Susumu Tonegawa Quotes

There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.

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.

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.

One can never be sure whether a very early memory is a real memory or just the recollection of something which you were told happened.

I'm so suspicious of our own understanding of the past. I just think that your mind plays absolute tricks on you and fools you every minute of every day. And so when you're talking about the past, you're talking about something that never happened. At least it didn't happen the way you think it happened.

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.

We will move from looking at correlations between brain activity and behaviour to studying how the brain causes mental states and behaviour.

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain.

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.

Doubting what you see is a very odd experience. And doubting what you remember is a little less odd than doubting what you see. But it's also a pretty odd experience, because some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them, and that happens to be the case even for memories that are not true.

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.

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

We're told that when we remember, the same parts of our brain light up as when we experienced the event we're remembering. Your brain lives through it again.

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

If you ask two people to remember a specific event, the stories are going to vary wildly because we always make ourselves out to be the hero.

You can't trust your memory. You change it to suit yourself.

Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.

What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

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

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.

Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.

You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.