Because I don’t.
I remember events from my childhood (and more recent events) in the third person. Very emotional or intense events I remember in the first person (especially sexual encounters) but my random everyday memories are almost always in the third person, as if watching a film of the event.
What about you?
First person. Third person seems much harder. What was I wearing? I probably didn’t even know then. I still don’t really know what I look like or sound like to third parties today.
I remember this being mentioned in a thread a few months ago how people could remember past events in 3rd person but not in 1st. I think the poster **Alistair McCello ** brought this up.
I remember things in the 3rd too. Definitely a fascinating subject. Do we have any psychology professionals here who could chime in on the reasoning? (if it is even known. I smell an open thesis topic…)
Some of the things I “remember” in third person are stories about myself that I was told, or memories sparked by photos. Not necessarily manufactured memories, because these things did happen, but I’m remembering them through someone else, so to speak.
Does that make any sense?
Surely if it’s in the third person then you are not remembering in the sense of replaying stored vision from an event. You are replaying stored vision that you have manufactured to fit an event. A third person memory must be highly unreliable!
I remember them in the first person. I’m with Shagnasty I don’t remember too much about myself so I would have to invent that part. I just replay what I saw and heard at the time and how it made me feel or react. I don’t re-arrange the whole thing like a stage play from another point of view. A lot of times I wouldn’t even remember my own reaction at the time because I’m having a new reaction from my present point of view. The only time I really remember my own actions is if I’m reflecting on them from someone else’s point of view to judge my own actions but that’s not the same as reminiscing and I don’t think of that as having a memory.
Oh yes, I agree. It is entirely unreliable. For example, I know I got a Super Nintendo for christmas in 1992 the same way that I know the D-Day invasion occured. I may as well have studied the book of my life rather than experienced it.
This is only with long-term memories though. I can remember maybe the last week or two in first person. Odd…
This is very hard to answer with all that much accuracy. If you can accept the viewpoint from which I see the events of my past as well as my dreams (which I believe include replays of things in my past) then I’m predominantly first person in how things are visualized. I tend to see out of my own eyes rather than looking down (or in) on events taking place. Not that there aren’t plenty of exceptions, and not that there aren’t shiftings in point of view, but the main POV for me is out onto the world around me, which I take to be roughly the same as first person.
It’s almost always the case that when I hear things in my mind’s ear it’s my hearing of events’ sounds as they are happening to me and not to someone else. Again, there are some exceptions but not nearly as many as with the vision portion of my memory.
If I were pressed to apply percentages to these components of memory (and I can’t even think of sensations that are not either sight or sound as far as first vs. third person goes – they’re all first person), I’d say for Visual it’s 60-70% first, and for Auditory it’s 80-90% first.
I’d be curious to know the currently accepted view of what a larger percentage of third person signifies.
Yes, it does. And I can sympathize with that thing about “manufactured memories” because when I try to remember things that happened before I was in school, most of the clear “memories” of those years are based on photos of myself or, to a lesser extent, on recall of stories told me about myself. Whatever my memory has stored of actual first person experiences from those first five or six years it has fused with the “manufactured” ones.
My memories are almost exclusively first person. But I have some very old memories from 1, 2, 3 years old or so that are in the third person. I’m pretty sure that these are “memories of memories”, though, and not really the same as “real” memories, whatever those are. They aren’t based on pictures or anything, just that I remembered some even when I was four, and then later, after the original memory was gone, remembered remembering it. Actually that happens to this day – my memories getting replaced by memories of memories – I can only assume that when I’m forty most of my pre-twenty memories will be of this nature… but what the hell, I don’t know.
Memory confuses me.
My memories are exclusively first-person, as far as I can tell. The fact that my memories tend to be anchored much more in smell, taste, and touch than in sight may contribute to that–those senses don’t translate well to a third-person perspective.