When imagination becomes memory

I think this is terribly important, but I ’ve never seen it described. So, in a few minutes, I’ll share what I think.Almost animals have memory, save perhaps the simplest single celled organisms. We think plants have a form of memory as well. There ’s nothing uniquely human about memory.Imagination is less common. It ’s not uniquely human either; crows, wolves, cephalopods, cetaceans, primates — they all have some form of something that looks like imagination. We think humans have much more of it though. We can create memories of things that have not happened or did not happen. Imagination is a form of ‘fa lse memory’ that we know to be false.Except … when we don’t know it to be false. And there lies a problem — but I’ll come back to that.When did humans develop the ability to create false memories and know them to be false? We think it is older than what we call “human” now — we think our fellow modern hominids, Neandertal, Denisovan and more had well developed imaginations. We suspect we have more of this talent though, and that we might have picked up additional abilities as recently as 50,000 to 75,000 years ago.That ’s very recent evolution, so it’s not surprising that, like strength and height, imagination might vary among people. It might vary in the ability to create “false” memories, and, perhaps independently, inthe ability to know them to be false.The latter variation is key. We know from research over the past forty years that ...
Source: Be the Best You can Be - Category: Disability Tags: adult brain and mind cognition cognitive impairment legal neurodiversity Source Type: blogs