FREE ESSAY ON BILL CLINTON

BILL CLINTON

The article I chose is called "Reinventing yourself" and it talks about research on
memory. According to the author "who you are is limited only by your imagination". What
does it mean? That's what I will try to explain on the following couple pages. 
As I understood this article, it's talking about how our imagination influences the
memory. It starts with the examples from people's lives. Bill Clinton told American
people that he never served for Vietnam, and the reasons he gave appeared to be totally
different from the reasons that came up after a research. Or, Gary Trudeau, cartoonist,
that was telling people the same story for about 20 years about the way he avoided army,
saying that he was a student and "his three-year student deferment had run out, which
meant his call-up was imminent". In fact, what appeared after a research, his dad was a
doctor, and he didn't serve in Vietnam because of his health condition. This is a good
example of how our present life develops our imagination that adds to the memory and
makes it different from a reality. But this is the way our imagination reflects and
connects our past, present and future.
And sometimes we start to think about what do we need a memory for. And the answer is "to
learn from our experiences without having to repeat them endlessly". That's why very few
moments in our life can repeat exactly. And when we share the personal histories, it
helps to keep the relationships going, but, as a matter of fact, what really happened is
not that dramatic and critical as the way we talk about it afterwards.
Let's imagine talking about memories from childhood, and suddenly somebody interrupts us
and says that it couldn't happened and you are wrong. What are you going to do? How are
you going to prove it? And what the statistics show now is that many people instead of
trying to find a proof such as pictures, tapes, videos will prefer just to imagine what
could happen and how would it feel if this could happen now. Psychologist Helen Hembrook
discovered this. In 1996 psychologists made a research by giving the example of the same
events to the same people twice that could happen to them in their childhood, and it
appeared that many of them gave different answers twice and, besides this, some of them
just imagined that it could happened to them and this made them to really believe that it
happened. That's what the psychologists call "imagination inflation". Also, sometimes, we
can remember the source of the information better than the information by itself, and
opposite, the information without a source, that is called "source monitoring" according
to Marcia Johnson. And, of course, we remember recent experiments more accurately and
more likely to interpret them correctly than childhood ones that we normally confuse.
Certainly, we can't confuse everything, and there are some things that we cant' make
ourselves to believe in, such as "I won a lottery", when you never did win one.
So, basically, the whole article comes to the main point that "we rely on memories of the
past to help us imagine and make sense of the present". We develop some experiences that
are common and don't change, like for example, going to the restaurant, waiting for
waiter to bring a bill, etc. "Sometimes people use their imagination to make sense of
someone else's past." To prove this, author gives an example Hillary Rodham Clinton that
was trying to explain her husband's unfaithfulness as a result of being in the middle of
conflict between two women that surrounded the boy in his childhood. And this is
something that she has been told by couple psychologist and certainly can be right. The
thing is that we often forget bad memories but scientific study doesn't support this
point of view and says that such bad memories as childhood sexual abuse and so on just
seem to be forgotten, but they are not, and sooner or later the present will reflect this
past.
Sometimes there are situations when imagination becomes a terribly dangerous problem. It
happens when it makes us to believe in some events and it doesn't let us to understand
the reality that is sometimes really important, for example in the therapy when we are
looking for a cause of illness and can't find it.
So, this article was interesting for me, that's why I chose it. It gave me some
additional information to the "sleep section" learned in class. I think author gave
enough evidences to prove the question-quote that was given at the beginning "who you are
limited only by your imagination". The research methods are understandable and make
sense.