STATE–BOUND MEMORIES

Only a tiny portion of what is in your mind right now is current thought. 99.999% of the contents of your subconscious mind consists of memories, memories of events, even memories of a bodily nature such as how to breathe, walk, pump your blood, fight off infection, etc..

Remembering is a living product of Desire, Attention, Insight and Consciousness.

How do we remember? Simonides, a Greek lyric poet who lived around 500 B.C., taught orators to remember their content and sequence for many hours of extemporaneous speaking. In both ancient Greece and Rome, people mentally located image–clues in various parts of remembered buildings and courtyards. This system was centrally important to the classical art of memory.

Much research has been done on how we store and retrieve memories, in particular by Ernest Rossi in his book titled The Psychobiology of Mind–Body Healing.

Modern Theories suggest that our memories are state bound. They are interlocked with innumerable other memories that are part of that particular incident or memory. These memories may manifest themselves as a taste, smell, picture, sound, feeling or emotion.

Reconstructing a memory is something like the game show Wheel of Fortune. As the game starts there are several sections of blank squares on the wall, each square representing a letter of the answer. Just as in memory recall, you start with some probable choices. Begin with the specific situation you want to recall and then try to fit probable events to it. You may try to first remember the year it occurred or possibly associate it with other remembered events. Once the establishing the time period you might try to remember the time of the year by the weather, the events happening relative to it, etc. Who was there? What was there? What was said or done? What were people wearing?

Memories can be visual, auditory, kinesthetic, gustatory or olfactory. It is interesting how a taste or a smell that is brought back to memory is so identifiable and in many cases even seems to register on these senses. Utilize not only physical details but emotional ones also. Emotions are very powerful in recalling charged events. In this manner we can reconstruct an event bit by bit until, just as in Wheel of Fortune, we finally reach that one letter (incident) that pushes us over the top and the balance of the event comes back.

As you piece together the events of a memory some will be recalled as a smell, a feeling, a taste, etc. A fascinating aspect of observing our abilities at recall is that once you go "Over the top" and recall the event, you usually recall additional details.

I was trying to remember the date that I withdrew some money from the ATM machine at the bank last week. I began by remembering what the weather was like that day. I remembered that it was raining that day and so I took the car instead of walking. It then occurred to me that I was also shopping supplies for the weekend and I was worried that the rain would ruin my plans. So I realized it was a Friday, and at that moment I remembered a whole list of things that happened on Friday. Recollection takes place by bringing in a bit of information at a time until sufficient memories are collected to enable the mind to remember the entire event. Ordinary forgetting does not imply stupidity, creeping senility or even not caring.

Nothing imparts a memory more strongly than the desire to forget

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