When I was an unreflecting boy, I assumed that memory operated like a left-luggage office. An event in our lives happens, we make some swift, subconscious judgment on the importance of that event, and if it is important enough, we store it in our memory. Later, when we need to recall it, we take the left-luggage ticket along to a department of our brain, which releases the memory back to us – and there it is, as fresh and uncreased as the moment it happened.
But we know it’s not like that really. We know that memory degrades. We have come to understand that every time we take that memory out of the locker and expose it to view, we make some tiny alteration to it. And so the stories we tell most often about our lives are likely to be the least reliable, because we will have subtly amended them in every retelling down the years.
— Read on www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/16/we-remember-as-true-things-that-never-even-happened-julian-barnes-on-memory-and-changing-his-mind
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