It always annoys me when someone learns Occlumency seemingly overnight, and masters it three days later. It's supposed to be rare and difficult, otherwise everyone would know it. The only thing that is even more annoying is the mindscape and suddenly perfect recall of everything you have ever know and forgotten... I suppose perfect recall starting after you mastered it might make sense if you want to implement it, but who cares about a todlers memories.

 

The perfect recall of everything from occlumency has at least some canon justification from the fact that memories viewed in a Pensieve have complete detail and can be used to view your own memories in higher fidelity than you remember. Like copying music from a cassette tape onto DVD and getting the music video as well.

Well, except for the fact that the only memories we see in canon are from Dumbledore, Snape (both Occlumens) and Slughorn who was likely an Occlumens himself.

 

We see the memories of:

Hepzibah Smith's house Elf Hokey when Riddle is visiting her.
Bob Ogden's when he comes to the Gaunt Shack.

 

Completely forgot those. Well then. I guess that it's completely canon that memories are eidetic and you can use Occlumency to perfectly remember everything since you were a baby including what is behind you.

Unless of course the pensieve magically scrys on the past using the memory to guide it. Except that you can have false memories which means that it's not scrying. Unless the false memories are hard to create because they overwrite the pensieve's scrying which is why it's obvious.

I don't know what to believe!

 

Relevant Word of god.

 

In those cases, Dumbledore was responsible for acquiring the memories and is a Legilimens- rather than Hokey or Bob Ogden the clueless Ministry worker having the power to dredge out memory strands, Dumbledore probably had them concentrate on the memory, used Legilimency to read what they saw and then extracted his memory for Harry's trips in the Pensieve.

EDIT: (No wonder mempory extracts aren't used for testimony. It would be like having a Defendant's hired psychologist take the polygraph for him; 'I vow that this is my impression of what the defendant thinks happened'.)

Snape, Slughorn and Dumbledore are still believable Occlumens. I don't favor the idea of 'perfect' recall, but these known Occlumens are expected to have very good memory capacity, so there may be a correlation.

As far as mindscapes, I favor the notion that only a visitor sees the mindscape, or at the very least there's an existing 'scape for anyone who revisit their own dreams. It's not something a person designs; rather, it's an expression of their personality + thought-process, which is really an outgrowth of their experiences anyway.

 

The above post makes me wonder if Occlumency may be precursors to using a Pensieve... for example, if Harry, untrained in Occlumency, removes his own memory and uses a Pensieve, it may be significantly more difficult to see in detail, which would, of course, be another caveat against using a memory during a trial.

I would then assume dreams would become even more difficult to determine using a Pensieve, as we often lose our ability to recall them as soon as we wake up.

Using the above theories on Occlumency, 99% of Fanfics just got boned - imagine all the stories where Harry goes "Hey, for shits and giggles, lets revisit how awesome I was during the Chamber of Secrets" suddenly becoming "Oh, damn, I'm pretty sure that snake was bigger than that!"

 

Wait, wait, wait. Rowling is seriously saying that in real life all memories are perfect but we just can't remember them properly? I call bullshit.

I prefer the idea of the pensieve scrying backwards through time myself since it actually explains why you can see things that you couldn't perceive the first time and the perfect fidelity of the experience. It also explains why it is so rare and not used for trials etc- its a magical artifact on a similar level to the Philosopher's Stone.

 

It's magic.

I'd say she'd thought of the stories of how police have used hypnotism to help witnesses remember details that they otherwise wouldn't remember. Except instead of hypnotism, it's magic, which works perfectly. I'm not saying it's a good or bad idea, but that's where I personally think she's coming from.

Scrying backwards in time doesn't fit with canon, but if that's the way you want to write it in your stories, feel free.

 

I think that may actually be the case, even without magic...the brain remembers everything, but we don't. I think I've heard stories about people unlocking this capacity in various ways. I could be entirely wrong, but that doesn't sound like such an outlandish concept to me.

/shrug?

 

That sounds like the "fact" that we only use 10% of our brain and the rest is devoted to psychic powers.

Which is sort of true. We only use about 10% of our brain at any one time. You know what we call using more than 80% of our brain at once?

An epileptic fit.
Or an orgasm. A good one anyway.

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About the memory thing: it doesn't work that way. It seriously, seriously doesn't work that way. You can teach yourself to learn things and remember much better, but you don't remember everything.

Look, around three quarters of people's most vivid and supposedly accurate memories like 9/11 or their weddings are provably inaccurate and bullshit, and the rest are just unprovably inaccurate and probably bullshit. [ 1 ]

At it's very basic level, unless you want to start talking about your memories being in your soul which changes the shape of your body (in which case most people will laugh at you), then your brain is made up of cells which die and get replaced. How long do synapses last? More than 100 years? I don't think so. They don't get replaced perfectly or we'd live forever.

Then theres the way that every single time you remember something you replace it with itself again changed slightly by your surroundings and current thoughts, leading to it changing gradually over time. You can change how people remember a memory after it has been added to their long-term memory and is supposedly permanent by electric shocks or drugs. [ 2 ], [ 3 ]

Not to mention the experiments showing just how easy it is to make someone believe something happened when it didn't, or experiments showing how even if you are asked to remember the same memory over and over it gradually decays.

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Now this can all be waved away in Harry Potter by saying that it's magic, and that all wizards and house-elves have magical memories which are permanent and eidetic. Or that memories are indeed held in the soul.

But in real life memories are like frozen sculptures and every time you take them out of the freezer to remember them they get melted a bit and put back in the freezer slightly differently.