Pensieve = Security Camera?

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 104021

vmonte wrote:
<snip> I wrote a few months ago that I beleived that the kids may 
even put some of their own memories to view in an unobjective way.  
They may be able to glean information that way.
> 
> 
> Alice responded:
> But this would mean that having a Pensieve would be like having 360
> vision and senses all the time - albeit only in retrospect. Wouldn't
> people USE that a lot more? Just one idea: the examiner could look
> into his Pensieve after the exam and check whether anybody had been
> cheating, talking etc. 
> I hate it when JKRs ideas seem be logically faulty, we must find
> another solution...


Carol:
As far as we can tell from the evidence presented, a Pensieve is not a
tool that just anyone can use. True, once a memory has been removed,
anyone (even a kid like Harry) can enter it and experience it--but not
from the viewpoint of the person whose memory it is. Instead, he
enters into the surroundings, seeing, hearing, even feeling objects
(such as the bench or chair he sits on in Dumbledore's memories). In
other words, it's an objective record of what happened, not a
subjective rendering of the event as it was perceived by the person
from whose mind it came.

To return to my point--the only two people we've seen place memories
in the Pensieve are Snape and Dumbledore, both of them skilled in
Occlumency. Not just any person can place his wand to his head and
remove a memory. And we've yet to see anyone remove a memory from a
head other than his own.

Occlumency seems to be a rare skill and Pensieves appear to be even
rarer. We've seen only one so far (Snape borrowed Dumbledore's for the
occasion). The memories aren't stored there. When the Occlumens has
finished studying them--objectively, in relation to each other,
uncontaminated by the subjective context of his own mind--or when he
no longer needs to conceal them from another person--he returns them
to his own mind.

IMO, the kids can't use the Pensieve to study their own memories
because not being Occlumens (whatever the plural is), they can't
remove the memories from their own minds. Nor would an examiner or
teacher be able to do so, unless, like Snape, he or she happened to be
an Occlumens.

As I've said before, the fact that Harry can enter the memory and *see
the person whose memory it is from the outside without entering into
that person's thoughts or feeling his emotions* indicates that the
Pensieve records *what really happened* uncontaminated by subjectivity
or the limitations of a particular person's perception. That is what
makes it valuable. But it can only be rightly used by a trained wizard
who knows what he's doing, a "superb occlumens" like Dumbledore or
Snape--not by kids or even by most grown wizards.

If we see more of the Pensieve, and I hope we do, most likely the
memories we see will be Snape's or Dumbledore's.

Carol