You Are Not What You Think You Are

"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...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."

"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."


Just another thing to remind us that the world and ourselves are not what we think."Reality" is not what we remember. Or maybe it is only what we remember (perhaps erroneously) that becomes what is real.

Thank you Oliver Sachs, for breaking another bubble

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/02/04/oliver-sacks-on-memory-and-plagiarism/