The memory multiverse

As an ethnographic experiment, this paper considers the texture of temporality, reflecting on how we know what is real, unreal, a hallucination, a memory, a confabulation. The paper explores unusual sensory experiences associated with traumatic brain injuries, the seemingly irrational imaginings by seemingly rational beings. Jamais vu and déjà vu - sensory experiences associated with neurological disorders resulting from either injury or epilepsy - are mnemonic experiences, when the organic and psychic are indistinguishable. They are experienced as memory disorders, involving the play of time, blurring fantasy and reality. Readers are introduced to two characters - our narrator and her other self - and the polytemporality of brain injury. Here we see how these disorders are experienced by the narrator and her other self, confusing the mind, subverting space and time. The paper brings the anthropology of time, the social study of neurosciences, and sensory ethnography into one conversation, an imaginative ethnography that traces the affects and intensities of an injured mind

Cognitive psychology · Cognitive science · Conversation · Epistemology · Ethnography · Irrational number · Mnemonic · Psychic · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Temporality · Anthropology · Communication · Empathy and Medical Education · Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology

• Battle in the Clouds

  Open Access•Amy Moran-Thomas, Amy Moran‐thoma et al.•American Anthropologist•2025

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