Christopher Robin Milne Quotes

If memories were indeed like what a camera records, they could be forgotten, or they could fade so that they are no longer clear and vivid. But it would be difficult to explain how people could have memories that are both clear and vivid while also being wrong. Yet that happens, and it is not infrequent.

You can't recover memories of a missing event. That's a fallacy.

How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events of a man's life, religiously preserve the merest trifles.

I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.

I think you just assume that your memory is just sort of a video playback of your experience, but it's nothing like that at all. It's a complete refabrication of an event and a lot of it is made up, because you're filling in spaces.

People can remember their childhood, but events from four or five years ago are in a never-never land.

...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

Every time you recall a memory, you're basically making another copy of it and at that same point it is susceptible to new changes and adaptations. So, you know, if you remember from when you were, you know, in second grade and there was Christmas and you got a present from your grandfather and your mom was wearing a red dress, that may or may not all have happened.

Our study showed that the false memory and the genuine memory are based on very similar, almost identical, brain mechanisms. It is difficult for the false memory bearer to distinguish between them.

Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.

It turns out that my memory is just not that great, so for specific scenes with people doing stuff, sometimes I'd have the details all wrong or I couldn't remember what happened exactly, so I just let that be.

I'll find myself having dinner with people and someone will mention something and I will say I was in that situation once. Then I'll say, forget it, it was a scene I was in. That can get to be quite confusing.

Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting.

I wish I were one of those terribly clever people who, when they write their autobiographies, always say, when I was fifteen months old I distinctly remember my Aunt Fanny saying to me, etc.

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.

I don't think forgetting is an important feature of human memory. I think it's important to be able to remember things accurately.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events.

You can do fascinating things with the tricks memory can play and tell. People can come to believe things which didn't happen at all if they're told them enough times.

People talk from memory and memory often plays false.

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances

As soon as anything is processed by memory, it’s fiction.

Sometimes we talk about memory as though it's firm and fixed, but of course, memory is highly fluid and subjective and thus highly subject to manipulation.

As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.

isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so.