Memory is our past and future. To know who you are as a person, you need to have some idea of who you have been. Your remembered life story is a pretty good guide to what you will do tomorrow. "Our memory is our coherence," wrote the surrealist Spanish-born film-maker, Luis Buñuel, "our reason, our feeling, evens our action." Lose your memory and you lose a basic connection with who you are.[2]
Relations between memory and the self are framed from a number of perspectives—developmental aspects, forms of memory, interrelations between memory and the brain, and interactions between the environment and memory.[3]
What constitutes self?
The Self-memory System(SMS) is conceptual framework that emphasizes the interconnectedness of self and memory. Within this framework memory is viewed as the data base of the self. The SMS consists of two main components, the working self and the autobiographical knowledge base.[4]
In an interview with Neal Conan, Atlantic neuroscientist Daniel Levitin talks about the relationship between memory and self. He says the relationship goes back to John Locke, the philosopher who said our memories of our past are part of what gives us a sense of identity. There are many elements of what we mean by self. Psychologist Stan Klein, University of California of Santa Barbara distinguishes seven components of self. The four major ones include self-ownership/self-awareness, self-agency, self-reflection and personal temporality.
First there's self-awareness. That's the ability we have to recognize ourselves in a mirror or to recognize the parts of our body and know that they are ours. And separate from that we have a sense of agency or responsibility. You recognize that your body belongs to you and that you more or ...
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... to imitate the facial gestures of persons in their environment. These studies show that we are born into a natural intermodal visual-proprioceptual sensory motor linkage, an innate intermodal connection between self and other. This also suggests that infants, long before they have any primary or fully conscious notion of self, nonetheless have a rudimentary proprioceptive self, that is, a sense that involves one’s own sensory motor possibilities, body postures, and body powers. Further, since proprioceptive awareness is an awareness of a body that can only be of one’s own body. This Shaun Gallagher feels is consciousness. [9]
The Gibsonian theory looks at proprioception in a different way. According to Gibson, proprioception should be understood not as a special channel of sensations or as several of them, but as ‘ego-reception’, as ‘sensitivity to the self’.[10]
Primo Levi once said, " Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.." The memory of a human being is a fascinating matter, but it is not something that stays with us forever. Memories will often change or multiply with unnecessary information, but they are what define you as you.
Even our social interactions with others are dependent upon what we remember. In a sense it can be said that our identity relies on an intact memory, and the ability to remember who we are and the things that we have done. Almost everything we do depends on our ability to remember the past.
“Holding onto past memories helps humans avoid pain in the future. These experiences also help them make better decisions in the future.” (Kenny) Many people advise others to learn from the past and apply those memories so that you can effectively succeed by avoiding repeating past mistakes. On the contrary, people who get too caught up with the past are unable to move on to the future. Memories are the foundation of a person's mindset because what you make of them is entirely up to you.
Definition of memory and it's functions is difficult to illustrate by a single sentence. Consequently we use several metaphors to describe memory implicitly. Our beliefs, perceptions and imagination influence memory. The fact gave rise to memory being described as a reconstructive process, explaining that memory is not an exact record of a particular experience. Instead we bring various components together and fill in the blanks with our predisposed schemas while recalling.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi author has explained in the ‘What is the self’ about when the human born until death, there are always trying to better represent their ideal images and get more and more respect for the self in the world. At the beginning, the author had provided an example of the ocean having tremendous amounts of water, but water produces many hydrogen and oxygen, so it is the same thing as the human’s self-having numerous goals, thoughts or ideas that are organized in consciousness, sense that reification of the brain. The author has defined ‘self is the reification of an abstract idea which creates the emotions, thoughts, feelings and awareness all of these records in the human’s brain, but all ideas related to an object and also includes the personal exclusivity, goals, experiences, some psychological qualities, hobbies into self. “The author said that the self can be considered a hierarchy of goals because every human has made the own goals and they are using psychic energy to decide they want to go ahead in their life for the future and family. Meanwhile, some humans are always trying to display good self-reputation through their own images to reach goals, but they do not good behaving inside self-means they are thinking of the personal self.
Remembrance is an integral part of our everyday lives. Both pleasant and unpleasant memories shape who we are as human beings. The definition of memory is two fold 1. “the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information” and 2. “Something remembered from the past; a recollection” (Google Definition). The life of memory has three stages in which it is created. An event occurs in ones life it becomes encoded and stored in the brain. Following the encoding, the brain then has full access to retrieve the memory in a response to any current activity or thought. Memories are unique to each person. There are three main types of memories that are studied. An individual memory is one that is formed by his or her personal experiences. An institutional
Memory is the process of acquiring, storing and retrieving information. Memories sub-consciously influence the way we perceive novel situations in our environment as well as how we interpret future events. Memory is of the following types: Immediate, Short term, Long term and Specific
Atkinson, R.C. & Shiffrin, R.M. (1968). Human memory: A proposed system and its control process.
Johnstone, M., Primmer, J. (2014). [Lecture]. The Mind-Body Problem. PHILOS 1E03, Problems of Philosophy. Hamilton, ON, Canada: McMaster University.
Memory is the tool we use to learn and think. We all use memory in our everyday lives. Memory is the mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experiences. We all reassure ourselves that our memories are accurate and precise. Many people believe that they would be able to remember anything from the event and the different features of the situation. Yet, people don’t realize the fact that the more you think about a situation the more likely the story will change. Our memories are not a camcorder or a camera. Our memory tends to be very selective and reconstructive.
Identity can be defined as the way you perceive or define you, or whatever makes an entity definable and recognizable in terms of possessing a set of qualities or characteristics that distinguish it from other entities, or what makes me, me and you, you. In philosophy, identity is essentially sameness (Solomon, Higgins, Martin 296). In this sense, identity consists of what makes you a unique individual and distinguishes you from others. Identity is also how you define yourself and the structure of your life made up of learned values and principles. Self-identity is the way one characterizes oneself, either in general or in particular (Solomon, Higgins, Martin 285). Self-identity is what makes you the same person over time. In his Meditation VI, René Descartes states that self-identity hinges on consciousness and does not depend on our body staying the same, and that is why human identity is unlike the identity of anything else in existence (Solomon, Higgins, Martin 288). The philosophical problem of self-identity “is how to identify an individual as the same individual over time” (Solomon, Higgins, Martin 286). There are many different philosophical theories that attempt to solve the problem of self-identity. Despite memories being distorted and forgotten the best solution to the problem of self-identity is based on self-consciousness and not the substances of the soul or the body. The famous philosopher, John Locke sets forth a prime theory in his teachings of how to use consciousness and memories to answer the problem of self-identity.
Long-term memory is how humans process in the present, recall information from the past, or think about the future. Without long-term memory one cannot remember past memories, today, or what we may plan to do in the future. On top of that, there is no learning without long-term memory and the progress that we see today in our fast pace driven world would not exist. This is why the study and understanding of long-term memory is important for further knowledge of human nature. The long-term memory itself takes in many different forms of information including images, sounds, and meaning. The orientation of memory encompasses three important stages and the first is encoding. Encoding takes places in different locations inside the brain and this
Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third person consciousness” (110). Fanon describes how as a person he came into this world and his sense of self was transformed (Lecture, 2/9). He finds himself objectified through someone else’s eyes again and again. As a result, he is also hyperaware of his movements and sees himself from the view of those surrounding him.
Perception of one’s self begins early in life. For me, it began as being a little sister. My older sister was six when I was born and due to that age difference, was also a kind of parent to me. I knew I was to be the compliant, cute little sister and spent my younger years trying to live up to the little sister standard. It took years to develop what sisterhood really was into my self-concept.
In the following, I am going to talk about the self-concept. Self-concept suggested that there are different kinds of self, such as actual self, ideal self, physical self, public self and spiritual self (Buss, 2001).