11/28/2023 0 Comments Creating memories after 10 yearsThere is no widely accepted definition of a memory trace in the literature, but the general idea is that memory traces bridge the gap between a past event and one’s current memory experience of that past event ( De Brigard, 2014b Robins, 2017 Werning, 2020). This appropriate causal connection is one that is maintained by a memory trace. This creates a problem because it seems to undermine the idea that episodic memory depends on one’s experience of a past event.Īccording to the influential causal theory of memory ( Martin and Deutscher, 1966), memory differs from imagination in that genuine remembering presupposes an appropriate causal connection between the subject’s current representation of an event and her earlier experience of it. Indeed, the claim that episodic memory is merely a form of episodic imagination, at least on some of its characterizations, seems to lead to some improbable attributions of memory–attributions such as Dalí’s claim to remember the period before his birth. Yet, the claim that memory is imagination is a significant one, and it has important theoretical implications for what we think memory is and how it works. This points to a certain similarity between the two processes. We see and feel these events unfold before our minds. Saying that memory just is imagination is to say that memory is constructive imagination ( Langland-Hassan, Forthcoming).īoth (episodic) imagination and memory tend to have a rich phenomenology, replete with visual and spatial mental imagery and emotion, for example. Addressing the debate about the relation between memory and imagination, Langland-Hassan (Forthcoming) concludes that the type of imagining involved is best described as constructive imagining, which refers to “the capacity to form novel representations” ( Van Leeuwen, 2013, p. Given that there are many different kinds of imagining, a more precise definition of the type of imagining that remembering is supposed to be is warranted. Episodic memory, then, is simply one form of this imaginative capacity in which we mentally revisit or re-enact episodes in our personal pasts. Roughly, on such a view, episodic imagination is our ability to mentally entertain possible episodes. This paper explores recent claims that episodic memory is merely one form of episodic (or experiential) imagination ( Michaelian, 2016a Hopkins, 2018) 2. Indeed, can we even be said to experience these intra-uterine moments in any real robust sense ( Lagercrantz, 2014)?īut, then, what if memory just is imagination? What if to episodically remember a past event is merely to imagine that episode in one’s personal past? Would Dalí’s memories, “so rare and liquid,” count as genuine? After all, we typically forget and cannot recall moments from our very early life. What are we to make of Dalí’s claim to “intra-uterine” memories? Are these memories genuine? Or are they the whimsical products of a famously creative mind? What Dalí is describing here seem to be rich and powerful fantasies of his past rather than genuine memories. But I-yes, I remember this period, as though it were only yesterday… (these) memories, so rare and liquid, which I have preserved of that intra-uterine life … will undoubtedly be the first of this kind in the world since the beginning of literary history to see the light of day and to be described systematically ( Dalí, 1942/1993: Ch. I presume that my readers do not at all remember, or remember only very vaguely, that highly important period of their existence which anteceded their birth and which transpired in their mother’s womb. Writing in his autobiography, a book about his “secret life,” the Spanish artist Salvador Dalí makes an assertion about personal memory 1. How do we remember, and what is it we find in the end?
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