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I think we all take memories in different ways. Mine are alot like yours sometimes. Music is a very strong trigger for me. I can listen to a song that takes me back to a place and time that I can almost reach out and touch – but I often need that song to make me remember the details – the song is a prompt just like a blog post or a journal or some paper I wrote in college. (In fact, my ultimate idea for a podcast is “A Song and A Story.” To bad I could never afford the broadcast rights for the music to go with the stories.)

My memories are more focused on feelings – sensations. Rarely are they focused on ideas. Why? Well – I think because sometimes I look back and think “how could you have thought about something this way?” My ideas are always changing. They are formed by the ideas of others around you. The conversations you have. The successes, and the failures. Everything changes all the time.

I just feel myself lucky to be surrounded by such big thinkers that are so willing to share their thoughts. Thanks.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic lately as I move through Bruner’s book on narrative. He pulls back from his earlier points a little at the end, but that notwithstanding, the idea here is that narrative and fact find their provisional but crucial meeting in the law. That’s where the issue of false memory syndrome becomes not a matter of individual cognition and perspectivism but a matter of public ethicial judgment. If I “remember” something someone did to me, and they did not in fact do it, I have not only erased their agency, I have put them in jeopardy. And I have probably evaded some fact about myself I desperately need to confront.

The law, Bruner suggests, is where our narratives must meet and be trusted as fact, in a process that signifies and enacts, as much as imperfect humans can, fairness. Rich topic to explore here. Bruner begins the conversation, but he doesn’t end it….