Japanese folding screen depicting a scene from the Tale of the Heike, seventeenth century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mary Griggs Burke Collection, gift of the Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation, 2015.

Memory

Volume XIII, Number 1 | winter 2020

Miscellany

In 1995 cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus conducted a study in which she presented to twenty-four people four stories about their childhoods. Three of the stories were true; one was false. Five of the twenty-four people falsely remembered the “lost in a mall” story. “People can be led to remember their past in different ways,” concluded Loftus, “and they even can be led to remember entire events that never actually happened to them.”

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

—Samuel Johnson, 1759

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The Colosseum, attributed to Robert Eaton, c. 1855.
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DÉjÀ Vu

Monumental Mistakes

2023:

Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.

c. 1850:

Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.

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