Kira (Kira Greene)

Thanks for having me again.

Well, I suppose the problem with it really is that it makes us think about memory as though it's along a continuum of accuracy.

That, you know, what we're aiming for is kind of top level accuracy.

So remembering something is good, not remembering something is bad.

And I think that's the way a lot of us tend to think about memory.

You know, it's about achieving that accuracy, getting that thing right.

But actually, you know, we're not computers.

It's not a matter of retrieving something and you either retrieve it correctly, in which case you get a nice big checkmark, or you don't retrieve it and then it's a big X and you've done something wrong.

And we're actually reconstructing our memories actively all the time.

A lot of people have this metaphor that memory is like a filing system, you know, either like a filing cabinet or on a computer, and that you should just be able to go in and pull out the file and retrieve it and it's right there.

But we're not doing that.

We're actively constructing the memory.

And then when we do that, during the process of that construction, not all the details are exactly the way they will originally have been.

We'll sort of construct it in a more kind of schematic way that will give us the gist, the important parts of what's there.

And through that process of reconstruction, what we're doing is pulling out the bits of memory that are important to us and letting the parts that aren't important to us or aren't relevant to a particular situation drift away.

What we call remembering and forgetting are actually part of that same process of constructing a memory along particular lines that includes some details and doesn't include others.

remembering absolutely every detail isn't necessarily something that we should want and sometimes we actually need to forget and one of the things that forgetting allows us to do is to kind of prune away all the unnecessary aspects of memories so that we can remember the gist of our day-to-day lives and kind of pull together and observe patterns across all of our experiences.

Well, yeah, so it's definitely true that most of us will remember highly salient or highly emotional events with, you know, a lot more frequency.

And a lot of that is that we tend to think about those events a lot more.

We're more inclined to bring them to mind.