"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 (as Helen Keller was in a very good position to note) depends as much on our imagination as our senses. There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, which is different in every individual to begin with, and differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever they are recollected.... 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."

~ Neurologist Oliver Sacks

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

Unless you recognize that the "truth as you remember it" might not be so "truthy" after all, and thus seek externally confirmable evidence to back it up.

:)

I find one part of what he wrote, "...our memories are relatively solid and reliable..." to be disputable. Much neurological research actually shows the opposite to be the case, i.e. studies involving "eyewitness accounts" that aren't solid or reliable at all. Interesting.

ificouldhietokolob Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> I find one part of what he wrote, "...our memories
> are relatively solid and reliable..." to be
> disputable. Much neurological research actually
> shows the opposite to be the case, i.e. studies
> involving "eyewitness accounts" that aren't solid
> or reliable at all. Interesting.


(Hey ifi-, hope New York was as splendid for you as it was for me. It was my first trip. Probably going back in September. And probably again every year for the rest of my life.)


“Eyewitness accounts” are a very specific kind of memory and largely impersonal. Someone randomly witnesses a crime or an accident. Yes, this very specific kind of memory has been shown to be problematic.

But it is a mistake to generalize those findings to be saying something about the many other forms of memory, which are largely personal. Memory works very well when it’s personal.

The “eye-witness accounts” phenomena doesn’t invalidate Sacks’s claim, especially since he gives room with his “relatively”.

I eschew non-fiction such as biographies/autobiographies, because they are most assuredly full of fiction, even if the writer is not aware of it.

When I was young I wondered why anyone would read fiction. It’s not true, why bother?

Then I discovered that fiction can be true and non-fiction not true, often purposely so.

Then there are books like the Book Of Mormon, not true as non-fiction and not true as fiction. Glad I don’t bother with that, anymore.

... aired this evening.

It was fascinating. Since it's also on YouTube (found out after,) was able to hit rewind and watch it again for the parts I missed due to interruptions the first go round.

What was most intriguing, and why I'm adding it here is the part that the "myth" of Pocahontas plays in the history of our nation.

She is considered right up there with the founding fathers of this country in terms of importance. Without her, there may not have been a coming together of colonizers in the New World. She was the conduit between the Native Americans and the Englishmen who helped bridge the gap between.

On the capitol rotunda's ceiling in Washington D.C. is first George Washington, with some founding fathers. Right below that are three portraits of Pocahontas as she was an emissary between her tribe, the Pawmunky and the Jamestown colony.

Much of Pocahontas story is actual. There are parts of it that are based on legend - perhaps. Such as her saving John Smith when he nearly was executed by the Indians after his capture. She would have been only a young girl of nine or ten when that took place, so it was unlikely she'd have been present to intervene on his behalf.

She was the daughter of the tribal chief however. So maybe not a stretch of the imagination.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0IqgYcygio



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/15/2017 08:10AM by Amyjo.

“Princess” Pocahontas came to live in Britain, but died shortly before landfall. She has a statue in Gravesend on the river Thames beyond London.

She died so young too.

So sad.

The documentary indicates that she may have been poisoned so she wouldn't leave Britain.

No one knows what illness caused her death. Only that she and several other shipmates became ill around the same time.

Mental images or it didn't happen.

Mental gymnastics and it did happen...

elderolddog Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Mental gymnastics and it did happen...


yeah I'm voting for mental gymnastics for the win Alex.

Did I tell you that Pocahantus was one of my ancestors?

Yes indeedy.

Most truth is subjective. Especially historical truth. Our minds are incredibly adept at staying sane, even if it means it represses, misremembers, and creates memories out of thin air. Our ability to shape our own reality is why we are the apex predator of this lovely blue sphere.

Everything you know is a lie, and only believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.

"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."

COMMENT: O.K. We are all human, which places limits on what we can be certain of. Does that mean we have NO access to truth, i.e. facts about the world? No. There are mechanisms in the brain to sort out representations of the world directly and reliably resulting from our sense experience, from representations that are purely imaginative, or hallucinatory. That is why we are able to mentally make such distinctions with striking coherence, suggesting that the world for the most part is what it appears to us to be, within the limits of human cognition.
_______________________________________

"We have no direct access to historical truth, and what we feel or assert to be true (as Helen Keller was in a very good position to note) depends as much on our imagination as our senses."

COMMENT: I disagree. Historical truth aside, what we assert to be true is NOT dependent upon our imagination. That is why we can successfully make the distinction between what we directly perceive, and what me only imagine. After all, Sachs should well know that we all do not mistake our wives for hats. (See Sachs, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat."
_________________________________________

"There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, which is different in every individual to begin with, and differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever they are recollected.... "

COMMENT: Again, disagree. We *do* directly experience events in the world, within the inherent limits of our sensory mechanisms. The fact that such mechanisms are limited, does not mean that what they *do* represent is false, even if the mental representations (thoughts, desires, beliefs, etc.) as related to such sensory inputs are subjective. What is more interesting is the extent humans agree about the content of their sensory experiences, not how much in the minutia they might differ.
_________________________________________

"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."

COMMENT: The fact that memory is imperfect, and subject to revision, does not suggest that the events were not "recorded" in the brain accurately in the first place, or accurately represented by the brain in long term memory. Memory problems might well be a retrieval problem, rather than an encoding problem. The "wonder" about the general reliability of our memory for everyday functioning is evidence that both the brain and the mind correlate rather well toward objective truth, all things considered.
______________________________________________

Finally, your heading suggesting that "truth is memory based," is not supported by this Sachs quotation, nor would it be by Sachs himself. There is no subjective truth suggested here. Truth still represents the "fact of the matter" as related to what actually exists and what actually happens in the world, regardless of our perceptions. Memory limitations, or human cognitive limitations generally, do not change the definition of truth to relativism, at least from a scientific perspective. And none of this has anything to do with indoctrination, which is a psychological manipulation of human minds through repetition and other techniques. Whether someone is "indoctrinated" into accepting what is true, or what is false, is often an open question, depending upon one's commitments about reality. We insist that Mormonism encompasses indoctrination toward false religious beliefs; but Mormons of course would disagree. The problem of "indoctrination" is that it is based upon the manipulation of beliefs through questionable psychological techniques, rather than assessing truth through the reasoning of an autonomous agent.

Sacks was saying that its stories oft repeated and passed down generationally that become historical truisms.

That is the subjectivity of truth he speaks to. It differs according to our collective identity; whether as a culture, religion, community, etc.

How you are raised and educated is typically how you relate to and perceive reality.

Amyjo Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Sacks was saying that its stories oft repeated and
> passed down generationally that become historical
> truisms.
>
> That is the subjectivity of truth he speaks to. It
> differs according to our collective identity;
> whether as a culture, religion, community, etc.
>
> How you are raised and educated is typically how
> you relate to and perceive reality.


Here is every quote of Dr. Sacks from the cited article:

"It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened — or may have happened to someone else. I suspect that many of my enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, have arisen from others’ suggestions, which have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten."


"Sometimes these forgettings extend to autoplagiarism, where I find myself reproducing entire phrases or sentences as if new, and this may be compounded, sometimes, by a genuine forgetfulness. Looking back through my old notebooks, I find that many of the thoughts sketched in them are forgotten for years, and then revived and reworked as new. I suspect that such forgettings occur for everyone, and they may be especially common in those who write or paint or compose, for creativity may require such forgettings, in order that one’s memories and ideas can be born again and seen in new contexts and perspectives."


"What is clear in all these cases — whether of imagined or real abuse in childhood, of genuine or experimentally implanted memories, of misled witnesses and brainwashed prisoners, of unconscious plagiarism, and of the false memories we probably all have based on misattribution or source confusion — is that, in the absence of outside confirmation, there is no easy way of distinguishing a genuine memory or inspiration, felt as such, from those that have been borrowed or suggested, between what the psychoanalyst Donald Spence calls ‘historical truth’ and ‘narrative truth.’

[…]

"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 (as Helen Keller was in a very good position to note) depends as much on our imagination as our senses. There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, which is different in every individual to begin with, and differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever they are recollected. . . . 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.

Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds."


"We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection."


"For [researchers] in the early twentieth century, memories were imprints in the brain (as for Socrates they were analogous to impressions made in soft wax) — imprints that could be activated by the act of recollection. It was not until the crucial studies of Frederic Bartlett at Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s that the classical view could be disputed. Whereas Ebbinghaus and other early investigators had studied rote memory — how many digits could be remembered, for instance — Bartlett presented his subjects with pictures or stories and accounts of what they had seen or heard were somewhat different (and sometimes quite transformed) on each re-remembering. These experiments convinced Bartlett to think in terms not of a static thing called ‘memory,’ but rather a dynamic process of ‘remembering.’ He wrote: 'Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience. . . . It is thus hardly ever really exact.'"


-------------

Now certainly we can all agree that I am no genius... But I found no mention of

> Sacks was saying that its stories oft repeated and
> passed down generationally that become historical
> truisms.

Didn't even see the phrase 'historical truisms'... Sacks says, "We have no direct access to historical truth, and what we feel or assert to be true (as Helen Keller was in a very good position to note) depends as much on our imagination as our senses." This to me implies that historical truisms aren't personal...



> How you are raised and educated is typically
> how you relate to and perceive reality.

Sacks says "I suspect that many of my enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, have arisen from others’ suggestions, which have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten."

But in my mind, this does not equate with "how we are raised." Your phrase suggests parents, relatives and teachers doing their 'duty', but a lot of my 'content' came from other sources, which had no idea they were 'raising' me, and despite how long in the tooth I've become, the process continues.

I've always been suspicious of people who declare they have pinned down all the facts... And you do realize that Dr. Sacks is providing data that allows us further liberties with regard to the 'facts' you have declared regarding many of your spiritual activities? You say they happened, but you cite an article that is replete with information regarding how individual falsify their memories.

It was in interesting read, but a bit of shock that you were the one to cite it.


one of us is probably guilty of the Spanish language judgment, "Habla mucho pero dice nada."

Extracting meaning from Sacks article was self deducing.

"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....

Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds."

"We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection."

How people form beliefs, identities, both social and cultural are based on the societal conditioning we receive through schooling whether that be from primary schools, churches, parents, etc. We reflect the knowledge we're given.

Everything we learn is through imitation. Everything. That includes belief systems and cultural biases.

And memories of what *is* v. what *isn't.*

What we accept as truth is what's stored in our memory, both collective and individually. That is the essence of Sacks premise.

"n his recent New York Review of Books essay, legendary neurologist Oliver Sacks tackles precisely that, exposing the remarkable mechanisms by which we fabricate our memories, involuntarily blurring the line between the experienced and the assimilated:

It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened — or may have happened to someone else. I suspect that many of my enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, have arisen from others’ suggestions, which have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten.

One phenomenon Sacks argues is particularly common — if not adaptive — in the creative mind is that of autoplagiarism:

Sometimes these forgettings extend to autoplagiarism, where I find myself reproducing entire phrases or sentences as if new, and this may be compounded, sometimes, by a genuine forgetfulness. Looking back through my old notebooks, I find that many of the thoughts sketched in them are forgotten for years, and then revived and reworked as new. I suspect that such forgettings occur for everyone, and they may be especially common in those who write or paint or compose, for creativity may require such forgettings, in order that one’s memories and ideas can be born again and seen in new contexts and perspectives.

Citing a number of case studies where false memories of fictitious events were “implanted” in people’s minds, Sacks explores unconscious plagiarism, something Henry Miller poetically probed and Mark Twain eloquently, if unscientifically, addressed in his famous letter to Helen Keller. Sacks writes:

What is clear in all these cases — whether of imagined or real abuse in childhood, of genuine or experimentally implanted memories, of misled witnesses and brainwashed prisoners, of unconscious plagiarism, and of the false memories we probably all have based on misattribution or source confusion — is that, in the absence of outside confirmation, there is no easy way of distinguishing a genuine memory or inspiration, felt as such, from those that have been borrowed or suggested, between what the psychoanalyst Donald Spence calls ‘historical truth’ and ‘narrative truth.’"

I believe it can be deduced that memory is made up more from what we've learned and been taught as truth, rather than objective fact.

That's why people ascribe to differing religious beliefs they are born into, schools of thought they're raised with, and societies they grow up in.

It also helps explain the historical legends we're taught to believe as factual, whether they are or not.

There is no absolute truth - truth is narrative that varies by narrator. You believe what you want to believe. Not what is absolute - because absolute truth doesn't exist.

self deducing???? hahahahahhahahahahhaha

It's even more hilarious you don't know what self-deducing means.

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL.

A quick check of Google and Wikipedia found no definition for "self deducing".

So Saucie is in good company.

I'm afraid you're going to have to explain "self deducing" to the Google, Wikipedia and the rest of the world....

Just whose god damn fault is it you don't know how to read?

Besides being a Grammar Nazi.

Deduce definition is: Definition of deduce. deduced; deducing. transitive verb. 1 : to determine by reasoning or deduction.

Which IS found in the dictionary.

Self deducing is not a word. It is two words.

You know, like self-explanatory?

It means the same damn thing.

Cut the crap.

You and saucie are a couple of jerks. Big time.

Thank you for your input.


ETA: weird... when you ask Google about self-explanatory, it goes on for pages and pages! And there is a wikipedia entry for self-explanatory...


but nothing for self deducing...

Looking at it logically, self deducing is a lonely task, and the same things will exist on both sides of the equal sign... At least that's what I self-deduce.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/15/2017 03:20PM by elderolddog.

"There is no absolute truth - truth is narrative that varies by narrator. You believe what you want to believe. Not what is absolute - because absolute truth doesn't exist."

COMMENT: Absolutely nothing you have said remotely supports this conclusion. The fact, or claim, that truth or reality is elusive to human beings, or that human beings rely on each other for facts and knowledge, or that humans beings often are deluded, or subject to indoctrination, does not imply that truth is relative.

The fact that Sachs stated, as you quote: "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..." indicates that he rejected such a position, which as a scientist he most certainly did.

One more point. The fact that people can be indoctrinated to believe something that is false, of itself suggests that there is some objective truth of which the falsity can be compared to; i.e. whatever reality or truth that such indoctrination undermines.

Your reasoning here is dangerously fallacious, suggesting post-modern relativism (i.e. the idea that there is "my truth, and your truth" but no objective reality); a metaphysical view for which there is no evidence. (Notwithstanding our friends in the liberal arts!) It is one thing to pull interesting quotes from the internet, but quite another to understand them, and make correct inferences from them.