h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

For as long as I can remember I've found that many of my memories are recalled in 3rd person.
I thought this was rather unusual. However, at least one other person on H2G2 has said they can do this as well (with me it isn't voluntary) and now I read an article in the guardian with someone else who does this as well.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2007320,00.html
"His first memory is "falling down the stairs outside my house. Rather strangely, I remember it in the third person, which is impossible."

so maybe it is a bit more common than I thought (maybe not).

So, are any of your memories in the 3rd person?

For me, where my memories are in 3rd person, the 'me' in them isn't necessarily well defined, but I definitly recall them from a viewpoint other than the one I experienced them as. And it isn't all of them (obviously non visual ones don't have this aspect and I don;t think memories that are recalled through a non visual clue are this way).

Or am I and those 2 others just freaks?

Do you mean that in the memory you can see yourself? If so I've got one or two like that.

Same here CDAA

A

well, sort of. But basically where the pov you 'see' the memory from is not 1st person, i.e. behind your eyes.

I guess all those movies and tv-shows weren´t getting it wrong anyway.

I've got one or two of these. The explanation is fairly obvious - they're not memories, in the sense we normally mean the word. As in, you're not recalling your experience of an event. You're recalling facts about an event, facts you may have been told by someone else who was there, facts you know because you wrote them down, or facts you know because you *used* to remember them, and have repeated them to people verbally so often that you now remember your account rather than the experience itself.

Research has shown that it is perfectly possible to "remember" things you've never experienced, usually by these methods. Most of the time, it's harmless enough. But it's a pretty good rule of thumb that if you can see yourself in your "memories", they're not memories, they're fantasies.

SoRB

True enough. And tellingly the older the memory the more likely it is to be.
There is an alternative explanation, which is that we model the world in our minds and, like any VR, there's nothing to say our POV has to be the same one the info was recorded from.

Almost all of my memories are 3rd person. Always have been.

I daydream in 3rd person too...

From some research (no citations, no pack drill), third person memories are an attempt by the brain to reframe original memories so that they are less powerful. This allows us to recall the events we remember without being afflicted by the same powerful emotions that we felt at the time.

They can also be false memories, of course.

Cool.
Sounds like there is some knowledge out there about this and that it isn't that uncommon.

Guess that means I'm not a freak after all

Mr. Dreadful always remembers in the first person except when, as SoRB says, he has been told about the event rather than actually remembering for himself.

He does _everything_ in the third person

Doesn't everyone?

I too daydream in the third person. To put it another way, I rarely figure in my own fantasies. Sometimes there is one character with whom I identify more closely than any of the others: an altar ego*. But such a character does not always exist.

I can't think, though, of any third person memories. I actually have very few memories of my early childhood, and those I do have are very badly muddled. Was I ten or six when that happened?

TRiG.

*Altar ego: conceited priest.

Hmmm... I wonder if maybe we're all watching too much TV, movies, videos, etc. Maybe our visual memory skills have become disassociated from our own point of view and we need to frame them in 3rd person objectivity to give them validity.

My childhood (pre-TV) memories remain essentially from my point of view and often have strong olfactory triggers. But more recent recollections do indeed seem to be scripted and choreographed and sometimes even narrated by someone other than myself as if I had viewed them, sans touch, sans smell. Some have even developed a sound track that probably wasn't there at the time.

~jwf~

do they come with a bit at the end saying 'Recorded in Cinamascope' at the end ~jwf~?

No but occassionally there is one of those copyright notice warnings against copying. But my subcounscious must install these in the hope and belief that these sort of things actually encourage people to do exactly the opposite.

~jwf~