Wax or Digestion: Which Best Explains Memory?
Memory is an extremely complex function which scientists and philosophers have been trying to explain since ancient times. Throughout the years they have been attempting to devise an effective analogy to explain memory, with varying effectiveness. One of these analogies comes from Plato in his works Theaetetus and Phaedrus, in which he compares memory to a block of wax on which we imprint our experiences. Another analogy comes from Mary Carruthers in her book The Book of Memory: A Study in Medieval Culture. Carruthers compares memory to rumination, implying we digest our experiences and make them our own in a sense. The most important distinction between Carruthers’s idea of memory as digestion …show more content…
She bases her analogy on the practices of medieval monks, who read and then reflected on the scriptures they dealt with. Unlike Plato and his contemporaries, the monks would attempt to make the texts personal and often change them in some way. Carruthers describes this practice as similar to “…a cow chewing her cud, or like a bee making honey from the nectar of flowers,” (Carruthers 51). She explains this by saying that the monks break down the text they are reading and internalize it, which is strikingly similar to the process of digestion. This analogy is accurate to what psychologists have discovered as it recognizes that memory is personal. Carruthers’s describes someone recollecting a text as its “re-author,” (Carruthers 54). When someone remembers an experience, they are essentially remembering it in the way they interpreted it, not exactly as it occurred. They essentially re-write the experience using their own lens. Viewing recollecting as rewriting explains how people can so often misremember events and the circumstances surrounding them. The main weakness in Carruthers’s analogy is that it assumes everything human beings remember is subsequently digested and reinterpreted. Many memories are simply facts. Disciplines such as math and science require the accurate memorization of facts, serving as evidence that not all human memories involve “re-authoring.” The analogy of memory as digestion is strong in its representation of remembering experiences but leaves a little to be desired when it comes to remembering
Memory is an extremely complex function which scientists and philosophers have been trying to explain since ancient times. Throughout the years they have been attempting to devise an effective analogy to explain memory, with varying effectiveness. One of these analogies comes from Plato in his works Theaetetus and Phaedrus, in which he compares memory to a block of wax on which we imprint our experiences. Another analogy comes from Mary Carruthers in her book The Book of Memory: A Study in Medieval Culture. Carruthers compares memory to rumination, implying we digest our experiences and make them our own in a sense. The most important distinction between Carruthers’s idea of memory as digestion …show more content…
She bases her analogy on the practices of medieval monks, who read and then reflected on the scriptures they dealt with. Unlike Plato and his contemporaries, the monks would attempt to make the texts personal and often change them in some way. Carruthers describes this practice as similar to “…a cow chewing her cud, or like a bee making honey from the nectar of flowers,” (Carruthers 51). She explains this by saying that the monks break down the text they are reading and internalize it, which is strikingly similar to the process of digestion. This analogy is accurate to what psychologists have discovered as it recognizes that memory is personal. Carruthers’s describes someone recollecting a text as its “re-author,” (Carruthers 54). When someone remembers an experience, they are essentially remembering it in the way they interpreted it, not exactly as it occurred. They essentially re-write the experience using their own lens. Viewing recollecting as rewriting explains how people can so often misremember events and the circumstances surrounding them. The main weakness in Carruthers’s analogy is that it assumes everything human beings remember is subsequently digested and reinterpreted. Many memories are simply facts. Disciplines such as math and science require the accurate memorization of facts, serving as evidence that not all human memories involve “re-authoring.” The analogy of memory as digestion is strong in its representation of remembering experiences but leaves a little to be desired when it comes to remembering