Thursday, June 15, 2006

Rewind vs. Fast Forward

The simplest metaphor I can give for my research is this: I want to compare and contrast human memory's ability to "fast forward" and "rewind."

That is, I seek to compare and contrast our ability to search forward in time (fast forward) through our memories to our ability to search backward in time (rewind) through our memories.

Is the mind inherently forward looking, engineered to constant predict and thus not so good at starting from B to get to A? Or is the mind reflective and brooding, built to answer the question: what chain of events led to this? Or is memory immune to temporal order and simply an associator of events regardless of their flow through time?

Place your bets now. I'll update this blog as I can with my own research and others' as I happen upon it. If your own interests skew this way, please feel free to comment here or contact me with your own thoughts. Thanks for being here!

-Jason