#daniel schacter

7 Sins of Memory, According to Daniel Schacter

The research of Daniel Schacter, memory researcher, cognitive psychologist and professor of psychology at Harvard University, defends that our memory is prone to fall into seven faults that by their way of functioning are common to all of us. He calls these seven errors the seven sins of memory.

Schacter explains that the research shows that the process of remembering and recovering memories is a…

John Berger, <<and our faces, my heart, brief as photos>>

"We are both storytellers. Lying on our backs, we look up at the night sky. This is where stories began, under the aegis of that multitude of stars which at night filch certitudes and sometimes return them as faith. Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky. The problem of time is like the darkness of the sky. Every event is inscribed in its own time. Events may cluster and theirtimes overlap, but the time in common between events does not extend as law beyond the clustering."

Daniel Schacter, on memories wrote:

"Memory is a temporary constellation of activity - a necessary approximate excitation of neural circuits that bind a set of sensory images and semantic data into the momentary sensation of a remembered whole. These images and data are seldom the exclusive property of one particular memory. Each succeeding recollection reinforces the constellation of images and knowledge that constitute a memory."

I think they fit remarkably well together, this synchronicity of metaphors. It pieces together Berger's idea of body time and the more abstract idea of conscious time, with the creation of memories. The focal points through which conscious time is to be measured must have something to do with memory building, it is in this way photographs are created.