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Memory is a complex thing and quite relative.
For example, my earliest memory is this: I have some scars on my chest from when I was very young. I remember getting them, I pulled a cup of boiling water (in the process of being made into a cup of tea) from the kitchen workstop down onto myself and burnt my chest. I remember this vividly; the exact position of the cup on the worktop, I can picture my hand reaching up towards it and I can remember my mother pretty much throwing me into the bathtub and turning on the cold tap.
Anyway, for reasons I wont go into, I recently found out that this memory is completly 100% made up! The story of how I got the scars is completly different, just that when I was younger my mother told me I got them "by pulling a cup of boiling water onto myself", she didn't go into any more detail than that, my brain just filled in the missing information by itself. The strange thing is, I still have this "memory" now and think of it as though it actually happened.
It's a bit of a headfuck trying to comprehend it never happened!
I believe many of our life memories follow a similar pattern, we remember the important details, those which are vital to the the memory of the incident, and our brain "makes up" the rest so such an extent that our concious mind doesn't even know which parts are real and which aren't.
At the end of the day, a lot of what we think we remember, is just a memory of a memory.....
I feel I've stopped making sense now.....
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) and I didn't last an hour.
