Experiences that we remember intrusively, despite desperately wanting to banish them from our minds, are closely linked to, and sometimes threaten, our perceptions of who we are and who we would like to be.

Thus, the “memories” that people reported contained little information about the event they were trying to recall (the speaker’s tone of voice) but were greatly influenced by the properties of the retrieval cue that we...

… [O]ne of the most influential approaches to thinking about memory in recent years, known as connectionism, has abandoned the idea that a memory is an activated picture of a past event. Connectionist or neural...