the.com/recall
the brain's least reliable witness, testifying with total confidence in a court that always believes it
means To bring something back to mind, or to summon something or someone back — whether a memory, a defective product, or an elected official.
from From the Latin-flavored prefix 're-' ('back, again') bolted onto 'call,' which comes through Old English 'ceallian' and is closely related to Old Norse 'kalla,' 'to cry out.' So the literal sense is 'to call back' — and English built it in the 1500s as a tidy translation of the older 'revoke' (Latin 'revocare,' same idea, fancier robes). The memory sense — calling a thought back from wherever it wandered off to — followed naturally.
- false memories
- Can be implanted with simple suggestion alone
- reconstruction
- Memories are rebuilt each time, not replayed
- tip of tongue
- Universal across nearly every studied language
- car defects
- Millions recalled yearly, most owners never respond
- testing effect
- Recalling beats rereading for long-term learning
flashbulb memory — vivid autobiographical memories of hearing about jfk assassination on november 22, 1963 that people report recalling with extreme detail
childhood amnesia — inability to recall memories before age 3-4, documented across human populations worldwide
false memory implantation — loftus experiment (1995) where subjects were convinced they got lost in mall as children through suggestion techniques