On the Construction of Memories

“If we have to use a metaphor in order to imagine the capacity for memory, then, the least appropriate one is the image of the library with books on its shelves, or a computer with data of whatever quantity stored in its memory. Memory is more like a generator, reproducing that past again; it is the ability, given certain impulses, to switch on the process of generating a conceptualized reality which the mind transfers into the past. This capacity is part of the general process of thinking and is inseparable from it.”

Lotman, Yuri. (1999) Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, Indiana University Press page 272