💬 Remembering the past through photos

This reminds me of Clive Thompson’s discussion of memory in his book Smarter Than You Think. From memory his discovery is that our memory is never as good as we think:

Our brains are remarkably bad at remembering details. They’re great at getting the gist of something, but they consistently muff the specifics. Whenever we read a book or watch a TV show or wander down the street, we extract the meaning of what we see—the parts of it that make sense to us and fit into our overall picture of the world—but we lose everything else, in particular discarding the details that don’t fit our predetermined biases. This sounds like a recipe for disaster, but scientists point out that there’s an upside to this faulty recall. If we remembered every single detail of everything, we wouldn’t be able to make sense of anything. Forgetting is a gift and a curse: by chipping away at what we experience in everyday life, we leave behind a sculpture that’s meaningful to us, even if sometimes it happens to be wrong.Page 28