Ways of Knowing (3)MEMORY AND IMAGINATION

Memory The wide plains of my memory and its innumerable caverns and hollows are full beyond measure of countless things of all kinds. Material things are there by means of their images; knowledge is there of itself; emotions are there in the form of ideas or impressions of some kind, for the memory retains them even while the mind does not experience them, although whatever is in the memory must also be in the mind. My mind has the freedom of them all. I can glide from one to the other. I can probe deep into them and never find the end of them. This is the power of memory! This is the great force of life in living man, mortal though he is!

St Augustine, Confessions - Book X

How are memories created? Sense Perception Language Emotion

What do we mean by memorisation?

Procedural memory

Personal Memory and Knowledge

Why do I know

•Which vegetables I prefer?

•Which park I prefer to walk in?

•Where I like to go on holiday?

•The lyrics or tune of a song?

•How I felt yesterday?

Imagine suddenly you suffered from amnesia. Would you know any of this?

Personal and Shared Memory How do you know that men landed on the moon?

•Saw the first images?

•Read about it?

•Been told about it?

•Are you alone in remembering this?

•How much detail do you remember?

(Apollo 11 was the spaceflight that landed the first humans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon on July 20, 1969?

Cultural and Shared Memory Memories of significant events

oHiroshimaoThe HolocaustoVietnamoThe Blitz

Cultural heritageoTraditions oTrades and skillsoLanguages?

The storage of collective Memory•Story telling and ballad singing (Oral tradition)

•Passing on orally

•Writing

•Books

•Newspapers

•Recordings

•Libraries and Archives

•The Internet

The Reliability of Memory?oTransience (the passage of time)oAbsent-mindednessoTemporary inability to recalloSuggestibility and biasoMisattribution oAmnesiaoAlzheimer's and other forms of dementia

Memory and testimony “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

Strengths and weaknesses of memory

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures,. The memory is sometimes so retentive, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligencesso serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

Imagination Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is

limited. Imagination encircles the world. Einstein

Imagination and creativity A work of the imagination (a deliberate creative act)

Imagination and creativity A work of the imagination (a deliberate creative act)

The dangers of imagination An over active imagination – what are the

consequences?

o“Imaginative children may be more prone to anxiety

attacks, a new book has suggested”

oOver-reaction

oBlurring of reality and the imagined

oFantasy (Think back to the reliability of a witness)

The Power of Imagination I have always been fascinated to imagine the uncertain circumstance in which our ancestors – still barely different from animals, the language that allowed them to communicate with one another just recently born – in caves, around fires, on nights seething with the menace of lightning bolts, thunder claps, and growling beasts, began to invent and tell stories. That was the crucial moment in our destiny, because in those circles of primitive beings held by the voice and fantasy of the storyteller, civilization began, the long passage that gradually would humanize us and lead us to invent the autonomous individual, then disengage him from the tribe, devise science, the arts, law, freedom, and to scrutinize the innermost recesses of nature, the human body, space, and travel to the stars.

Mario Vargas Llosa – Nobel Prize acceptance speech 2010

The power of imagination Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and, therefore, the foundation of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and relevetory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

J. K. Rowling, Harvard Commencement Address, 2008

Imagination in Business Title of article in Forbes Magazine 7/26/2014:

Today, Imagination Is The Most Important Business Skill. Here's Why:

“From lights out manufacturing to 3D printing, the biggest challenge for young professionals today is how not to get replaced by a robot.”

Imagination in Science and Medicine

The best medicine is not just scientific and rational, it is also imaginative,

empathetic, adaptive to social and political needs and culturally specific. It

works with the grain of psychology rather than against it, and is where science

meets humanity, where reason takes the fears and deep-held beliefs of the

individuals it treats into account. The fight against this new onslaught of TB

cannot just be fought by science; we need inventiveness and a spirit of

adventure as well. http://newint.org/blog/2011/12/19/hiv-tb-medicine-south-africa/

To conclude ........“Memory and imagination help [a man]as he works. Not only his

own thoughts, but the thoughts of the men of past ages guide his

hands; and, as a part of the human race, he creates.” William Morris

“Memory feeds imagination” Amy Tan

“Memory is imagination in reverse.” Stephen Evans