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Johns Hopkins University | AS.145.203

Constructing Memories: between Art and Science

3.0

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What is a personal memory? Is it a story or a scene, as if in a film? Is there such a thing as body memory? How tight is the connection between remembering and story-telling? Scientific articles and book chapters in cognitive psychology and the neurosciences can provide some answers to such questions. Two films, “Memento” and “Inside Out” can also help us grasp the impact of major scientific discoveries of how memory works. But our discussions will depend above all on literary and biographical accounts based on the experiences of “rememberers” such as St Augustine, Proust, Woolf, Freud, as well as on cases on amnesia documented by Oliver Sacks, Antonio Damasio, and David Shenk. The latter will help us understand why our ability to engage in mental time-travel is essential to our personal and social existence. Coming out of this course, you will not only have a better comprehension of how autobiographical memory works, you’ll have learned also how some of the sharpest scientific and philosophical minds of our times have tried to make sense of this mysterious human capacity.

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