Daniel Kahneman Quotes

I was starting to think I was making up memories, just to have answers. Our brain does that sometimes. Or at least mine does.

Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.

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.

I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.

Anything processed by memory is fiction.

there simply is no way to describe the past without lying. Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction.

However, for story reasons, we needed to represent them in certain ways. One of the things that sort of blew me away that I didn't know when we started is that memories are completely susceptible to change. And this is, you know, one of the many reasons why certain people are trying to get it taken out - eyewitness testimony in court cases because it's very unreliable.

Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.

That is the beauty of memory, isn’t it? Our reality is always clouded by our perceptions of truth. (Mnimi)

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.

History is the most dangerous product which the chemistry of the mind has concocted. Its properties are well known. It produces dreams and drunkenness. It fills people with false memories, exaggerates their reactions, exacerbates old grievances, torments them in their repose, and encourages either a delirium of grandeur or a delusion of persecution. It makes whole nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable and vainglorious.

The truth of these days is not that which really is, but what every man persuades another man to believe.

The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true, only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.

I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.

Sometimes I think the only memories I have are those that I’ve created around photographs of me as a child. Maybe I’m creating my own life. I distrust any memories I do have. They may be fictions, too.

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

Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.

Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.

Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.

An imagination is a powerful tool. It can tint memories of the past, shade perceptions of the present, or paint a future so vivid that it can entice... or terrify, all depending upon how we conduct ourselves today.

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.

A strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgment.

The greatest scandal of the century in American psychiatry ... is the growing mania among thousands of inept therapists, family counselors, and social workers for arousing false memories of childhoood sexual abuse.