Oliver Sacks finds a silver lining in our tendency to misremember events:
We, as human beings, are landed with memory systems that have
fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections—but also great flexibility
and creativity. Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a
paradoxical strength: if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge,
we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information.
Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are
told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and
richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear
with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the
art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and
contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge.
This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be
possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified,
seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not
only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.
