Do the actual events of a memory matter more than the memory itself? Is the act of imagining a recollection enough to provide meaning, education, and purpose to the development of our lives?
Those fond mental images of you as a child...did they happen the way you remember? probably not...does that matter? not really
we all want to be able to recall the minutia of our past (mainly positive events, but with the often secret desire to remember our most terrifying disturbing moments in even more vivid detail)...its a desire to stay connected with the self we have know and maintain a steady tow line from start to finish...sadly that hangs limp in places and swerves wildly at others...it may become disconnected but we try to keep pulling ourselves along with the reassurance that nothing has changed behind us....
well i hate to be the bearer of bad news but it has changed...the previous landscape has gone through all the same weather changes that your current position has...it erodes leaving great channels of neural sediment that the geologist of our psyches tries to catalog and explain...
i for one don't mind the memory grotesquerie of my past...graveyards have always intrigued me, so what better than a resting place for altered and invented thoughts...it really doesn't matter if you have changed the story of you past (willingly or unknowingly) as long as there is still forward momentum.
1/21/10
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An interesting book on how the defects of memory once served humankind (and continue to do so) is Daniel Schacter's book The Seven Sins of Memory. If you are really interested in the science behind this, I would highly recommend reading this book.
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