Sane

[chalkwalk]

So studies have been done, results have been compared, argued over and tentatively settled on. Sadly this is the best that the psychological sciences do for "exact". The net of it is that it is now believed that every time we recall a memory we are essentially building it from scratch.

It's not to say that we are always lying when we recall things

Comments

[wickedirony]

if you account for our propensity to lie to ourselves and others in addition to our crappy memory, our memories and self image aren't worth shit. i experience the brunt of that fact pretty often, because my memory has always been bad enough to put some Alzheimer's patients to shame. the more i study other people, the more i realize that they just make up their own personality on a day to day basis. like you said, they use their shoddy memories and invented self-image and build on it to make an even less convincing social persona, which they later feel like they have to stick to no matter what. obviously i'm no less guilty of that than anyone else. i guess all we can do is try to be honest with ourselves on a minute to minute basis and try not to think too much about the past and what it may or may not have shaped us into.

[chalkwalk]

That sounds pretty much like what I wanted to say at the start. I think anyway.

There's a punchline to this though. Once I hit the post button I remembered that I had actually been on my way to mow the lawn when this thought and the desire to write it down struck me. So this is literally one of those things that someone does to put off mowing the lawn.

[chalkwalk]

Or you could say that everything we know is a lie. That ties it off neatly and keeps this from dragging on into any more fine granularity. Because those conversations always end up with something squishy and odd that makes everyone involved just feel uncomfortable witnessing.

[spongeboob]

For myself, I found that the older I became the more I based the idea of what the world is and how it works by experiencing it, rather then just taking someoene's word.
The world feels more real when you tase it yourself, rather then just by drinking the words from others.

Memory in general is a picky thing, we only do remember the things we want to belive have happend. Is it good, is it bad? I think that's kind of irrelevant. You are stuck with what you have, you might as well squeze the most out of it.