OOP - If Snape wanted Harry to see and other Snape stuff.

[oh have faith]

No: HPFGUIDX 69901

Sue says:

> What I don't understand is when Snape caught Harry in the Pensieve 
> and pulled him out, he(Snape)knew that Harry had seen his father 
in 
> there.  If Snape pulled the memory out of his head so Harry 
wouldn't 
> be able to access it during the lesson, how could Snape have any 
idea 
> what it was Harry had just seen??  It would seem to me Snape 
wouldn't 
> really know what Harry had seen until he put the memory back into 
his 
> head.
> 

I say: 

 Perhaps removing the memory doesn't work quite like that - maybe 
you retain the memory of the memory, even if the memory itself is 
gone?  After twenty years, perhaps it leaves a kind of indelible 
mark on your brain. JKR had Snape rattle on about the complex nature 
of the mind, and your memories don't exist as a sort of isolated 
box.  Snape may have removed that particular incident so that Harry 
can't break right into it by accident, but he'd still have a lot of 
other abstract memories related to it.  

My gut feeling would be that when you remove the memory, the 
knowledge you have from that incident stays with you - after all, 
it's been processed into your brain and is now entirely interwoven 
into your personality.  What you put away is the vividness and the 
nowness and the sensation of the memory - the qualia, for want of a 
better word. (Qualia are what you are directly aware of in your 
conscious experience - For example if you see the colour red, you 
have a quale of the colour, which makes actually seeing the colour 
different from simply imagining that you see it).  So while you 
remember objectively what happened, you've lost the emotional 
subjective punch of it which makes it vulnerable to being broken 
into.

  When someone breaks into your mind, they see flashes of incidents, 
but they don't see abstract knowledge.  For example, Harry can see 
Snape as a teenager alone in his room, but he can't, say, *see* 
Snape's knowledge that Veritaserum needs to stand for a full lunar 
month, or that black is never out of fashion, or a whole host of 
other stuff that he must surely have in his brain. So it's safe for 
Snape to still have the *knowledge* that James Potter once dangled 
him upside down and showed his pants to a group of giggling 
onlookers, as long as the actual incident is gone.  

Or something!

^_^  Faith's Girl