The Complexity of Memory

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We're remembering context, right? So with every memory, there's going to be context that you store away. You might know that it must have happened before this because you hadn't yet known about that or you might know that a particular person was there and you didn't yet know that person before such and such a time. And so in that context of retrieval that that information gets added or gets reclassified. It's not that it has a timestamp. It's that one memory is sort of connected to all these other memories and we can reconstruct when it must have been. Exactly. But we certainly don't have a timestamp and mostly we're terrible at remembering when things happen,. which,

What direction does time point in? None, really, although some people might subconsciously put the past on the left and the future on the right, or the past behind themselves and the future in front, or many other possible orientations. What feels natural to you depends in large degree on the native language you speak, and how it talks about time. This is a clue to a more general phenomenon, how language shapes the way we think. Lera Boroditsky is one of the world’s experts on this phenomenon. She uses how different languages construe time and space (as well as other things) to help tease out the way our brains make sense of the world.

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Lera Boroditsky received her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford University. She is currently associate professor of cognitive science at UC San Diego. She serves as Editor in Chief of the journal Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. She has been named one of 25 Visionaries changing the world by the Utne Reader, and is also a Searle Scholar, a McDonnell scholar, recipient of an NSF Career award, and an APA Distinguished Scientist lecturer.

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