive at that truth.
If there is no easy way to separate memory from truth, and if our beliefs are often wrong or shaped by our external environment, then the truth may sometimes be impossible to determine. In those cases, we might as well adopt interpretations that improve our lives and make the world a better place.
Here’s Maria Popova summarizing Oliver Sacks’s view and pondering whether the fallibility of memory may be essential to creativity.
Excerpts:
We, as human beings, are landed with memory systems that have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections — but also great flexibility and creativity. Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength: if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information.
Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.
Ryu's Blog 