lives in a permanent present- he is indeed a prisoner limited to a brief island of consciousness in the sea of amnesia.
p12-one possibility is that the experience of having breakfast never registers in his brain; in other words no memory grace is laid down. a second possibility is that a trace is laid down, but faded away very rapidly. A third possibility is that the memory trace is there, but cannot be accessed or retrieved. The memory trace may be like a book in a library with no catalogue system.
p16- referred to as echoic memory, since it is rather like an echo lingering on after the item has been spoken.
p19- some theorists claim that information in memory never disappears, but simply becomes less and less accessible.
p23- how long is the present? A minute ? A second ? A millisecond ? Or is infinitesimally small?
p24- the concept of limited consciousness is closely related to but not identical with the concept of short term memory... It is as if the system can grasp fleeting ideas which would otherwise slip into oblivion, hold them, relate them and manipulate them for its own purposes.
Chapter 7 Repression
p.155
(Sigmund) Freud suggested that a good deal of everyday forgetting might have its origin in the repression of events associated with anxiety.
Forgetting what is unpleasant
p. 157-Freudian theory suggests that incidents associated with pain are forgotten more readily than those associated with pleasure… a related question is whether pain is remembered as being less intense than it really was.
(in a study, women were asked to rate the memory of their pain during childbirth over time. The results showed that the pain faded away as time goes on.) p. 158-Is this characteristic of all memories of pain, or is it limited to the pain experienced during a childbirth?
Multiple Personality
p.161- An even more extreme example of repression occurs in multiple personality, in which one person will on different occasions adopt two, and sometimes even more, mutually exclusive personalities.
p.162-At a more subtle level it is likely that when he is thinking about certain events or people that are remotely related to the source of his anxiety, he will find this unpleasant and direct his memory search elsewhere… The validity of such methods has come under close scrutiny in recent years, with many claims of child abuse following the uncovering of ‘repressed’ memories during therapy.
Child Abuse
p.163- In recent years it has been tragically clear that child abuse is much more than a fantasy in the minds of patients undergoing therapy.
p.169- There is no doubt that cases of child abuse do occur, and it seems probable that the memory of these is sometimes repressed.
Chapter 12 Memory in Childhood
p. 292 The importance of children as witnesses has increased in recent years as the extent of child abuse has become more fully realised.