Selection of short films about memory. Films are freely, legally accessible.
What is memory? Short-term and long-term memory. Reconstruction and reinvention of the past.
Why and how do our memories resurface?
Discover all our thematic programmes.
In the service of children's education, films as a pedagogical support tool.
How do our memories resurface? What are the triggers of our memory? A sound, a smell, a taste, a bodily situation, a certain temperature, the humidity of the air, a scale relationship with an object or a place?
Why and how do certain scenes of life previously lived, certain people who have disappeared from our memory suddenly come back to life?
The triggers of our memory
A somewhat difficult subject for young children but fascinating; young children are easily drawn in.
In Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, the taste of a biscuit dipped in tea projects the narrator back into his past in Combray.
The science of memory is still in its infancy, but we are beginning to understand the role of the hippocampus in memory and now believe that our memories, linked to unique moments and sensory experiences, are stored in the brain as particular and unique configurations of neurons.
Reliving a previously experienced sensory experience
One of the ideas of neural plasticity is to consider that each memory corresponds to a unique configuration of neural activity.
This connection may never be reactivated, but if by chance one relives a sensory experience similar to a previously lived experience, a sound or smell would reactivate this unique configuration, and resurrect the memory indissolubly linked to that sensory experience.
Many adults have experienced the sudden appearance of a lost memory. Children too, very early on, forget and revive buried memories.
© Olivier Defaye.
Ask children to make a list of their memories.
Yesterday's memories, older memories.
