personal narrative

It is easy to accept that perception, memory and interpretation are imperfect in the abstract. The difficult part comes when a particular piece of evidence unsettles the account we have used for years to explain ourselves, another person or the course of our life.

Our life stories contain other people, but we rarely possess their full story. We observe behaviour, infer motives and assign meaning. Over time, those interpretations can become so familiar that we forget which parts were witnessed and which parts were supplied by us.

We do more than remember what happened. We organise events into an account that explains who we are, how we became that person and what kind of person we expect ourselves to be next. Identity shapes memory, but memory also helps maintain identity.

Memory feels like retrieval, as though the past has been stored somewhere intact. It is closer to reconstruction. Each act of remembering draws on surviving fragments, later knowledge, emotion and the meaning an event has acquired since it happened.

We tend to think memory is where our account of an event becomes unreliable. But the process begins earlier. Attention is selective, perception is incomplete, and two people can experience the same event while noticing very different things.