Memory, p.50
Memory, page 50
fn2 D. A. Spalding, ‘Instinct with Original Observations on Young Animals’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 27 (1873).
fn3 J. M. Baldwin, ‘A New Factor in Evolution’, American Naturalist, 30 (1896). C. Lloyd Morgan, ‘On Modification and Variation’, Science, 4 (1896). H. F. Osborn, ‘Ontogenic and Phylogenic Variation’, Science, 4 (1896).
fn4 A. Hardy, The Living Stream (1965), p. 170.
fn5 Piaget’s work did not come out in book form until 1979, near the end of his life, in Behaviour and Evolution.
fn6 G. G. Simpson, ‘The Baldwin Effect’, Evolution, 7 (1953).
fn7 Bruce H. Weber and David J. Depew, Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered (2003).
fn8 P. Bateson and G. Horn, ‘Imprinting and Recognition Memory: a Neural Net Model’, Animal Behaviour, 48 (1994).
fn9 Dennett in Weber and Depew, Evolution and Learning.
fn10 P. Bateson, ‘The Active Role of Behaviour in Evolution’, Biology and Philosophy, 19 (2004).
fn11 The term was first used by Conrad Waddington and he provided the first empirical evidence for what he had in mind in 1953 in Evolution, 7.
fn12 See Deacon in Weber and Depew, Evolution and Learning.
Ulric Neisser, ‘Memory with a Grain of Salt’
fn1 W. Penfield, ‘The Permanent Record of the Stream of Consciousness’, Proceedings of the 14th International Congress of Psychology (1954).
fn2 R. Brown and J. Kulik, ‘Flashbulb Memories’, Cognition, 5 (1977).
fn3 U. Neisser, ‘Snapshots or Benchmarks?’ in U. Neisser (ed.), Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts (1982).
fn4 See C.P. Thompson and T. Cowan, ‘A Nicer Interpretation of a Neisser Recollection’, Cognition, 22 (1985) and also U. Neisser, ‘Remembering Pearl Harbor, Cognition, 23 (1986).
fn5 U. Neisser and N. Harsch, ‘Phantom Flashbulbs: False Recollections of Hearing the News about Challenger’, in E. Winograd and U. Neisser (eds), Affect and Accuracy in Recall (1992).
fn6 Brown and Kulik, ‘Flashbulb Memories’, p. 86.
fn7 H. Schmolck, E. A. Buffalo and L.R. Squire, ‘Memory Distortions Develop Over Time: Recollections of the O.J. Simpson Verdict after 15 and 32 Months’, Psychological Science 11 (2000).
fn8 D.L. Greenberg, ‘President Bush’s False “Flashbulb Memory” of 9/11/01’, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 18 (2004).
fn9 U. Neisser, E. Winograd, E.T. Bergman, C.A. Schreiber, S.E. Palmer, and M.S. Weldon, ‘Remembering the Earthquake: Direct Experience vs. Hearing the News’, Memory, 4 (1996).
Richard Holmes, ‘A Meander through Memory and Forgetting’
fn1 Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (1991), p. 250.
fn2 Napoléon Peyrat, Les pasteurs du désert (1842), 2 vols, II, p. 50. Translation R.H.
fn3 Marisse Clarke, ‘Wash Day and Bath Night: Uncovering Women’s Reminiscences of Domestic Life in Norwich and its Surrounds, 1930s to 1940s.’ Unpublished MA dissertation, September 2003, School of Literature and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia. By kind permission of the author.
fn4 David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature (1738), I, iv, 19.
fn5 Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994), pp. 246, 252.
fn6 David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty and His Expectations (1749), I, 90.
fn7 Ibid., I, 3; Richard C. Allen, David Hartley on Human Nature (1999), p. 24.
fn8 Quoted ibid., p. vii.
fn9 Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), p. 95.
fn10 S. T. Coleridge, Notebooks, ed. Kathleen Coburn (1957—), III, 3708 (1803).
fn11 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. Engell and Bate (1983), I ch. 6, p. 110.
fn12 Humphry Davy, Salmonia, or Days of Fly-Fishing (1828), in Collected Works (1840), IX, pp. 13–14.
fn13 Humphry Davy, Fragmentary Remains, Literary and Scientific (1847), p. 287.
fn14 Salmonia, p. 27.
fn15 Biographia Literaria, Ch. 6, p. 125.
fn16 Nobel Prize press release, 4 October 2004.
fn17 Susan Greenfield, The Human Brain: A Guided Tour (1997), p. 170.
fn18 Ibid., p. 186.
fn19 Ibid. p. 181.
fn20 David Samuel, Memory: How We Use It, Lose It, and Can Improve It (1997), pp. 75–7.
fn21 Greenfield, Human Brain, p. 176.
fn22 Charles Nicholl, Leonardo da Vinci: the Flights of the Mind (2004), p. 16.
fn23 Coleridge, Letters, ed. E.L. Griggs (1956) I, pp. 427–8.
fn24 Coleridge, Notebooks, I, 1575 (1803).
Childhood Memories
fn1 Anyone with an interest in the mental processes of childhood will easily understand the deeper conditioning of my demand to my big brother. At the age of not quite three, I realised that my recently born sister had grown in my mother’s uterus. I was not at all pleased about the new baby and suspected, gloomily, that my mother’s body might be harbouring yet more children. The wardrobe symbolised the maternal womb to me; I therefore demanded to see inside the cupboard, and to that end I applied to my big brother. As other material shows, an older brother can replace a father as a little boy’s rival. Apart from my well-founded suspicion that this brother was responsible for putting the absent nursemaid in prison, I also feared that he had somehow implanted the new-born child in my mother’s body. My sense of disappointment when the wardrobe proved empty arose from the superficial motivation of my childish demand, and was misplaced in relation to my deeper level of feeling. On the other hand, my great satisfaction at noting my mother’s slender figure on her return is fully comprehensible only on that deeper level.
The Idea of Memory
fn1 Mill is arguing against distinctions made in W.G. Ward’s chapter on ‘Certitude’ in On Nature and Grace (1860).
fn2 Probably the famous passage beginning ‘Quid est ergo tempus’ from St. Augustine’s Confessions, Book XI. As translated by William Watts (1912) this passage runs, in part, ‘What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know, but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I know not … If nothing were passing, there would be no past time; and if nothing were coming, there should be no time to come; and if nothing were, there should now be no present time …’.
fn3 Power within the people, authority in the Senate.
fn4 Maurice Halbwachs (1887–1945). He wrote extensively on public and collective memory.
The Art of Memory
fn1 According to Macrobius, Sat. 7.13.7–8, the anatomists spoke of a nerve which extends from the heart to the fourth finger of the left hand (the digitus medicinalis) where it interlaces into the other nerves of that finger; the finger was therefore ringed, as with a crown. Testiculi suggests testes (witnesses). Of the scrotum of the ram purses were made; thus the money used for bribing the witnesses may perhaps also be suggested. (Translator.)
fn2 Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1617–21), II, section 2, pp. 48ff.
fn3 The extremely magical art of memory of which Fludd has heard at Toulouse sounds like the ars notoria. Fludd might possibly be referring to Jean Belot who had been publishing in France earlier in the century works on chiromancy, physiognomy, and the art of memory. Belot’s highly magical artificial memory, in which he mentions Lull, Agrippa, and Bruno, is reprinted in the edition of his Oeuvres (Lyons, 1654), pp. 329 ff. The art of memory by R. Saunders (Physiognomie and Chiromancie … whereunto is added the Art of Memory, 1653, 1671) is based on that of Belot and repeats his mention of Bruno. Saunders dedicated his book to Elias Ashmole.
fn4 If this, the basic diagram for the ars rotunda, is compared with the design on the title-page of the first volume of the Utriusque Cosmi … Historia, we see there the temporal revolution visually depicted through the rope wound round macrocosm and microcosm which Time is pulling. We can also understand by comparison with this picture, in which the microcosm is represented within the macrocosm, why the ‘round’ art of memory is the ‘natural’ one for the microcosm.
fn5 ‘His pratis oppositae fingantur quinque columnae, quae itidem debent figura & colore distingui; Figura enim duarum extremarum erit circularis & rotunda, mediae autem columna habebit figuram hexagoneam, & quae his intermedia sunt quadratam posside-bunt figuram’ (ibid., p. 63). Though he speaks of ‘fields’ [prata] here, he is thinking of the five doors as memory fields or places.
Memory and Science
fn1 R.L. Gregory (1969), on how so little information controls so much behaviour. Towards a Theoretical Biology 2, 236–47. An IUBS Symposium, ed. C.H. Waddington, Ednburgh University Press.
fn2 In collaboration with the Functional Imaging Laboratory, at the Institute of Neurology, University College London.
fn3 In collaboration with the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London.
fn4 In collaboration with the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery.
fn5 Kandel experimented on the giant sea-slug, Aplysia, and its reaction to repeated stimuli.
Memory and Imagination
fn1 René Descartes.
fn2 John Locke.
fn3 This desire to keep time was expressed also in other ways, for instance in his emotional reaction when a bigger boy outstripped him in walking.
fn4 Freud speaks of ‘archaic vestiges.’
fn5 1957.
fn6 27 November, 1955.
fn7 Since there is so much more of the past than there is of the present and remembering is an activity that takes time and can itself be remembered, there is something absurd about the idea that all experiences could be remembered in the form in which they were experienced. Recall would take up more time than was available for it and infinite regresses (remembering oneself remembering oneself remembering …) would clutter up the system. What in fact happens is, of course, that all experiences, including events, imaginings, reflections and dreams are subject to a continuous process of selection, abstraction, generalisation, distillation. When Proust set out on his A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, what he discovered was not a serial account of the time he had lost (not forgotten (oublié), a point which the English translation, Remembrance of Things Past, misses) but a distillation of it.
False Memories
fn1 H.G. Pope and J.I. Hudson, ‘Is childhood sexual abuse a risk factor for bulimia nervosa?’, American Journal of Psychiatry (1922).
fn2 ‘A star cries incest’, People Magazine (7 October 1991). N. Darton, ‘The Pain of the Last Taboo’, Newsweek (7 October 1993).
fn3 Interview with Roseanne and Tom Arnold, Playboy (June 1993).
fn4 Mateu v. Hagen, No. 91–2–08053–5 (Washington 1993).
fn5 J.F. Kihlstrom, The recovery of memory in the laboratory and the clinic.’ Unpublished MS, University of Arizona (1993).
fn6 W.A. Wagenaar, Identifying Ivan (1988), 29.
fn7 J. Briere, Child Abuse Trauma: Theory and Treatment of the Lasting Effects (1992), 117; R.J. Ofshe and M.T. Singer, ‘Recovered memory therapies and robust repression: a collective error’. Unpublished MS, University of California, Berkeley (1993).
fn8 B. Engel, The Right to Innocence (1989), 20.
fn9 Renée Fredrickson, Repressed Memories (1992), 15, 23.
fn10 J. Frank, A Door of Hope: Recognizing and Resolving the Pains of your Past (1987), 41.
fn11 J. Bradshaw, ‘Incest: When you wonder if it happened to you’, Lear’s Magazine (August 1992).
fn12 J. Briere and J. Conte, ‘Self-reported Amnesia for Abuse in Adults Molested as Children’, Journal of Traumatic Stress 6 (1993); J.L. Herman and E. Schatzow, ‘Recovery and Verification of Memories of Childhood Sexual Trauma’, Psychoanalytic Psychology (1987).
Public Memory
fn1 G. Mansuelli, Les Civilisations de l’Europe ancienne. Paris 1967, pp. 139–40.
fn2 Ricoeur’s first cause of fragility is a shifting sense of identity over time. The second is confrontation with others, experienced as threat.
fn3 George Steiner, Real Presences (1989) p. 4.
fn4 There is a fundamental difference between Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick and Blade Runner, the film that Ridley Scott adapted from Dick’s novel. Whereas it is the cyborgs that exhibit sensitivity and empathy in Scott’s film, Dick’s novel, written several years before its cinematic adaptation, paints the opposite picture. For Dick, it is machines that are inhuman, cruel, vicious, amoral, and manipulative, while humans suffer, question their existence, and see themselves slowly dying away. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? human beings are still human, even if they share their world with machines. For Ridley Scott, however, human beings are no longer human. In his film, cyborgs must be exterminated, not because they are a danger to society, but because they are more human than the humans themselves. In Blade Runner, cyborgs long for love, life, and understanding: they long for beauty and spirituality. In contrast to Dick’s novel, human beings have now become amoral, vicious, dangerous, manipulative, and cruel. The reversal is complete: In Scott’s film, just as in Cameron’s (Terminator 2) and Verhoeven’s (Robocop), human beings are more dangerous than their machines. In these films, machines are rich with humanity, they are moral beings endowed with compassion, sensitivity, and empathy. Suddenly, machines are the ones who, like a curse, carry the weighty burden of human kindness …
Forgetting
fn1 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II x. 5.
fn2 Théodule Ribot, Les Maladies de la Mémoire (1881) p. 46.
fn3 Biographia Literaria, 1847 edn, I, 117 (quoted in Carpenter’s Mental Physiology, Chapter 10, which see for a number of other cases, all unfortunately deficient, like this one, in the evidence of exact verification which ‘psychical research’ demands). Compare also Th. Ribot, Diseases of Memory, Chapter 4. The knowledge of foreign words, etc., reported in trance mediums, etc., may perhaps often be explained by exaltation of memory. An hystero-epileptic girl, whose case I quoted in Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, automatically writes an ‘Ingoldsby Legend’ in several cantos, which her parents say she ‘had never read’. Of course she must have read or heard it, but perhaps never learned it. Of some macaronic Latin-English verses about a sea-serpent which her hand also wrote unconsciously, I have vainly sought the original (see ibid., p. 553).
fn4 The Works of Joseph Conrad (1921) I, viii–ix.
A S Byatt, Memory
