What I remember
Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless,
and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or
construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a
whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience, and to a
little outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in
language form. It is thus hardly ever really exact, even in the most
rudimentary cases of rote recapitulation, and it is not at all
important that it should be so.
Frederic Bartlett, Remembering, 1932
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