digs
April 18, 2020, 2:16pm
841
I was thinking about this thread, and poof it appeared! In a MPSIMS thread, I replied to someone’s “I have this memory, but found out it’s not true” post… well, here’s my whole reply, because it does apply to the latest “I vividly remember it happening”:
I have memories like this, where once I dig up old facts I realize it could NOT have happened the way I clearly remember it.
In fact, there’s a book “So Long, See You Tomorrow” that deals with this. A boy grows up with a memory of playing in a neighbor’s house under construction, with snowflakes falling. Goes back as an adult, and the homeowners are puzzled: “We built this house in the summer, construction was May to August.”
Memories like these have gotten me to research the nature of how we store and retrieve memories. It’s not pulling a paper from a file cabinet, it’s more like sifting through a pile of scraps of paper and trying to reconstruct a memory. We pull scraps that someone has told us about, others from the wrong event, and some that our brains have just made up, for fun.