Pieces of Light Quotes

“Memoir is an increasingly popular literary genre, and yet it rarely examines its own workings in the sense of asking whether the memoirist should trust his or her own recollections.”
― Charles Fernyhough, Pieces of Light: The New Science of Memory

“To remember the past, you tell a story about it. And in recalling the memory, you tell the story again. It's not always the same story, as the person telling it does not always want the same things. Memory fits in with the demands of the present as much as it tries to remain faithful to the facts of what happened. It incorporates new ideas, including snippets of information that have nothing to do with the original events. As children become better storytellers, they become better remembers. But their memory system also becomes more susceptible to distortion, as it sucks up other facts and convinces itself that they were part of the memory. As Virginia Woolf noted, there is something particularly pure about early fragment memories, detached as they are from bodies of information that eventually weaken their power. “Later,” she wrote, “we add to feelings much that makes them more complex, and therefore less strong; or if not less strong, less isolated, less complete.”… The more memory becomes organized, the more slippery it becomes.”
― Charles Fernyhough, Pieces of Light: The New Science of Memory

“When I talk to people about their reconstructive view of memory, I encourage them to abandon themselves to its slippery charms. We are all natural-born storytellers; we engage in acts of fiction-making every time we recount an event from our pasts. We are constantly editing and remaking our memory stories as our knowledge and emotions change. They might be fictions, but they are our fictions, and we should treasure them. Stories are special. Sometimes they can even be true.”
― Charles Fernyhough, Pieces of Light: The New Science of Memory

“Memory means different things to psychologists. Autobiographical memory is an interesting case because it straddles the most basic of the distinctions that scientists make between types of memory: that between semantic memory (memory for facts) and episodic memory (memory for events). Our memory for the events of our own lives involves the integration of details of what happened (episodic memory) with long-term knowledge about the facts of our lives (a kind of autobiographical semantic memory). Another important distinction is that between explicit or declarative memory (in which the contents of memory are accessible to consciousness) and implicit or non-declarative memory (which is unconscious). As we will see, this distinction is particularly important when it comes to the question of how memory is affected by trauma and extreme emotion.”
― Charles Fernyhough, Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts