216 Self and the Phenomenon of Life
b2726 Self and the Phenomenon of Life: A Biologist Examines Life from Molecules to Humanity “9x6”place in a carriage on her way to a funeral, and she hasn’t the least idea
which one of her friends may be dead. She actually became pregnant
during one of her early secondary states, and during her first state had
no knowledge of how it had come to pass. Her distress at these blanks of
memory is sometimes intense and once drove her to attempt suicide.”^7
It looks as if this lady had two biographical selves, based on two sets of
memories that were partially overlapped.
10.3 Memory, Imagination, and Fantasy
Metaphorically, our conscious mind may be compared to the stage of
a playhouse, on which only one play goes on at a time. In the default
condition, our mind’s “play” reflects what is going on in the immediate
present. But when we recall, we are resetting the stage to play out a past
event. To this end our mind mobilizes a limited repertoire of actors,
costumes, props, and scenes (all deposited there by past experience) and
uses them repeatedly in a modular manner. For example, the same chair
can be employed in The Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named
Desire; the same Laurence Olivier can play Hamlet and King Lear in a
Shakespeare festival. However, the reconstruction requires simplifica-
tion, abstraction, and reorganization, resulting in skewing and distortion,
as commonly occurs when two witnesses testify the same crime scene.
Many of us have the experience of returning to a childhood town, where
we are stunned by the realization that the first school we attended was so
small compared to the one we have harbored in our minds.
For those who prefer a “high-tech” metaphor for memory, our con-
scious mind can be likened to a computer monitor. Each person’s mind
has only one screen, but countless images can appear on the same screen
by changing the values of the individual pixels and combining them in
various patterns.
Imagination is similar to recall in that it too is a modular recon-
struction of past experience, but it differs from memory as the parts can
be fragmented and freely recombined without regard to real time and