12_18_15

“Reminisce” means to recall a memory, often fondly or nostalgically.

It is the act of recollecting past experiences or events, such as when a person shares his personal stories with others or allows other people to live vicariously through stories of family, friends, and acquaintances while gaining an authentic meaningful relationship with a person. Grandparents are often among those who reminiscence to their grandchildren, sharing their individual experience of what the past was like.

The study of reminiscence has a long history, which is shortly described in Eysenck and Frith (1977, chapter 1):

Reminiscence is a technical term, coined by Ballard in 1913, denoting improvement in the performance of a partially learned act that occurs while the subject is resting, that is, not performing the act in question. (Eysenck and Frith, 1977, page 3).

The reality of reminiscence was first experimentally demonstrated by Oehrn(1896). In experiments on reminiscence the same task is always administered twice or more. One is mainly interested in the effect of the rest periods between the tasks. Learning might not be apparent within a task but it may be across tasks.

• Eysenck, H.J. and Frith, C.D. (1977). Reminiscence, motivation and personality. London Plenum Press.

• Oehrn, A. (1896). Experimentelle Studiëen zur Individualpsychologie [Experimental research on the study of individual differences]. Psychologische Arbeiten, 1, 92–151.

• "Reminiscence | Define Reminiscence at Dictionary.com." Dictionary.com

• "Rethinking Reminiscence: We All Lose When Memories Are Lost or Forgotten." LifeBio.

It is necessary for reminiscence to take some starting-point, whence one begins to proceed to reminisce. For this reason, some men may be seen to reminisce from the places in which something was said or done, or thought, using the places as it were as the starting-point for reminiscence; because access to the place is like a starting-point for all those things which were raised in it. Whence Tullius teaches in his Rhetoric that for easy remembering one should imagine a certain order of places upon which images (phantasmata) of all those things which we wish to remember are distributed in order.” Proust, it is true, uses “place”; but he does not so systematize memory as to impose rigid order upon his images. The modification is important; for order, like habit, is destructive to imagination and art. In this, Proust follows late 19th century values; even Ruskin remarks that “love of order is not love of art” (“Nature of the Gothic.” Stones of Venice, Works, X, 205). Thus, in Proust’s “voluntary memory,” order is still not in the service of his narrative technique as much as surprise, interruption, and so forth.

-written by Thomas Aquinas, Aristotoelis libros de sensu et sensato, de memoria et reminiscentia commentarius. translated by F. Yates, The Art of Memory, p 82.

Calmness and ‘Empty Time’: If the perception of time is affected by the physical world, then the perception of time in a calm place will be different from somewhere more turbulent. In calm places we become relaxed and time dilates. These are eventless places, areas of ‘empty time’. Tonald Bogue has written, ‘Reminiscence takes place when we disengage ourselves from the present. We reminisce within an empty time.’ Time stops in the past. Le Corbusier left behind the cabanon. There remains only emptiness.

-written by Jean Taek Park, Space of Intensities: Intensification of Experience in Wave

Following the discovery of oil in Iraq in 1927, science and engineering became the backbone of the new education system. In 1951, a development council was established, to which, for a few years, all the oil revenues went. In sharp contrast with the allegedly corrupted centralization of Iraq’s oil money today, this fund went to build dams, electricity infrastructure, railways, and bridges, requiring thousands of qualified engineers and architects, “There was tremendous work and education,” says Humadi. The country was rapidly modernizing, and the influence of Western studies continued, even after the British mandate ended in 1932. Today in Iraq, members of an older technocratic generation, schooled in the West, still reminisce over sugary tea and cigarettes about warm beer, cold weather, and Ph.D. studies in electrical engineering or applied mathematics at British redbrick universities.

-written by Alice Fordham, Glorious Past, Distressed Present.

The reminiscence bump is the tendency for older adults to have increased recollection for events that occurred during their adolescence and early adulthood[1].It was identified through the study of autobiographical memory and the subsequent plotting of the age of encoding of memories to form the lifespan retrieval curve.

The Life Span Retrieval Curve is a graph that represents the number of autobiographical memories encoded at various ages during the life span. The lifespan retrieval curve contains three different parts [2].From birth to five years old is a period of childhood amnesia, from 10 to 30 years old is the reminiscence bump and last is a period of forgetting from the end of the reminiscence bump to present time[2]. The reminiscence bump has been observed on the life span retrieval curve in multiple studies.

The reminiscence bump occurs because memory storage in autobiographical memory is not consistent through time. Rather, memory storage increases during times of changes in the self and in life goals, such as the changes in identity that occur during adolescence[3].Researchers have consistently observed the reminiscence bump, the period of increased memory accessibility in participants' lifespan retrieval curves, and the bump has been reproduced under a range of study conditions.

1. Jansari, A.; Parkin, A. J. "Things that go bump in your life: Explaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory". Psychology and Aging.

2. Conway, Martin A.; Haque, Shamsul (January 1999). "Overshadowing the reminiscence bump: Memories of a struggle for independence". Journal of Adult Development.

3. Rathbone, C. J.; Moulin, C. J.; Conway, M. A. (2008). "Self-centered memories: The reminiscence bump and the self". Memory and Cognition.