Frederic Bartlett, (1986-1969) is a British psychologist famous for his studies on memory, my theme for April 2018 A to Z Blog Challenge. Bartlett’s key accolades include becoming the first university professor of experimental psychology at Cambridge in 1931, election to the Royal Society in 1932 and knighthood in 1948.
The reason he makes it into my exploration into the mysteries of memory is most famous book, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. In this work, he posits that memory is reconstructive as a opposed to reproductive. That means we don’t tend to remember things exactly as they occurred. Instead, we reconstruct them by filling in gaps in what we saw and heard with personal experiences and cultural attitudes.
This helps explain why no two people tend to see any event exactly the same thing. Perhaps the most interesting take on this Akira Kurosawa‘s classic film, Rashomon, which looks at the same crime through the eyes of four witnesses. By the film’s end, it is hard to say what happened, because each individual provided different but plausible accounts of the same horrific event.
Haven’t you experienced this in your own life? Like discussing a meeting with a colleague to learn they remembered the discussion or the outcome completely differently? Or disagreeing with your kid about what was agreed days earlier or details of a vacation?
Our memories structure our lives in so many ways, and yet the are also social constructs. Yet, we accept our own memories as truth, even though they can only ever be a partial truth.
A reminder that, in the end, we each create our own meaning. If we feel vulnerable and victim at times to the social messaging all around us, know that we perhaps have more control than it feels. As we learned from the last past, the more that social world pushes our emotional buttons, the more that messaging will be recalled, the more likely it will finds its way into our memories.
If there is a large web connecting people to each other, it lives in our memories–don’t you think?
Ah, so that’s why we all remember different things about the same events. It depends on what we are more inclined to and the way that interest compelets the reconstruction of an event.
That is so interesting!