Abstract: Memory is an essential cognitive foundation of narrative, yet its role remains underexplored in narrative medicine. While health humanities scholars and healthcare providers skillfully analyze the symbolic, existential, and structural elements of narratives, they often overlook the fundamental cognitive processes that generate them. Before any story of lived experience can be told, events must first be perceived, interpreted, and represented by the mind. Human intuitions about causality, temporality, and agency shape these representations before they are stored, and the representations become linked with prior memories, and prove impressionable in response to subsequent experiences.
This presentation examines how the cognitive processing of episodic memory (the recollection of specific events) and autobiographical memory (the integration of personal experiences into one's life story) influence how narratives are constructed. By exploring the cognitive processes of encoding, consolidating, and retrieving memories, we gain valuable insights into how patients narrate illness and how healthcare providers narrate clinical interactions.
During this paper session, we will review the basic processes of episodic and autobiographical memory and analyze examples of clinical reflections and pathographies. We will examine how memory processes influence, enrich, and potentially distort what people retell. Familiarity with these cognitive foundations offers health humanities scholars and healthcare practitioners fresh perspectives on narrative medicine practice and enhances their ability to interpret illness narratives with greater nuance and accuracy. This framework bridges cognitive science and narrative medicine, creating new possibilities for both theoretical approaches and practical applications.
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