Pictures and Memory

Railroad Station - Milan, Italy

I'm sure that you are familiar with Bag News Notes, that truly excellent site that analyzes pictures in the news. It always has something pithy to say about the visual inundation that is now our daily bread. (Fifty years ago there was only grainy black and white photos in the newspapers. Of course there was Life magazine with its glossy excess. Television was still black and white, but it was there. This sea change in visual onslaught is rarely taken into account.)

I am reading Mindsight by Colin McGinn. The reason for this is that I am very interested in the question of "free will," and I clearly need to do some background reading. I have a very mechanistic view of "free will" that I want to go into here that would make Pharyngula proud. (You will have noticed that I put "free will" in quotation marks. This may give you a hint as to what I think of it.)

In any case, McGinn immediately starts off differentiating between pictures that we create in our mind (images) and pictures of reality (percepts). I suppose pictures like the one above of the Milan train station that appeared on Yahoo this AM would classify as a percept. After all, I didn't conure it up out of nowhere.

But, and it is a very big But (no pun intended), this picture conjures up a very strong memory from twenty-one years ago when I visited Milan with a friend. I mean, a memory so strong that it almost bowled me over when I saw the picture. Its not that anything really interesting happened to us (I seem to remember waiting endlessly for the train to Firenze and then it being crowded beyond belief. San Gimignano and driving wildly to the sea. Motorcycles, Volta, sleeping in an old nunnery, scandalizing the monks, writing a poem about it four years later, and...well, you get the drift). Needless to say, the images that are conured up by a percept are very strong, but still images.

So, I think that the relationship of images and memory is one that is so incredibly complex that I am anxious to get to that part in the book. I hope he looks at it.