Abstract

Selection: “… psychologists have discovered that our long-term memories are intrinsically dynamic: They can be reactivated, given new information, and quite literally rewired. While the psychoneurological context of memory reconsolidation is contemporary, that our long-term memories are, on occasion, interpretively malleable is not; our memories are reactivated and rewired both by other people and by God. Other people—whether friends, psychotherapists, or anyone else besides—and God can remind us of things we know but chronically forget or cannot bring ourselves to willingly believe; through various means, they can help us challenge or reenvision encoded meanings we attach (or have had attached) into those memories… I immediately considered what this finding would mean not only philosophically and theologically but in the lives of the saints, including—and especially—Catholic converts like St. Augustine, whose pre-Christian memories required a kind of integration into his Christian life. What does this integration look like, given the discovery of memory reconsolidation? Augustine is a case in point; his Confessions (c. 397) appears to be partially interpretable as an exercise in memory reconsolidation.”