History
Flashbacks are the "personal experiences that pop into your awareness, without any conscious, premeditated attempt to search and retrieve this memory" These experiences occasionally have little to no relation to the situation at hand. Flashbacks to those suffering posttraumatic stress disorder can be so disruptive as to seriously affect day-to-day living.
Memory is divided into voluntary (conscious) and involuntary (unconscious) processes that function independently of each other. Theories and research on memory dates back to Hermann Ebbinghaus, who began studying nonsense syllables. Ebbinghaus classified three distinct classes of memory: sensory, short term, and long-term memory. Sensory memory is made up of a brief storage of information within a specific medium (the line you see after waving a sparkler in your field of vision is created by sensory memory). Short term memory is made up of the information currently in use to complete the task at hand. Long term memory is composed of the systems used to store memory over long periods. It enables one to remember what happened two days ago at noon, or who called last night.
Miller (1962–1974) declared that studying such fragile things as involuntary memories should not be done. This appears to have been followed since very little research has been done on flashbacks in the cognitive psychology discipline. Flashbacks have been studied within a clinical discipline however, and they have been identified as symptoms for many disorders, including post traumatic stress disorder.
Read more about this topic: Flashback (psychology)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The principal office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.”
—Tacitus (c. 55–c. 120)
“The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)