Hypermnesia
Hypermnesia (from the Greek mnesis memory) means a stronger ability to remember. The term is used in two areas of psychology - with different meanings.
For one, it is an established phenomenon in general memory psychology. This is what people talk about when people remember more at a later point in time than they did earlier. So if z. For example, if witnesses are questioned not just once but several times after an event, they may be able to reproduce more correct memories in the third interview than in the first. This occurs above all if corresponding repeated reminders are requested within a short period of time (e.g. an hour). In fact, previous tests seem to be decisive, rather than the length of time.
On the other hand, in connection with hypnosis, hypermnesia is used when the hypnotist remembers events that he was not consciously aware of or that he believed he had forgotten. This is more of a clinical phenomenon.
At the beginning of his Dream Interpretation, Sigmund Freud summarizes some hypermnestic dreams of various authors. In these dreams, persons, events or givens appear to the dreamer, which he has apparently never seen. However, it turned out - sometimes only after decades - that they had already experienced this before the dream. Using these examples, Freud shows that people can remember things in dreams that do not come into their consciousness while waking, but were constantly stored in the unconscious. He also notes that it was often details that were not consciously perceived during the experience.
See also
Individual evidence
- ^ MH Erdelyi: The Ups and Downs of Memory . In: American Psychologist 65, 2010, doi : 10.1037 / a0020440 , pp. 623-633.
- ^ HL Roediger & DG Payne: Hypermnesia: the role of repeated testing . In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 8, 1982, pp. 66-72.
- ↑ Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams. Nikol-Verlag, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-86820-053-9 , pp. 24-35.