Individual And Collective Memory Consolidation

An argument that individuals and collectives form memories by analogous processes and a case study of collective retrograde amnesia. We form individual memories by a process known as consolidation: the conversion of immediate and fleeting bits of information into a stable and accessible representation of facts and events. These memories provide a version of the past that helps us navigate the present and is critical to individual identity. In this book, Thomas Anastasio, Kristen Ann Ehrenberger, Patrick Watson, and Wenyi Zhang propose that social groups form collective memories by analogous processes. Using facts and insights from neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and history, they describe a single process of consolidation with analogous—not merely comparable—manifestations on any level, whether brain, family, or society. They propose a three-in-one model of memory consolidation, composed of a buffer, a relator, and a generalizer, all within the consolidating entity, that can explain memory consolidation phenomena on individual and collective levels. When consolidation is disrupted by traumatic injury to a brain structure known as the hippocampus, memories in the process of being consolidated are lost. In individuals, this is known as retrograde amnesia. The authors hypothesize a "social hippocampus" and argue that disruption at the collective level can result in collective retrograde amnesia. They offer the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) as an example of trauma to the social hippocampus and present evidence for the loss of recent collective memory in mainland Chinese populations that experienced the Cultural Revolution.

Collective Memory, Volume 274 in the Progress in Brain Research series, highlights new advances in the field, with this new volume presenting interesting chapters on a variety of interesting topics, including Deriving testable hypotheses through an analogy between individual and collective memory and updated information on Collective future thinking: Current research and future directions. Provides the authority and expertise of leading contributors from an international board of authors Presents the latest release in Progress in Brain Research series Updated release includes the latest information on Collective Memory

This special issue of Memory is devoted to discussions and investigations of social memory phenomena. Very often our memories of the past are of events we shared with others and very often we share in remembering with others -- when parents and children reminisce about significant family events, when spouses argue over details of an event they attended together, when colleagues remind one another of information relevant to an important group decision, or when complete strangers discuss a crime they happened to witness together. Psychology is at the heart of recent interdisciplinary efforts to understand the relationship between individual and group memory. In six theoretical reviews and four original empirical reports, this special issue addresses two major themes. First, how do groups operate to process information, especially memories; what are the costs and benefits of collaborating? Second, what are the pathways to, and between, individual and collective memory; how do groups shape individual memory; how does remembering with others influence later individual recall? This volume draws together leading theorists and researchers from cognitive, developmental, clinical, and cross-cultural psychology to propose sophisticated, novel and testable ways to conceptualise collective memory.

This is the biography of a contested memory, how it was born, grew, changed the world, and was changed by it. It's the story of the story of how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began. Joseph Smith, the church's founder, remembered that his first audible prayer, uttered inspring of 1820 when he was about fourteen, was answered with a vision of heavenly beings. Appearing to the boy in the woods near his parents' home in western New York State, they told Smith that he was forgiven and warned him that Christianity had gone astray. Smith created a rich and controversial historical record by narrating and documenting this event repeatedly. In First Vision, Steven Harper shows how Latter-day Saints (beginning with Joseph Smith) and others have remembered this experience and rendered it meaningful. When and why and how did JosephSmith's first vision, as saints know the event, become their seminal story? What challenges did it face along the way? What changes did it undergo as a result? Can it possibly hold its privileged position against the tides of doubt and disbelief, memory studies, and source criticism - all in theinformation age? Steven Harper tells the story of how Latter-day Saints forgot and then remembered accounts of Smith's experience and how Smith's 1838 account was redacted and canonized. He explores the dissonance many saints experienced after discovering multiple accounts of Smith's experience. Hedescribes how, for many, the dissonance has been resolved by a reshaped collective memory.

First published in 1984. This volume was organized for students of human memory and related cognitive processes. The issues deal not only with memory in unimpaired individuals, but also with impaired patients and with consolidation in lower animals. The chapters in this volume demonstrate that consolidation is a flourishing and controversial concept in memory research today. More than ten years after the seminal book of M cGaugh and Herz, questions about consolidation are re-examined in light of current models of human memory, its pathology, and its modulation by drugs.

This engaging volume for the general reader explores how individuals and societies remember, forget and commemorate events of the past. The collection of eight essays takes an interdisciplinary approach to address the relationships between individual experience and collective memory, with leading experts from the arts and sciences. We might expect scientists to be concerned with studying just the mental and physical processes involved in remembering, and humanities scholars to be interested in the products of memory, such as books, statues and music. This collection exposes the falseness of such a dichotomy, illustrating the insights into memory which can be gained by juxtaposing the complementary perspectives of specialists venturing beyond the normal boundaries of their disciplines. The authors come from backgrounds as diverse as psychoanalysis, creative writing, neuroscience, social history and medicine.

Venturing out of the laboratory into the wild of natural settings, it becomes untenable to locate memory strictly in the head. Instead, memory appears as a materially extended and socially distributed process, embedded within culture and history. This book explores the complex relations between practices of remembering and the settings in which they are enacted. It advances a novel set of concepts developed from ecological, cognitive, cultural and narrative currents in psychology and further afield to analyze (1) trajectories of autobiographical remembering, (2) the relation between individual and collective memory, (3) memory and cultural transmission, as well as (4) various methodological techniques to investigate memory in the wild.

This text introduces students, scholars, and interested educated readers to the issues of human memory broadly considered, encompassing both individual memory, collective remembering by societies, and the construction of history. The book is organised around several major questions: How do memories construct our past? How do we build shared collective memories? How does memory shape history? This volume presents a special perspective, emphasising the role of memory processes in the construction of self-identity, of shared cultural norms and concepts, and of historical awareness. Although the results are fairly new and the techniques suitably modern, the vision itself is of course related to the work of such precursors as Frederic Bartlett and Aleksandr Luria, who in very different ways represent the starting point of a serious psychology of human culture.