Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 ‘Memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases’
- 2 Flashes in the dark: first memories
- 3 Smell and memory
- 4 Yesterday's record
- 5 The inner flashbulb
- 6 ‘Why do we remember forwards and not backwards?’
- 7 The absolute memories of Funes and Sherashevsky
- 8 The advantages of a defect: the savant syndrome
- 9 The memory of a grandmaster: a conversation with Ton Sijbrands
- 10 Trauma and memory: the Demjanjuk case
- 11 Richard and Anna Wagner: forty-five years of married life
- 12 ‘In oval mirrors we drive around’: on experiencing a sense of déjà vu
- 13 Reminiscences
- 14 Why life speeds up as you get older
- 15 Forgetting
- 16 ‘I saw my life flash before me’
- 17 From memory – Portrait with Still Life
- Bibliography
- Index of names
16 - ‘I saw my life flash before me’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 ‘Memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases’
- 2 Flashes in the dark: first memories
- 3 Smell and memory
- 4 Yesterday's record
- 5 The inner flashbulb
- 6 ‘Why do we remember forwards and not backwards?’
- 7 The absolute memories of Funes and Sherashevsky
- 8 The advantages of a defect: the savant syndrome
- 9 The memory of a grandmaster: a conversation with Ton Sijbrands
- 10 Trauma and memory: the Demjanjuk case
- 11 Richard and Anna Wagner: forty-five years of married life
- 12 ‘In oval mirrors we drive around’: on experiencing a sense of déjà vu
- 13 Reminiscences
- 14 Why life speeds up as you get older
- 15 Forgetting
- 16 ‘I saw my life flash before me’
- 17 From memory – Portrait with Still Life
- Bibliography
- Index of names
Summary
In 1836 the German physicist and philosopher Gustav Fechner (1801–87) published a comforting theory on what awaits us after death. He confided his ideas in the Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode – ‘The little book about life after death’. About halfway through the text Fechner discusses the limitations of man's intellect during his life on earth. In normal life consciousness can accommodate just one thought and one memory at the same time. We can never access the entire contents of our mind all at once. Our powers of recall can only be in one place at a time; if we want to bring something to mind we have, so to speak, to search our memory with a feeble lantern that throws light in a narrow beam and leaves the rest in the dark. Man thus wanders about like a stranger in his own mind, ‘feeling his way as if along a wire, and ignoring the large shadows that lie buried in the darkness beside the illumined path of his thoughts’.
This is a poignant picture. There is also something depressing about it: a slowly moving pool of light, lost in an enormous repository. That which enters the circle of light of our consciousness always stands on its own and as soon as our thoughts move on it returns to darkness. The edges of the circle of light are sharply defined; anything that falls just outside them is as dark as the furthest object.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Why Life Speeds Up As You Get OlderHow Memory Shapes our Past, pp. 239 - 268Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012