I can say with absolute certainty that from this moment forth your life will be divided into two sections. That before which you heard this choir sing, and that after.
And when I think about that particular time in my life, I don't know, I just felt like that was Peter. That was this stage where you're looking back at the things and the places that you've been, and you don't know how to define them to move forward.
Most of us think of our brains as recorders of experience — cameras that capture life as it is. But the brain is less like a camera and more like an editor, constantly making choices about what to include and what to cut. It doesn't just record what happens to us; it constructs a version of reality shaped by our expectations, our desires, and our fears.
Most of us have encountered the idea of the bell curve. Average is the most common outcome. Very good or very bad outcomes are rarer. Extremely good or extremely bad outcomes are rarest of all. But Yadin Dudai says our emotional memories don't follow a bell curve — instead, they skew toward the extremes.
We don't just want people to know us — we want to feel known by them. And one of the most powerful ways to feel known is to have someone remember the small details of our lives: the name of our dog, the fact that we hate cilantro, the thing we mentioned once about our complicated relationship with our mother.
Most of us think of nostalgia as a kind of pleasant but passive experience — a wistful longing for the past. But researchers have found that nostalgia is actually a social emotion. When we feel nostalgic, we don't just think about ourselves; we think about the people we love.
For many of us, forgetting a name or losing your keys feels like a small failure. But what if forgetting is actually one of the most important things your brain does?
I would watch the bands from a window in the kitchen. You know, I would like peek out as a 13-, 14-, 15-year-old working weekends and summers making fruit cup and salads, and, you know, I played high school football, but I had red fingernails from the cherries that I put on the fruit cups.
What if the problem is not so much about how unreliable eyewitness memory is, because of how easily contamination can create false memories, and more about how and when we test the witness's memory.
5mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
