why do frenchmen wave their arms about?

What i've been writing (and therefore thinking about) these past few days is about memory and whether you can base research upon the memories of others because of all the problems with the validity of memory, i.e do we remember things accurately or do we see them, 'coloured with nostalgia' ? Then i started thinking that i remember things either as completely good or bad, for example i really loved my second year uni house when in actual fact their were times when i could have cheerfully throttled the people there (but then i think that at certain points with mostof my housemates). But then i'm not sure if it matters if we have the capacity of filtering out the bad bits (and therefore the good bits too) of memories that might be positive. By asking people their memory of the past, that's what you get, how they perceive past events in the context of the present. I guess you just need to acknowledge that from the outset alongside the point that a lot of communication isn't verbal as illustrated by the posts' title.