Colloquium: "Perspectival Forgetting"

Abstract: There are certain episodes from our past which we can replay with vivid detail, but which nevertheless remain distant from us in one crucial respect: we have lost access to the emotional or evaluative perspective from which we experienced those episodes. For example, you may be unable to recall enjoying a genre of music you now dislike, or unable to recall feeling hopeful after your expectations have been dashed.  Such forgetting is all-too-familiar yet widely overlooked in recent work on memory. In this talk, I introduce the phenomenon, defend its status as a genuine kind of forgetting, and explain its wide-ranging implications to central debates about empathy and the powers of imagination.