Penseive Question...

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 187378

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Jamieson Wolf Villeneuve" <jamiesonwolf at ...> wrote:

> Or, while the memory is in the Pensieve, do they have no mental record of that memory? I'm curious to what everyone else thinks. Thoughts anyone? 
> 

Pippin:
This seems to be an unsettled issue in canon. Harry thinks the memory is removed from the mind of the person storing it. He supposes that is why Snape takes three memories from his mind before each occlumency lesson and stores them in the pensieve -- to protect them from any accidental incursions by Harry. 

But this seems unlikely. In the first place, as we now know, Snape had far more than three memories  to conceal from Harry, and in the second place, he had been hiding all of those memories and many more from the far more powerful legilimency of Voldemort himself. 

More likely, Snape was only making a show of protecting his secrets with the pensieve in order  to disguise the fact that he could actually protect them with occlumency. Dumbledore seems able to discuss the trials he witnesses in the pensieve without putting the memories back in his head first. But no doubt it's a complex piece of magic and can work in more than one way, depending on how the wizard (and JKR) want it to function.

Pippin