When we think back to a time in our past why do we visualise it from the outside?

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Is that memory conjuring up emotions when you are remembering that event? I think we are still more subjective to our memories than a mere observer.

 

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Very good question. Maybe memories that generate bad feelings makes us view ourselves from the outside in order to not have to experience the trauma again.
I definitely see the difference, bad memory, outside view, good memories inside view. I never thought about that this before though. But I don't think that explains all situations. If I for example remember walking in the forest with a person, then I can see that memory from above the treetops, which is a strange perspective.

 

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I don't. Most of the most significant memories of my life come back to me from my point of view. (The one exception to that are events that have lots of pictures, because I can still see the pictures.)

 

Who is this "we"?? I remember things from my perspective.

 

There is a movement towards outsideness--a rupturing or dehiscence--in the passage of time itself. We thus stand outside of our past as rememberers of it not inside of it as participants of it. Internality is only experienced in the present, as the conscious sense of being inside. Once we fade into the past, we become objectified to ourselves because we are indeed on the outside looking in at that point. JMO..

 

Photographs may warp your memory. But then, are you remembering the event or the photo?

 

I think it depends on what perspective you care to view the situation from. When I am thinking of my past as I sit here, I can either think of things through my eyes, or depending on how well I know or imagine the environment around me, I can picture third person. However, I find it hard to picture myself since I do not really have an adamant mental image of myself. I can however see a situation between two known people from the third person. I suppose it's a matter of preference and habit in how we think of the past or even use mental imagery.

 

Forgive this momentary OT lapse, but what's your favorite David Lynch movie Nashton? Lost Highway was really creepy..

 

This is an interesting question, one that I wonder if any real research has been done on. It would be an interesting case study, I think. Clearly, from the few responses here, people remember their pasts in different ways. I wonder what influences that. Does it have something to do with personality types? Does it have to do with mental development? Perhaps dissociation/association with past (or even present) "selves"? Is it trauma based, in any sense? Is third-person memory more prominent in spatially aware people? Is first-person memory more prominent in people who are self-confident? Content? I think it would be a fascinating case study.

 

I would have to say Twin Peaks. All of his movies are very visceral, as well as his artwork, which I find rather delectable. I've had this thought, that if I were to put on an exhibition with Lynch's work, that Massive Attack's music would be rather suitable ambiance.

And I agree with you on Lost Highway, quite a dark film..

 

Interesting focus on what I never much noticed. The farther back in years, the more a memory does seem to develop into a visual version of a 3rd-person narrative, at that. Perhaps it could result from the deterioration of details over time -- the condensing and repeated shuffling of a memory from one neural location to another. So as to fill in what was lost, a combo of imagination and creative "storytelling" is recruited that not only provides repairs but displaces the by-then highly eroded, original first-person POV.

Or: a deliberate conversion of some "pictures" to language would surely save "bytes", so that itself could be part of the continual "image compression" and migration of such older memories to make room for newer ones. Due to the self-less automatic nature of the concerned sub-system / process, it might thereby figuratively prefer a description of "She blew out the candles" to an "I blew out the candles". When recalled, once again imagination is summoned to turn those parts of memory back into a somewhat now erroneous and re-invented version of the original "movie".

 

Our long term memory is outside of our brain, and we access it.

Thats why sometimes people have transplants they often get others memories. We all have a certain frequency, and by getting a part from another, they often tune into someone elses long term memory.

Your long term memory is outside your brain, and you access it. Thats why to relation to ops question.

 

This is completely false. But if you believe it isn't, explain how the brain transports memory outside of the brain, and then accesses it later.

There is no mystery that memories are created through synaptic work and stored in brain tissues. That's why when when certain sections of the brain are removed, memories go with them. There are even structures, such as the hippocampus that are heavily involved in the creation and storage of memory.

source: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5731/92.full

 

Well, there has been research concerning how we can rely on other people as external memory sources; but that doesn't eliminate the fact that each brain has its own long-term retention capacities. Which humans before writing and symbolic inventions took fuller advantage of. This preceded discovery (or what should be obvious-ness) that portable smartphones, tablets, and the internet are making us even more lazier when it comes to mnemonic affairs, providing a speedier retrieval bank for depositing the past, where we only have to remember where the information is located. Excerpt below actually deals with the former, though.

The Internet Is Changing Our Memory: "...The study, led by Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University, was designed to look at transactive memory, or the idea that there are external memory sources. Initially, researchers looked at how we use other people as the keepers of our information and memories. Sparrow said that society as a whole tended to assign the job of expertise in certain subjects to certain people. Such people were then made responsible for certain types of information, she said. Study co-author, Harvard University researcher Danial Wegner, first coined the term 'transactive memory' in a book chapter about how couples store knowledge between them. Titled 'Cognitive Interdependence in Close Relationships', Wegner's work concluded that couples who had been together for a long time relied on each other as memory banks..."

 

I think it is because we simplify the memory, the closer you are to first person view, the more detailed the memory has to become. If I remember a feeling or a thought then the memory is often first-person. But if I simply remember the scene of a event, then the memory is often third person, but I could remember that same scene in first person as well, but it would take more work since it is more detailed.

Thanks for the interesting question.

 

If you try to recall emotions, feeling and sensations, the only way to recall these accurately, is in the first person. This is because this is where they all originate. But things that start from outside and enter the sensory systems; eyes, can be recalled using third person.

For example, if I asked do you remember the first time eating ice cream? Next, do you remember how good it tasted? The first is observed from the outside or third person while the second needs the first person to recreate an internally generated sensation.

 

Yeah, I think you're on to something there! Perhaps it's simply because the memory can't generate a objective feeling, but it must always be felt subjectively (and therefor in first-person).

 

I noticed something when trying to "relive" my past memories to recreate something I once did in the past to try and get the same feelings I did when I first experienced the memory. As an example when I first went to a zoo at about 5 years old I was with my mother and we just walked around the cages. Trying to experience the unique sensations that I remembered there was very hard not to recall the animals that were there but the way they were something new and wonderful.

It was the sensations that I could not evoke that I once had interacting with the animals. I just did not "feel" the same way as I originally did as they heightened and opened new sensations that I never experienced before but the second time, trying to bring those memories back a few years later just weren't the same. So memories can be found but the actual feelings couldn't.

 

That's interesting. It suggests memories might not as be accurate as we feel they are. For instance you now remember yourself as a boy seeing say a warthog. But the way it actually happened was you as a child encountering this strange monster that was scary and weird. You have iow edited the scene to make more sense to you now. We always remember from the perspective of what we know and understand about the world NOW, abstracted from all the uncertainty and surprise and wonderment that was going on when we originally experienced it.