It’s a beautiful fall day here in Maine, but I’m inside reading your discussions. I’m very pleased – Schank and Abelson are by no means easy reading. Even though they provide many examples to illustrate what they’re saying, they are often talking generally about the nature of stories and of human memory. And of course most of us do better with examples to read – little stories – rather than general conclusions about memory as an abstraction. But you’re getting it!

By now, you’ve come to see so far how unreliable memory is and hopefully you’re already at work on reconstructing a memory of your own, or at least trying to recreate a memory told to you by someone else.  (I didn’t want to force anyone to write about themselves!)

The big question is, Can we depend on our memory of events? You can probably guess the answer already. Artificial intelligence researchers like Schank & Abelson, as well as neuro scientists who we’ll read about later have done a lot to puncture our idea that the brain is a camera taking pictures of an event and then playing it back perfectly.  

This week, in our third reading from Schank and Abelson, they lead us into the social context and ramifications of story telling, and mention a famous film, "Rashomon," which is based on Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story “In A Grove,” which I’ve included as one of our readings this week. Remember when you read it that though it was written in the 1920s, it’s set in medieval Japan (say around the 12^th  century—almost a thousand years ago), so it’s far distant from us in time and culture. But human nature hasn’t changed very much...    

This week, also, for an abrupt switch from the mysteries of memory, we’ll start considering formal logic. Remember the “logician model” that Schank and Abelson are so hesitant to accept as a valid description of human reasoning.  One of the objectives for the course is to introduce you to logical fallacies, these are mistakes when occurring in a court of law or academic argumentation , but they are a frequently used though somewhat dishonest tool of advertisers, politicians, and people who want to persuade you to do what they want you to do!