A history of memory

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/a-history-of-memory/4373748#transcript

metaphors for memory
Alison Winter:  There have always been models, metaphors for memory because it’s such an elusive thing and usually there are metaphors that have to do with writing or recording some kind of information storage to think about how the mind stores information. And at the turn of the century the dominant metaphor was the filing cabinet. There are also ancient metaphors that continue to be used like the wax tablet that you scratch, you scratch an impression into a wax tablet and over time that scratch gets scratched over by other things so your memory softens or becomes eroded. But the filing cabinet was a model that was quite common in this early time, the early 20^th century.
Lynne Malcolm:  In the early 1900s science began devising techniques to retrieve the truth and the idea of the truth serum came into play.
Alison Winter:  The irony about its history is that we now I think associate it with a kind of coercive interrogations of forcing someone to tell you something they don’t want to tell. But in the 1920s it was used in the hopes of correcting corrupt police practices and this truth serum, which was actually an obstetric drug, was thought to guarantee the testimony of people whose freedom was at risk. It was almost like it was a truth serum for society in the 20s, and the claim was that you would just be able to pull the drawer of the filing cabinet and rifle through anything that was inside.

rebirth
the story of Virgina Tighe and Bridey Murphy

Alison Winter:  One of the things that most interested me in my research is the relationship between recording technologies on the one hand and how they’ve been understood; and what you might call internal memory, memory within our minds. Because researchers on memory have tended to compare memory to whatever recording device was most exciting, or cutting edge at the time. So the story about the flashbulb has to do with the way that people took pictures with cameras in the 20^th century.
During my childhood there were many ads for cameras and film that talked about the Kodak moment you could take a picture of a moment in your family’s life that was on the one hand perfectly ordinary but on the other hand it would be absolutely unique and there would be this one special moment like the moment when a child takes a dive in a pool for the first time. Something both mundane and superb and then if you don’t have the camera with you you can’t capture that moment and it’s a split second.
Well the national event that was related to this idea of a frozen moment was the moment when people in America heard about the assassination of President Kennedy and for years after that people would talk about where they were and what they were doing at the moment when they heard about the assassination. This is the early days of television so it was one of the first times when something of this scale of shock was communicated so quickly to so many people. And psychologists at Harvard Roger Brown and James Kulik were intrigued by how vivid these descriptions were of the moment. It was almost they thought like a photograph and they weren’t the first people to make this comparison.

Is memory really seared into our brain - like a photo?

The trend in the psychological sciences is to think of memory as being very reconstructive, that is we think we have a continuous access to our original experiences like I think I can remember a birthday party that I had with my dad when I was five.  But actually what I probably remember is a picture of myself with the cake and I turned that into a place holder for an original memory that is long gone and may have had nothing to do with the photograph beside the fact that that photograph exists.
So the most widely accepted understanding of memory now is that we continually remake what our memories actually are but we think of them as being reliable and authentic.