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Yaadein yaad aati hain
Updated On: 03 March, 2024 07:47 AM IST | Mumbai | Sucheta Chakraborty
When you remember a painful episode, are you imagining it or recalling it? A cognitive neuroscientist’s fascinating new book on the fundamental functioning of human memory studies its relationship with imagination, identity and growth
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Two people remember the same experience differently, because our memory only offers glimpses of the past, “but then, we reconstruct those bits and pieces into stories.” Representation pic; (right) Ranganath writes that since the early 1990s, the sport of competitive memory has grown exponentially around the world. Yänjaa Wintersoul is a Mongolian Swedish triple world-record holder and the first woman to compete on a World Memory Championship–winning team. She is most famous for a 2017 viral video in which she memorized IKEA’s entire furniture catalogue (328 pages of roughly five thousand products) in less than a week
Reframing isn’t about changing your memory, but rather changing your perspective,” says Dr Charan Ranganath. “Memory can give us glimpses of the past, but then, we reconstruct those bits and pieces into stories about what transpired. And these stories are heavily filtered by our beliefs, goals, and perspective. That is why two people can often experience the same event and remember it in totally different ways.”
Fortunately, he assures us, memory is flexible enough to allow us to change our perspective, so that we can look at the same event in different ways. “For instance, suppose my boss yelled at me in front of my co-workers. If I framed that event as an indicator of my incompetence on the job, I might focus on recalling his criticisms. But if I knew that my boss was going through a painful divorce, I might remember the event differently, focusing more about how he looked dishevelled, like he hadn’t slept in days. It’s the same episode, but our interpretations can dramatically reshape how we remember it. A good therapist will not enforce a particular interpretation, but simply point out other ways in which someone could interpret the same event.”
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