Presentation of Memory and Imagination for ToK

1. Ways of Knowing (3)
MEMORY AND IMAGINATION

2. Memory
The wide plains of my memory and its innumerable caverns and
hollows are full beyond measure of countless things of all kinds.
Material things are there by means of their images; knowledge
is there of itself; emotions are there in the form of ideas or
impressions of some kind, for the memory retains them even
while the mind does not experience them, although whatever is
in the memory must also be in the mind. My mind has the
freedom of them all. I can glide from one to the other. I can
probe deep into them and never find the end of them. This is
the power of memory! This is the great force of life in living
man, mortal though he is!
St Augustine, Confessions - Book X

3. How are memories created?
Sense Perception
Language
Emotion
What do we mean by memorisation?

4. Procedural memory

5. Personal Memory and Knowledge
Why do I know
•Which vegetables I prefer?
•Which park I prefer to walk in?
•Where I like to go on holiday?
•The lyrics or tune of a song?
•How I felt yesterday?
Imagine suddenly you suffered
from amnesia. Would you know
any of this?

6. Personal and Shared Memory
How do you know that men landed on
the moon?
•Saw the first images?
•Read about it?
•Been told about it?
•Are you alone in remembering this?
•How much detail do you remember?
(Apollo 11 was the spaceflight that
landed the first humans Neil Armstrong
and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon on July
20, 1969?

7. Cultural and Shared Memory
Memories of significant events
oHiroshima
oThe Holocaust
oVietnam
oThe Blitz
Cultural heritage
oTraditions
oTrades and skills
oLanguages?

8. The storage of collective Memory
•Story telling and ballad singing (Oral tradition)
•Passing on orally
•Writing
•Books
•Newspapers
•Recordings
•Libraries and Archives
•The Internet

9. The Reliability of Memory?
oTransience (the passage of time)
oAbsent-mindedness
oTemporary inability to recall
oSuggestibility and bias
oMisattribution
oAmnesia
oAlzheimer's and other forms of dementia

10. Memory and testimony
“I swear to tell the
truth, the whole
truth and nothing
but the truth.”

11. Strengths and weaknesses of memory
If any one faculty of our nature may be called more
wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There
seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in
the powers, the failures,. The memory is sometimes so
retentive, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of
our intelligencesso serviceable, so obedient; at others, so
bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic,
so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every
way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do
seem peculiarly past finding out.
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

12. Imagination
Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is
limited. Imagination encircles the world. Einstein

13. Imagination and creativity
A work of the imagination (a deliberate creative act)

14. Imagination and creativity
A work of the imagination (a deliberate creative act)

15. The dangers of imagination
An over active imagination – what are the
consequences?
o“Imaginative children may be more prone to anxiety
attacks, a new book has suggested”
oOver-reaction
oBlurring of reality and the imagined
oFantasy (Think back to the reliability of a witness)

16. The Power of Imagination
I have always been fascinated to imagine the uncertain
circumstance in which our ancestors – still barely different from
animals, the language that allowed them to communicate with
one another just recently born – in caves, around fires, on nights
seething with the menace of lightning bolts, thunder claps, and
growling beasts, began to invent and tell stories. That was the
crucial moment in our destiny, because in those circles of
primitive beings held by the voice and fantasy of the storyteller,
civilization began, the long passage that gradually would
humanize us and lead us to invent the autonomous individual,
then disengage him from the tribe, devise science, the arts, law,
freedom, and to scrutinize the innermost recesses of nature, the
human body, space, and travel to the stars.
Mario Vargas Llosa – Nobel Prize acceptance speech 2010

17. The power of imagination
Imagination is not only the uniquely
human capacity to envision that which is
not, and, therefore, the foundation of all
invention and innovation. In its arguably
most transformative and relevetory
capacity, it is the power that enables us to
empathize with humans whose
experiences we have never shared.
J. K. Rowling, Harvard Commencement Address, 2008

18. Imagination in Business
Title of article in Forbes Magazine 7/26/2014:
Today, Imagination Is The Most Important Business Skill.
Here's Why:
“From lights out manufacturing to 3D printing, the biggest challenge
for young professionals today is how not to get replaced by a robot.”

19. Imagination in Science and Medicine
The best medicine is not just scientific and rational, it is also imaginative,
empathetic, adaptive to social and political needs and culturally specific. It
works with the grain of psychology rather than against it, and is where science
meets humanity, where reason takes the fears and deep-held beliefs of the
individuals it treats into account. The fight against this new onslaught of TB
cannot just be fought by science; we need inventiveness and a spirit of
adventure as well. http://newint.org/blog/2011/12/19/hiv-tb-medicine-south-africa/

20. To conclude ........
“Memory and imagination help [a man]as he works. Not only his
own thoughts, but the thoughts of the men of past ages guide his
hands; and, as a part of the human race, he creates.” William Morris
“Memory feeds imagination” Amy Tan
“Memory is imagination in reverse.” Stephen Evans