## Metadata - Author: [[Douwe Draaisma]] - Full Title: Forgetting - Category: #books ## Highlights - However we may explain forgetting, its consequences can fill us with a deep melancholy. The beginning comes too late. You see your son, just turned two, playing with his grandpa and know that his first memory will not be laid down for at least another year and a half. What young children lack is a record button, with a red light to assure you that the child’s memory is registering its experiences. Evolution had other plans for memory. It is intended to keep us out of trouble and therefore has priorities of its own. It immortalises as our first memories not a playful grandpa but an insulted grandpa giving us a slap; not a walk among the poppies but instead a hot iron, shards of glass, angry dogs; not mothers reading bedtime stories but dark cupboards that have fallen shut; not safe and happy cycle rides but instead that one time when your foot got caught in the spokes – and all for your own good. Memory obeys not its owner but its designer. We cannot command our own memory, let alone anyone else’s, and this is especially true when it has only just started to work. Our impotence in the face of the very young memory, our own or that of our children, is perhaps expressed most poignantly of all in the first memory of painter Arja van den Berg. When she was about three her mother gave her a penetrating look and said: ‘You must always remember this!’30 And that is all she remembers. ([Location 571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=571)) - ‘Anterograde amnesia’ means that the patient is unable to imprint new information. This is memory loss in a forward direction: whatever the patient may experience in the future, it will not enter the memory. ‘Retrograde amnesia’, by contrast, affects the patient’s past: memories of things he or she has experienced disappear. ([Location 1600](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=1600)) - The first law of psychology applies here: the quantity of research is directly proportional to the degree of experimental accessibility. There has been very little research into retrograde amnesia compared to the wealth of experiments concerning anterograde amnesia. ([Location 1635](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=1635)) - Enzymes that are vital for the glucose metabolism of brain cells and for keeping intact the cell membranes and the myelin sheaths around a cell’s axons are reliant on thiamine. The brain takes up almost all the available thiamine, which means that if the supply is interrupted, problems quickly arise; stimuli are conveyed less effectively, cell tissues begin to atrophy and some brain structures visibly shrink. ([Location 1648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=1648)) - having an experience that is stored away but not accessible to the conscious mind despite the fact that it sometimes continues to influence thought and experience – later became known as the Claparède effect. It is part of the theory that in 1985 was termed ‘implicit memory’. ([Location 1721](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=1721)) - There is a ‘next-in-line’ effect: those who came immediately before you in the brainstorming session run a slightly higher risk of having their ideas stolen by you, probably because you were already thinking about your own contribution as you listened. ([Location 1839](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=1839)) - Most likely of all to increase the occurrence of cryptomnesia is an invitation to participants to improve on ideas already proposed.16 Nothing separates the true owner so rapidly and efficiently from his or her ideas as a minimal addition or insignificant variation. ([Location 1842](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=1842)) - Confronted with a problem, it is not particularly helpful for the survival of the individual or group to remember just who came up with the brilliant idea, but it may prove invaluable to be able to recall what it was. ([Location 1886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=1886)) - The language in which Wigan describes the relationship between the two brains is that of hierarchy and discipline. The leading brain gives the orders. It controls and keeps vigil, while the other brain is required to be subordinate. Throughout the book, reins are continually being laid down or taken up again, slackened or tightened. But the leading brain cannot do this by itself. It needs to be nurtured. The aim of education and training is to teach the leader to lead. In this sense, the interaction between the two brains reproduces something of the Victorian fascination with authority, control and willpower. ([Location 2157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=2157)) - Definitions are partisan, coloured by the theory that gave rise to them and the era in which they were formulated. ([Location 2269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=2269)) - The irony is that help for abused women first took off within the feminist movement, but therapeutic insights about recovered memories resemble psychoanalysis more than anything else. ([Location 2774](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=2774)) - In dreams, day residues sometimes emerge, memories of trivial events of waking life that seem to have been recorded even if we paid no attention to them at the time. This surely proves that none of the things we have done or experienced are ever completely forgotten, that our memories are absolute. He expressed agreement with the German psychiatrist Friedrich Scholz, who wrote that the dream memory teaches us that ‘nothing which we have once mentally possessed can be entirely lost’. ([Location 2862](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=2862)) - American physiologist and photography pioneer John William Draper wrote in 1856 that the ganglion cells, which bundle together stimuli from other cells, store away a permanent record of our experiences.3 Those traces remained present in a latent form, resembling a photographic plate that had been exposed but not yet developed. He saw the memory as a ‘silent gallery’ with, on the walls, ‘silhouettes of whatever we have done’. ([Location 2868](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=2868)) - Although he used a different metaphor, Sergei Korsakoff said exactly the same; not even the serious memory disorder to which his name is attached could wipe out the original traces. Within the patient’s memory ‘the vibration of all the strings that have ever reverberated continues, a soft echo of everything he has ever thought’. ([Location 2874](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=2874)) - A brain is not a machine but an organ. It consists of continually changing networks and circuits, modulated by chemical processes. It has rhythms of day and night, states of wakefulness and rest, changes in levels of hormones, cycles of growth and death. The brain, in short, is more like a steaming and dripping stretch of rainforest than a computer’s hard disc. Memory traces are not conserved permanently in a sterile environment like information in the artificial memories we have invented. Instead they are subject to the neuronal equivalents of rot and untamed growth. ([Location 3157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=3157)) - The Esterházys were major landowners, with property on an almost inconceivable scale, sometimes described by Péter with a wave of the hand as ‘a quarter of Hungary’.3 Any ‘father’ taken at random owned ‘fields so vast, the wild geese could not traverse them in one night’s flight’. ([Location 3228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=3228)) - It did not take the invention of photography to make people aware that portraits deployed to combat forgetting can themselves pose a threat to our memories. ([Location 3504](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=3504)) - In 1859, doctor and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes warned his readers that photography had become so commonplace that there was a danger of forgetting what a miraculous invention it was. Previously the situation had been: ‘The man beholdeth himself in the glass and goeth his way, and straightway both the mirror and the mirrored forget what manner of man he was.’12 Photography, he wrote, is the ‘invention of the mirror with a memory’. ([Location 3550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=3550)) - ‘They say that he paints not merely a man’s features, but his mind and heart. He catches the secret sentiments and passions, and throws them upon the canvas, like sunshine – or perhaps, in the portraits of dark-souled men, like a gleam of infernal fire.’ ([Location 3594](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=3594)) - Lady Elizabeth Eastlake believed it was precisely in that accurate resemblance that a lack of selectivity lay. In an 1857 essay she wrote that photography ultimately betrayed its mechanistic nature by portraying the buttons of a coat with the same clarity as the features of a face. ([Location 3656](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=3656)) - Both Claudet and Lady Eastlake point to memory, but the contrast between them is telling. To Claudet the photograph seems to satisfy the memory because it records what someone really looked like, the face we would see if we stood next to the subject and looked in the mirror. Lady Eastlake believes the photograph does not perform a service for the memory, rather it is the memory that must serve the photograph. Without ‘loving eyes and memories’ there would be only the accurate but lifeless mirror image. The viewer turns it into the face of a loved one. ([Location 3660](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=3660)) - The portrait that made time stand still required the avoidance of any movement, first by means of invisible supports to steady the head, later by the adoption of a practical pose with a hand under the chin, or with a couple of fingers held against the temple. The seriousness of all those early portraits was not merely the result of knowing that the daguerreotypist was on the point of taking a picture that would immortalise you forever; it also flowed from the requirement to adopt an expression you could sustain. A smile was not an option. ([Location 3701](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=3701)) - Like the eyepieces of a stereoscope, memories give depth to the photos you insert, creating a third dimension, drawing you in as if you are right inside the picture for a moment and involved with what you can see there. Without memories we lose any hint of perspective. ([Location 3856](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=3856)) - People who have survived suicide attempts tell of the narrowing down of thought and action, the haste, the desire to get it over with and to avoid being stopped at the last moment by any further act or reflection. It is a narrowing that is perhaps necessary at that moment and deliberately preserved; it does not allow for the distraction of writing a note. ([Location 4205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=4205)) - ‘Rarely do memories bring any comfort, because they remind us of what will never again be the way it was.’ ([Location 4361](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U3URKUK&location=4361))