Saturday, March 17, 2007

The Impersistence of Memory


In the column above mine in The Daily News this morning Scot DeSmit wrote about his faulty recollection of characters from a book he read to his children. He remembered a rabbit and a gopher rather than a squirrel and a mole. His column reminded me of the many times I have misrecollected things and events from my past. I have remembered houses being somewhere else, people looking and acting different and events not being quite the same as others recollect them. In studying memory, I learned that there are biological traces of every memory we have. Our minds also seem to have a pastime of creating scenarios different from the ones which actually happened. Maybe there is a novelist inside each of us happily going about creating new events from the material provided by reality. It certainly makes for an interesting world.

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