Well, I told you so and that was one of the my reasons to start blogging. One of the irrefutable fact of my life (and could be a curse depending on how I feel at that time) is that I will be left to live with memories of Max.
I don't want to make up stories (i.e., imagination inflation), like the imagined self of being the world greatest dog lover or Max being the greatest dog ever. As of today, I know that I am ordinary man who loves a regular chocolate labrador called Max and this simple evolutionary bond is having a profound impact on my life. It is as simple as it sounds, nothing more and nothing less. Those simple moments are the ones I want to hold on until the end without distilling it with time and make up feel good stories (no rosy retrospection and save the real feel good ones I am having now). At the same time I don't want the real memories to fade with time when eventually other things sprout in my life. I want to "pickle" and "freeze" the memories of my years with Max. It's not a personal war to preserve my autobiographical memory of these years but an effort to preserve as much I can, knowing the limitations (I do have the receny effect on my side for now).
The ape in me is obsessed with the future but Max is teaching me everyday to live my life now. So preserving the memories for future is just a fringe benefit and enjoying the time I have with him now is the reality and only thing I could control.
I might sound obessed with my uncertianities of my own memory but I have very good reason to do so.
Pick your favorites from the smorgasbord of memory biases . We need to stop pointing fingers at others and understand consequences of our unconsicious biases. For each one of the biases listed below, I do have my own stories with the aid of my "own" memory(does that sound like an oxymoron?).
Choice-supportive bias: remembering chosen options as having been better than rejected options.
Change bias: after an investment of effort in producing change, remembering one's past performance as more different than it actually was.
Childhood amnesia: the retention of few memories from before the age of two years.
Consistency bias: incorrectly remembering one's past attitudes and behaviour as resembling present attitudes and behaviour.
Context effect: that cognition and memory are dependent on context, such that out-of-context memories are more difficult to retrieve than in-context memories (e.g., recall time and accuracy for a work-related memory will be lower at home, and vice versa).
Cryptomnesia: a form of misattribution where a memory is mistaken for imagination, because there is no subjective experience of it being a memory.
Egocentric bias: recalling the past in a self-serving manner, e.g. remembering one's exam grades as being better than they were, or remembering a caught fish as being bigger than it really was.
Fading affect bias: a bias in which the emotion associated with unpleasant memories fades more quickly than the emotion associated with positive events.
Hindsight bias: the inclination to see past events as being predictable; also called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect.
Humor effect: that humorous items are more easily remembered than non-humorous ones, which might be explained by the distinctiveness of humor, the increased cognitive processing time to understand the humor, or the emotional arousal caused by the humor.
Generation effect (Self-generation effect): that self-generated information is remembered best. For instance, people are better able to recall memories of statements that they have generated than similar statements generated by others.
Illusion-of-truth effect: that people are more likely to identify as true statements those which they have previously heard (even if they cannot consciously remember having heard them), regardless of the actual validity of the statement. In other words, a person is more likely to believe a familiar statement than an unfamiliar one.
Leveling and Sharpening: memory distortions introduced by the loss of details in a recollection over time, often concurrent with sharpening or selective recollection of certain details that take on exaggerated significance in relation to the details or aspects of the experience lost through leveling. Both biases may be reinforced over time, and by repeated recollection or re-telling of a memory.
Levels-of-processing effect: that different methods of encoding information into memory have different levels of effectiveness.
Misinformation effect: that misinformation affects people's reports of their own memory.
Misattribution: when information is retained in memory but the source of the memory is forgotten. One of Schacter's (1999) Seven Sins of Memory, Misattribution was divided into Source Confusion, Cryptomnesia and False Recall/False Recognition.
Modality effect: that memory recall is higher for the last items of a list when the list items were received via speech than when they were received via writing.
Mood congruent memory bias: the improved recall of information congruent with one's current mood.
Next-in-line effect: that a person in a group has diminished recall for the words of others who spoke immediately before or after this person.
Part-list cueing effect: that being shown some items from a list makes it harder to retrieve the other items.
Peak-end effect: that people seem to perceive not the sum of an experience but the average of how it was at its peak (e.g. pleasant or unpleasant) and how it ended.
Persistence: the unwanted recurrence of memories of a traumatic event.
Picture superiority effect: that concepts are much more likely to be remembered experientially if they are presented in picture form than if they are presented in word form.
Positivity effect: that older adults favor positive over negative information in their memories.
Primacy effect: that the first items on a list show an advantage in memory.
Recency effect: that the last items on a list show an advantage in memory.
Reminiscence bump: the recalling of more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than personal events from other lifetime periods.
Rosy retrospection: the remembering of the past as having been better than it really was.
Serial position effect: that items near the end of a list are the easiest to recall, followed by the items at the beginning of a list; items in the middle are the least likely to be remembered.
Self-relevance effect: that memories relating to the self are better recalled than similar information relating to others.
Source Confusion: misattributing the source of a memory, e.g. misremembering that one saw an event personally when actually it was seen on television.
Spacing effect: that information is better recalled if exposure to it is repeated over a longer span of time.
Stereotypical bias: memory distorted towards stereotypes (e.g. racial or gender), e.g. "black-sounding" names being misremembered as names of criminals.
Suffix effect: the weakening of the recency effect in the case that an item is appended to the list that the subject is not required to recall (Morton, Crowder & Prussin, 1971).
Suggestibility: a form of misattribution where ideas suggested by a questioner are mistaken for memory.
Telescoping effect: the tendency to displace recent events backward in time and remote events forward in time, so that recent events appear to be more remote, and remote events, more recent.
Testing effect: that frequent testing of material that has been committed to memory improves memory recall.
Tip of the tongue phenomenon: when a subject is able to recall parts of an item, or related information, but is frustratingly unable to recall the whole item. This is thought to be an instance of "blocking" where multiple similar memories are being recalled and interfere with each other.
Verbatim effect: that the "gist" of what someone has said is better remembered than the verbatim wording.
Von Restorff effect: that an item that sticks out is more likely to be remembered than other items.
Zeigarnik effect: that uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones.
The gray matter under our skull is fascinating but no question it does have weird sense of humor.
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