Memories

The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
- Vladimir Nabokov

Memory Lane Has a Three-Way Fork

"In his magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust wrote that “remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”  

That elegant line speaks to a simple truth: There are things you remember, and there are things you remember well. Even if you can recall a past event, your memories will vary considerably in how much detail they contain, and how correct those details are. In an elegant experiment, a team of neuroscientists led by Jon Simons at the University of Cambridge have shown that these aspects of our memories—our success at recalling them, their precision, and their vividness—depend on three different parts of the brain."

(Image: Matthew Whitney)