News, Memory, & Truth; Memory works better if you imagine what you want to achieve ($)

We must do more than remember.

“Life can only be understood backwards, but it can only be lived forwards.”
— Søren Kierkegaard

News, memory, and truth have little to do with each other. None of them stand up to scrutiny.

Our language fails to distinguish between the two radically different meanings of memory. We equate the meaning of the entirely different phrases, “Can you describe your feelings?” and “Can you recall how you felt?”

Requesting a description asks for a summary in terms of signs and signifiers. In contrast, asking you to recall how you felt could mean asking you to re-experience a past feeling, or to create in us what you felt. A description bears no more resemblance to a feeling than a label can be equated with a sensation.

A description is a communication made of things and actions. A sensation is a phenomenon that is experienced. It’s understandable that we should ask for a description to facilitate communication, but this doesn’t recreate the sensation. Partly because of this confusion we allow the feelings that other people create in us to define the signifiers we assign to them. For example, we might equate feeling proud with nationalism, or feeling hate with being at a disadvantage.

When you say that something was red, we accept that since we think red is a relatively constant thing. But when you say you felt angry, that is not something that anyone even attempts to either qualify or quantify. Aside from distinguishing between slightly angry and very angry, we have little clues as to its meaning.

There has been a rash of random, public shootings recently. If those shooters told us that they were “very angry,” would we have even the slightest understanding of what they were talking about? We would not.

News

There has lately been a fuss about the quality of the news. Low quality news annoys everyone who is trying to figure things out. We like to think that if the news is correct, then we can combine this with what we know to arrive at the truth. And with this truth, we can navigate the future. People seem to think that if we were better informed about the present, we’d be able to figure everything out.

We want to know the facts in order to record events properly. The facts are the events that caused things to happen and which, in a similar context, will cause the same things to happen again. I wonder if people would be as upset with their own memories if they understood how poorly we remember things.

In the 2017 article “The Influences of Emotion on Learning and Memory,” Chai Meei Tyng and colleagues report, “Emotional experiences/stimuli appear to be remembered vividly and accurately, with great resilience over time.”

I understand what vivid and resilient means with regard to memory, but what does “accurately” mean? It does not mean what you might suspect. It does not mean factually accurate, it means recollectively accurate. That is, you can better recall thoughts that triggered emotions than you can thoughts that did not. That does not imply these thoughts were accurate at the time or ever.

Memory