Your Memory Sucks

What if everything you thought you knew wasn't exactly true or accurate? What if your recollection of past events are merely pieces of a puzzle put together by your brain upon your request? Are memories only the memories of our memories? How the hell does your brain remember anything in the first place? These are all things I think about. Welcome to my nightmare. 

From: If my brain were an imaginary friend

More after the jump...

Writing for this blog has become a journal of sorts. While writing about past events, memories, family, etc., I've stumbled upon mounting evidence that suggests our memories aren't always what they seem; that they may be pieces of a puzzle assembled by your brain using many chunks of leftover, re-written memories. This is referred to as reconstructive memory, which suggests that each time we recall a memory, we are in some ways distorting the original memory and overwriting it with a new one. 

     From an article by Greg Miller at Smithsonian.com:

      Most people have so-called flashbulb memories of where they were and what they were doing when something momentous happened: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, say, or the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. (Unfortunately, staggeringly terrible news seems to come out of the blue more often than staggeringly good news.) But as clear and detailed as these memories feel, psychologists find they are surprisingly inaccurate.

[Karim] Nader, now a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, says his memory of the World Trade Center attack has played a few tricks on him. He recalled seeing television footage on September 11 of the first plane hitting the north tower of the World Trade Center. But he was surprised to learn that such footage aired for the first time the following day. Apparently he wasn’t alone: a 2003 study of 569 college students found that 73 percent shared this misperception.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/How-Our-Brains-Make-Memories.html#ixzz2mzyodaE5 

We all like to think that when we recall events of magnitude our memories are concrete. How many times have you told your story of where you were on 9/11? How many times have you heard everyone you were with taking turns telling everyone where they were or what they were doing on that morning? I'd bet it's at least twelve, as I'm sure the people you are with each September 11th insist on telling you where they were in 2001. The chance that some of those memories have been altered or even combined with other accounts over the years is pretty great. 

It's upsetting to think that the memories we hold so dear may not be entirely accurate. These memories are personal. They are of the events that have shaped us. They are responsible for things we do every day. But don't be scared. Scientists are learning more every day.

     From The TED Radio Hour on NPR:

In his new book, Pieces of Light, Charles Fernyhough digs deep into the recesses of memory to figure out what shapes it, how it works and why some things stick with us forever. Fernyhough talks with NPR's Rachel Martin:

     "There's something weird going on with memory. The scientists are telling us that memory is a reconstruction, and yet we, as people, tend to stick to our old-fashioned ideas that memory works like a video camera, for example, that it just records, and it files things away in mental DVDs that we can pull down and set playing. And in a way, that's not surprising, because we see memories as foundational for who we are. We commonly feel that we are our memories; our memories define us. So something needs to change. ... Accepting that memories are not literal representations of the past as it happened doesn't mean that we have to forget about them or start disbelieving them all. But they're shaped by who we are now. They're shaped by what we feel, what we believe, what our biases are."

The distortion of memories during recollection may also be a tool of the mind that enables us to learn from the past. In other words, we can only think of the past through the prism of our experiences since the memory. Since we can't unlearn what we have learned since the memory, what we have learned since must shape how we view the memory.

For example, you could have a lovely memory of a holiday during your childhood. You cherish this memory for decades only to later learn that just outside the framework of your mind's eye your parents were in a devastating argument or that the best gift you received was stolen from an orphanage by your delinquent, alcoholic uncle. 

Would this not change the nature of this memory? 

In June of 1989 my family and I spent a wonderful weekend at a music festival somewhere in Ohio. Upon returning home that Sunday night we learned that my dad's younger brother was in a terrible car accident. For three weeks the doctors did not know if he would survive, let alone walk again, talk again, or tuck his three children into bed again. He did survive but he has done so with a myriad of leftover ailments and will live out his days completely blind. Do you know what we remember of our lovely weekend in Ohio? Nothing. Even as we see photos of the weekend taken BEFORE the accident, the images are tainted with what we learned since. 

Something else you could ask is this: assuming this memory reconstruction is proven factual, can it be applied to mankind's recollection of history? If each account of any crumb of historical significance could be a memory reconstruction or an amalgamation of ideas, how can we be sure how accurate it all is? 

(Challenging Conventional Wisdom coming soon to a blog near you.)

Do we settle with consensus? Eyewitness testimony? There is a ton of information regarding the lack of credibility of eyewitness accounts of an event and the extent of the plasticity of these memories. Elizabeth Loftus has made a career of studying this. You can listen to her TED talk here. You can also check out this Wikipedia entry on the Misinformation Effect regarding eyewitness testimony and how memories can actually be manipulated. 

How easy is it to distort history? What if the history of the world has been recorded as if the human race has been playing "the telephone game" for a few thousand years? It has already been proven that history can be twisted by film and television. Far too many people learn history by watching TV and movies and treating them as historical fact. Check out this 1989 NY Times article discussing this, and this more current UGO.com list of movies that distort history. 

If you're reading this and asking yourself what kind of apeshit monkey baloney you are reading, I understand. At the root of all this is that memories of childhood are being jogged by spending my first Christmas with my baby daughter, and the desire to make her memories as wonderful as mine. What really got me thinking was one of those nights spent with friends and family where a friendly argument ensued about the events of some gathering in years past. 

We've all had those "it happened like this", "no, it happened like that" kinda arguments, where both or all parties present have a completely different recollection of the same event. Sure, some of it comes down to mere perspective, but sometimes we can't even agree on the basic framework. How can this be? Why doesn't somebody know the absolute truth? We all think we do, but do we really? Couples who are asked how they met or how they got together have this problem often and they normally feel pressure to come to a consensus on the event. This consensus, of course, dissolves quickly when divorce proceedings begin.

What all of this is making me realize is how important it is to take pictures, keep a journal, write for a blog, and anything else you can think of. So for those of us worried about writing "memoirs" before we die, have no fear; that's not what it's about. You could be preserving more than just memories. You could be preserving your very own thought processes, feelings, ideas, and perhaps even a passing fancy or two that you wouldn't otherwise remember.