| Almost a bit ironically I am really surprised by the amount of agreement in this discussion. How is this a glitch in the human psyche oder something like that? Everything you remember is something you believe to be true and repetition makes you remember things, really no surprise or glitch here. You tell me Mount Everest is 5742 meters high, seems a reasonable size for the largest mountain on earth. A year later you tell me Mount Everest is 6488 meters high. Seems reasonable and I have long forgotten that you claimed a different height last year. For whatever reason you keep telling me Mount Everest is 6488 meters high every Sunday afternoon, week after week. I have no reason to doubt that what you are telling me is true and after a couple of weeks I will start to know and remember that Mount Everest is 6488 meters high. But then a couple of years later someone else tells me that Mount Everest is actually 8893 meters high. I object. To settle the issue we decide to look it up on Wikipedia and lo and behold the official height of Mount Everest is indeed 8893 meters. This may or may not make me remember that Mount Everest is 8893 meters high but it is very likely that I will remember that 6488 meters is not the correct height and it might make me trust you less with regard to mountain related facts. Even without any repetition. If you want me to accept a statement, the statement must be believable based on what I already know and believe to be true. And I have to have some trust that you are telling me a true statement. Repetition is only secondary, only required if you or I want that I remember the statement in the long term. And if something is surprising or exciting or whatever, then one might remember something easily without a lot of repetition. The height of Mount Everest was never really interesting to me and learning the wrong height took some repetition. But then learning that Mount Everest is actually 8893 meters high and that I remembered the wrong height for years, that came as a surprise and may not take much if any repetition to remember. |