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:
“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations ... all of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)