"For life is but a dream whose shapes return, Some frequently, some seldom, some by night And some by day, some night and day: we learn, The while all change and many vanish quite, In their recurrence with recurrent changes A certain seeming order; where this ranges We count things real; such is memory's might."

"Memory, in widow's weeds, with naked feet stands on a tombstone."

"Forsan et hæc olim meminisse juvabit."

"Quique sui memores alios fecere merendo."

"Ah! memories of sweet summer eves, Of moonlit wave and willowy way, Of stars and flowers, and dewy leaves, And smiles and tones more dear than they!"

"The sense of smell can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back pictures as sharp as photographs of scenes that had left the conscious mind."

"It is possible for one with a well-trained memory to compose clearly in an organized fashion on several different subjects. Once one has the all-important starting-place of the ordering scheme and the contents firmly in their places within it, it is quite possible to move back and forth from one distinct composition to another without losing one's place or becoming confused."

"Since each phantasm is a combination not only of the neutral form of the perception, but of our response to it (intentio) concerning whether it is helpful or hurtful, the phantasm by its very nature evokes emotion. This is how the phantasm and the memory which stores it helps to cause or bring into being moral excellence and ethical judgement.[28]"

"One must have a rigid, easily retained order, with a definite beginning. Into this order one places the components of what one wishes to memorize and recall. As a money-changer ("nummularium") separates and classifies his coins by type in his money bag ("sacculum," "marsupium"), so the contents of wisdom's storehouse ("thesaurus," "archa"), which is the memory, must be classified according to a definite, orderly scheme."

"A long text must always be broken up into short segments, numbered, then memorized a few pieces at a time."

"Even what we hear must be attached to a visual image. To help recall something we have heard rather than seen, we should attach to their words the appearance, facial expression, and gestures of the person speaking as well as the appearance of the room. The speaker should therefore create strong visual images, through expression and gesture, which will fix the impression of his words. All the rhetorical textbooks contain detailed advice on declamatory gesture and expression; this underscores the insistence of Aristotle, Avicenna, and other philosophers, on the primacy and security for memory of the visual over all other sensory modes, auditory, tactile, and the rest."

"Attentional focus on one coherent scene does not in itself explain how a complex sequence can be recalled. To understand that, one must take into account that the focus of attention can shift from one level of analysis to another. Cowan: The magical number 4 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2001) 24:1 93 McLean and Gregg (1967, p. 459) described a hierarchical organization of memory in a serial recall task with long lists of consonants: “At the top level of the hierarchy are those cueing features that allow S to get from one chunk to another. At a lower level, within chunks, additional cues enable S to produce the integrated strings that become his overt verbal responses.”"

"Broadbent (1975) noted that the ability to recall items from an array grows with the visual field duration: “for the first fiftieth of a second or so the rate of increase in recall is extremely fast, and after that it becomes slower.” He cites Sperling’s (1967) argument that in the early period, items are read in parallel into some visual store; but that, after it fills up, additional items can be recalled only if some items are read (more slowly) into a different, perhaps articulatory store. Viewed in this way, the visual store would have a capacity of three to five items, given that the performance function rapidly increases for that number of items. However, the “visual store” could be a central capacity limit (assumed here to be the focus of attention) rather than visually specific as the terminology used by Sperling seems to imply."

"The ability to apprehend a small number of items at one time in the conscious mind can be distinguished from the need to attend to items individually when a larger number of such items are presented. This point is one of the earliest to be noted in psychological commentaries on the limitations in capacity. Hamilton (1859) treated this topic at length and noted (vol. 1, p. 254) that two philosophers decided that six items could be apprehended at once, whereas at least one other (Abraham Tucker) decided that four items could be apprehended. He went on to comment: “The opinion [of six] appears to me correct. You can easily make the experiment for yourselves, but you must be aware of grouping the objects into classes. If you throw a handful of marbles on the floor, you will find it difficult to view at once more than six, or seven at most, without confusion; but if you group them into twos, or threes, or fives, you can comprehend as many groups as you can units; because the mind considers these groups only as units, – it views them as wholes, and throws their parts out of consideration. You may perform the experiment also by an act of imagination.” When the experiment actually was conducted, however, it showed that Hamilton’s estimate was a bit high. Many studies have shown that the time needed to count a cluster of dots or other such small items rises very slowly as the number of items increases from one to four, and rises at a much more rapid rate after that. Jevons (1871) was probably the first actual study, noting that Hamilton’s conjecture was “one of the very few points in psychology which can, as far as we yet see, be submitted to experiment.” He picked up handfuls of beans and threw them into a box, glancing at them briefly and estimating their number, which was then counted for comparison. After over a thousand trials, he found that numbers up to four could be estimated perfectly, and up to five with very few errors"

"Other theorists (Hummel & Holyoak 1997; Shastri & Ajjanagadde 1993) have applied this neural synchronization principle in a way that is more abstract. It can serve as an alternative compatible with Halford et al.’s (1998) basic notion of a limit on the complexity of relations between concepts, though Halford et al. instead worked with a more symbolically based model in which “the amount of information that can be represented by a single vector is not significantly limited, but the number of vectors that can be bound in one representation of a relation is limited” (p. 821). Shastri and Ajjanagadde (1993) formulated a physiological theory of working memory very similar to Lisman and Idiart (1995), except that the theory was meant to explain “a limited-capacity dynamic working memory that temporarily holds information during an episode of reflexive reasoning” (p. 442), meaning reasoning that can be carried out “rapidly, spontaneously, and without conscious effort” (p. 418). The information was said to be held as concepts or predicates that were in the form of complex chunks; thus, it was cautioned, “note that the activation of an entity together with all its active superconcepts counts as only one entity” (p. 443). It was remarked that the bound on the number of entities in working memory, derived from facts of neural oscillation, falls in the 7 6 2 range; but the argument was not precise enough to distinguish that from the lower estimate offered in the present paper. Hummel and Holyoak (1997) brought up similar concepts in their theory of thinking with analogies. They defined “dynamic binding” (a term that Shastri & Ajjanagadde also relied upon to describe how entities came about) as a situation in which “units representing case roles are temporarily bound to units representing the fillers of those roles” (p. 433). They estimated the limit of dynamic binding links as “between four and six” (p. 434). In both the approaches of Shastri and Ajjanagadde (1993) and Hummel and Holyoak (1997), these small limits were supplemented with data structures in long term memory or “static bindings” that appear to operate in the same manner as the long-term working memory of Ericsson and Kintsch (1995), presumably providing the “active superconcepts” that Shastri and Ajjanagadde mentioned."

"One need not be a Chamber - to be Haunted - One need not be a House - The Brain has Corridors - surpassing Material Place -"

"Human beings are so constituted that we take for granted the fact that a direct awareness of our past selves is preserved... We take for granted the durability of the individual self. ...But ...the preservation of memories ...is as great an exercise in magic as the transfer of memories from the dead to the living. ...How the magic works ...is still a dark mystery. ...When once the technology exists to read and write memories from one mind to another, the age of mental exploration will begin in earnest. ...[W]e will look at nature directly through the eyes of the elephant, the eagle and the whale. We will... feel in our own minds the pride of the peacock and the wrath of the lion. That magic is no greater than the magic that enables me to see the rocking horse through the eyes of the child who rode it sixty years ago."

"Vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs."

"μεταβάλλει δυσδαιμονία:"

"Infants devote more visual fixation to novel than to previously exposed targets, thereby indicating both discriminative ability and recognition memory. Since the earliest demonstrations of infants' preferences for novel visual stimulation (Fantz 1964; Saayman, Ames, & Moffett 1964), a number of explorations of infant recognition memory have been conducted. Variables studied have included age (Fagan, Fantz, & Miranda 1971; Wetherford & Cohen 1973), dcegree and type of stimulus variation (Cohen & caron 1968; Fagan 1970, 1971, 1973; Pancratz & Cohen 1970), sources of forgetting (Fagan 1973), and conceptual development (Caron, Caron, Caldwell, & Weiss 1973; Fagan 1972)."

"When we are gone our book is closed, it goes on a shelf. We live only in memories until the people who remember us are also gone."

"We have all forgot more than we remember."

"Counterfactual imaginings are known to have far-reaching implications. In the present experiment, we ask if imagining events from one's past can affect memory for childhood events. We draw on the social psychology literature showing that imagining a future event increases the subjective likelihood that the event will occur. The concepts of cognitive availability and the source-monitoring framework provide reasons to expect that imagination may inflate confidence that a childhood event occurred. However, people routinely produce myriad counterfactual imaginings (i.e., daydreams and fantasies) but usually do not confuse them with past experiences. To determine the effects of imagining a childhood event, we pretested subjects on how confident they were that a number of childhood events had happened, asked them to imagine some of those events, and then gathered new confidence measures. For each of the target items, imagination inflated confidence that the event had occurred in childhood. We discuss implications for situations in which imagination is used as an aid in searching for presumably lost memories."

"Working memory is a fundamental aspect of executive cognition that is thought to encompass three primary mental processes: 1) the access of information, 2) “on-line” operation(s) on this information, and 3) the production of a motor output response based on these operations (Goldman-Rakic, 1987). At present, several distinct theoretical conceptualizations of working memory exist within the cognitive science literature (reviewed in Kimberg, D’Esposito, & Farah, 1998). This lack of consensus may be due, in part, to the functional complexity of working memory, which includes aspects of rehearsal, maintenance, short term storage, attention, and executive control (Kimberg, et al., 1998). Working memory is widely accepted as being dependent on the lateral frontal cortex (Fuster, 1997; Goldman-Rakic, 1987; Owen, et al., 1998; 1999; Owen, 2000), and plays an important role in the temporal coordination of guided behavior via the perception-action cycle (Fuster, 2000). Immediate serial recall and memory span tasks are two common tools used to assess working memory in humans (Baddeley, 1996). In such tasks, the participant is presented with a series of stimuli, and required to recall this stimulus string in sequential order (Baddeley, 1996). In these tasks, the likelihood of correct recall is directly related to the length of the stimulus string, and by manipulating the length of this string, the participant’s working memory capacity (memory span) can be assessed (Baddeley, 1996)."

"Remembrance wakes with all her busy train, Swells at my breast, and turns the past to pain."

"Where'er I roam, whatever realms to see, My heart untravell'd fondly turns to thee; Still to my brother turns, with ceaseless pain, And drags at each remove a lengthening chain."

"In two experiments, subjects heard simple action statements (e.g., “Break the toothpick”), and, in some conditions, they also performed the action or imagined performing the action. In a second session that occurred at a later point (10 min, 24 h, 1 week, or 2 weeks later), subjects imagined performing actions one, three, or five times. Some imagined actions represented statements heard, imagined, or performed in the first session, whereas other statements were new in the second session. During a third (test) phase, subjects were instructed to recognize statements only if they had occurred during the first session and, if recognized, to tell whether the action statement had been carried out, imagined, or merely heard. The primary finding was that increasing the number of imaginings during the second session caused subjects to remember later that they had performed an action during the first session when in fact they had not (imagination inflation). This outcome occurred both for statements that subjects had heard but not performed during the first session and for statements that had never been heard during the first session. The results are generally consistent with Johnson, Hashtroudi, and Lindsay’s (1993) source monitoring framework and reveal a powerful memory illusion: Imagining performance of an action can cause its recollection as actually having been carried out."

"We ought, then, to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in memory. And we shall do so if we establish similitudes as striking as possible; if we set up images that are not many or vague but active; if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we ornament some of them, as with crowns or purple cloaks, so that the similitude may be more distinct to us; or if we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud and smeared with red paint, so that its form is more striking, or by assigning certain comic effects to our images, for that, too, will ensure our remembering them more readily."

"We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us."

"It is important to state here -- though evidence will be considered in detail later on -- that all three women have either had "dreams" or normal recollections of having been shown, at later times, tiny offspring whose appearance suggests they are something other than completely human that they are in fact hybrids, partly human and partly what we must call, for want of a better term, alien. It is unthinkable and unbelievable -- yet the evidence points in that direction. An ongoing and systematic breeding experiment must be considered one of the central purposes of UFO abductions."

"I am wading in the ruins of was."

"In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting. ... If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take as long for us to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of the facts which filled them. ... A thing forgotten on one day will be remembered on the next. Something we have made the most strenuous efforts to recall, but all in vain, will, soon after... saunter into the mind... [T]he sphere of possible recollection may be wider than we think, and... apparent oblivion is no proof against possible recall under other conditions. ... [M]ost of what happens actually is forgotten. ... When memory begins to decay, proper names are what go first ...[[wikt:common#Adjective|[C]ommon]] qualities and names have contracted an infinitely greater number of associations ...than the names of most of the persons ...Their memory is better organized. ...'Organization' means numerous associations; and the more numerous the associations, the greater the number of paths of recall. For the same reason... words... which form the grammatical framework of all our speech, are the very last to decay. ... We have ...as M. Ribot says, not memory so much as memories. The visual... tactile... muscular... auditory memory may all vary independently... and different individuals may have them developed in different degrees. As a rule, a man’s memory is good in the departments in which his interest is strong; but those departments are apt to be those in which his discriminative sensibility is high. ...[D]ifferences in men’s imagining power... the machinery of memory must be largely determined thereby. ... Mr. Galton ...in his English Men of Science, has given ...cases showing individual variations in the type of memory... Some have it verbal. Others... for facts and figures, others for form. Most say... [it] must first be rationally conceived and assimilated. ... Setting the mind to remember... involves a continual minimal irradiation of excitement into paths which lead thereto... the continued presence of the thing in the 'fringe' of our consciousness. Letting the thing go involves withdrawal of the irradiation, unconsciousness of the thing, and... obliteration of the paths. ... [T]hings are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. ...[I]t pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again."

"For all of us, explicit memory makes it possible to leap across space and time and conjure up events and emotional states that have vanished into the past yet somehow continue to live in our minds."

"Whereas memories of events and public records are potentially faithful impressions of what happened at a particular place and a particular time, autobiographical memories and personal diaries "...are infused with the idiosyncratic perspectives emotions, and thoughts of the person doing the remembering" (Wheeler, 2000, p. 597)."

""The horror of that moment," the King went on, "I shall never, never forget!" "You will, though," the Queen said, "if you don't make a memorandum of it." - Lewis Carroll, from Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1872/1982, p. 94, emphasis in original) In his brief dialogue between the King and the Queen - two of the chess piece sovereigns of the Looking Glass House - Lewis Carroll captured the complementary sides of the coin we term memory The King, having experienced a "horrifying" event (being set on a table by Alice, a relative giant whom the King could neither see nor hear), expresses absolute faith in the durability of memory. The Queen, in contrast, presents a less flattering view of the capacity: that without some intervention (a memorandum), even a salient event will be forgotten. In a rare instance, the reality experienced by the King and Queen on their side of the looking glass is reflected on the drawing room side as well. Memory is at times seemingly and at other times frustratingly fallible. What is at times seemingly indelible and at other times frustratingly fallible. What is more, in true looking glass fashion, the same past experience can at one moment impinge on consciousness unbidden and at another elude deliberate attempts to recollect it."

"I am a miser of my memories of you And will not spend them."

"When you've played a memory over and over in your head a few hundred times, it becomes difficult to know what you actually saw at the time and what details your mind has edited in after the fact."

"Memory is the storehouse in which the substance of our knowledge is treasured up."

"The purpose of this review is to evaluate the effects of chronic stress on hippocampal-dependent function, based primarily upon studies using young, adult male rodents and spatial navigation tasks. Despite this restriction, variability amongst the findings was evident and how or even whether chronic stress influenced spatial ability depended upon the type of task, the dependent variable measured and how the task was implemented, the type and duration of the stressors, housing conditions of the animals that include accessibility to food and cage mates, and duration from the end of the stress to the start of behavioral assessment. Nonetheless, patterns emerged as follows: For spatial memory, chronic stress impairs spatial reference memory and has transient effects on spatial working memory. For spatial learning, however, chronic stress effects appear to be task-specific: chronic stress impairs spatial learning on appetitively motivated tasks, such as the radial arm maze or holeboard, tasks that evoke relatively mild to low arousal components from fear. But under testing conditions that evoke moderate to strong arousal components from fear, such as during radial arm water maze testing, chronic stress appears to have minimal impairing effects or may even facilitate spatial learning. Chronic stress clearly impacts nearly every brain region and thus, how chronic stress alters hippocampal spatial ability likely depends upon the engagement of other brain structures during behavioral training and testing."

"It is therefore necessary that memorable things should be committed to writing, (the witness of times, the light and the life of truth,) and not wholly betaken [i.e., committed] to slippery memory which seldom yields a certain reckoning."

"We are all the sum of our memories, after all."