How could you forget? The mysterious, mischievous memory-machine

Whether we are trying to pull off a pickle recipe for our family or trying to impress a gathering with a well-timed joke, a large chunk of our daily cognitive, social, and communicative activities are invested towards making memories, and retrieving old ones. It is safe to assume that one cannot study memory sans a study of forgetting, that commemoration may also be complexly shaped by forms of oblivion or even erasure. Elizabeth Loftus’ neuroscientific work on memory, misinformation, and punitive processes foregrounds how frequently false memories may be planted, sometimes through strategic interrogation techniques that may be racially or socially biased. The reconsolidation theory As Joseph LeDoux theorises, the reconstruction model of memory may be replaced by reconsolidation, whereby what one retrieves at each recall may not be the original memory of the original experience but the last remembered version of the same, each recall being profoundly and complexly shaped by the environment around the remembering subject. Frederic Bartlett’s example of memory schema is a perfect example of the same whereby a group of Cambridge students were made to read a native-American fable and asked to re-write the same multiple times from their original memory and the results revealed how the rewritings became increasingly ‘infected’ by the cultural and social location and biases of the remembering and rewriting subject to the point that the final draft of the story incorporated many elements from Anglo-American cultural contexts while effacing and erasing elements from the original native-American legend.