The embellishment of memories is a widespread phenomenon. Sometimes, the distortion of memory goes beyond embellishment and becomes fabrication: false memories are common, and they can be easily induced. Simply put, memory is prone to distortion. Research shows that human memory is constructive (or reconstructive) rather than purely reproductive; we fill in gaps in memory…
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Anemoia, a coinage from the writer John Koenig – author of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows – refers to a feeling of nostalgia for a time one didn’t live through. I previously wrote about why this feeling arises, namely, by connecting it to Daniel Laidler’s concept of hagioptasia: the tendency to project ‘specialness’ onto certain aspects…
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Emo music is full of references to car crashes. When you’ve listened to enough of this type of music or watched enough music videos for emo songs, it can become apparent how recurrent this theme is in the genre, similar to the theme of ‘getting out of this small town’, ambulances, or hospitals. Examples of…
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Jungian psychology is highly popular in New Age culture, and this is for several reasons, some perhaps quite obvious, and others less so. I would like to detail these connections between New Age spirituality and Jungian psychology mainly as an effort to show how particular models of reality and mind lead to an embrace of…
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I recently watched Mike Leigh’s 1971 film Bleak Moments – his directorial debut. And while watching it, I again felt something about Leigh’s characters (or at least some of them), which I’ve felt watching some of his other films: they have a caricature-esque level of eccentricity. Others have drawn attention to this too, such as…
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