We often think of memories like recordings — we think about an event and it plays back in our minds. But that isn’t the case at all. Our memories are actually created fresh every time:
Scientists generally agree memories aren’t recorded like videos or stored like data on a hard drive. They are constructed and assembled on the spot like Legos from a bucket in your brain.
Neurologist Oliver Sacks once had a patient who became colorblind after a brain injury. Not only could he not see certain colors, he couldn’t imagine them or remember them. Memories of cars and dresses and carnivals were suddenly drained, washed down. (You can read more about his research in his book, “The Island of the Colorblind.”)
Even though this patient’s memories were first imprinted when he could see color, they now could only be conjured up with the faculties of his current imagination.
Here’s a fun little demonstration:
Take out a piece of paper and get ready to write.
Really do it; it will be fun.
Ok.
Now, read this list of words out loud one time and then try to write as many of them as you can remember on the paper without looking back. When you think you have them all, look back.
Don’t read past the block of words until you’ve finished.
Go:
door, glass, pane, shade, ledge, sill, house, open, curtain, frame, view, breeze, sash, screen, shutter
Now, take a look at the list. How did you do?
Did you write down all the words?
Did you write the word window down?
If presented properly, 85 percent of people will remember seeing window in the list, but it isn’t there.
If you did, you just gave yourself a false memory thanks to the misinformation effect.
Read the whole thing before you misremember it.
Yep. The majority of each experience is interpolated by the brain, not direct experience; it’s mostly gaps, and your brain fills in what may well have been there according to its prior expectations.
And we’ve known that for quite a while, which is why it’s perplexing we still rely so heavily on testimony for truth in so many contexts.
Exactly… eye witness testimony is notoriously shakey, yet our legal system (and apologists for Jesus’s resurrection) rely heavily on it.
In the case of law I suspect it’s because there’s little real alternative. Plus, if you get a whole bunch of people who independently say pretty much the same thing (i.e. they haven’t had a chance to talk about it first), you can be pretty sure they’re truthful.
Intersubjectivity for the win. I think that only works, though, if they witnessed the event separately and there is no subsequent communication about the event.
In the case of law I suspect it’s because there’s little real alternative.
True, but my complaint isn’t that they use it, but that it is afforded as much if not more weight generally than physical evidence. Using testimony to corroborate a sequence of events that seem indicated by physical evidence is way different from using testimony to establish what happened in the absence of or contrary to the facts.
Very true.
I didn’t write down window – I was really hoping that I would have. Oh well. Not that I am bragging. I could only remember six of the words. Maybe you have to have a good memory in order to create memories.
I figured this out a long time ago…my parents were in a very strict Christian sect for a long time, so my first Christmas was when I was four, after they left. I remember it clearly…I thought. In my memories, my father has a beard, like he always has. But when I watched a video tape of that Christmas morning, he doesn’t. He grew the beard a year or so later. I’ve always wondered what other memories have been “overwritten” like that.
I guess not everyone has video evidence so clearly contradicting such a clear memory?
This has happened to me as well. When I was around 17 my parents told me a story of how I got electrecuted by sticking a plant stem in a plug when I was 3. Now I swear I can picture the entire event in my memory and the only reason I know it’s a false memory is because I was old enough to remember that I didn’t remember it before my parents had told me. Freaky stuff.
Something like ten times as many people claim they remember being present when JFK was assassinated than were actually there. Now when I hear people say, “I will always remember what I was doing on 9/11,” I think to myself, “Yes, but were you actually doing that?”
Also, on this topic, confabulation is an awesome word.
I was sitting in my bath robe reading CNN.
I remember, because I’d gotten up that morning to begin job hunting after taking six months off to drive around the US, and then moving a thousand miles to a new house. My first thought when I saw those flaming buildings was, “Man, no one will be hiring now.”
Yes, I am deeply ashamed that those were my first thoughts. Shame keeps the memory fresh.
I had a job interview for Customs and Excise. My brother picked me up and told me about it in the car as we raced home at 100 MPH to watch CNN (I bet their international ratings have never been so high).
I was in high school, and I was eating cereal and watching the news before leaving the house … I remember being confused, and not registering surprise or shock.
When I left to walk to the bus, I stopped by the horse corral where my mother was shoveling manure. I told her what had happened and she stopped shoveling to stare at me with a dropped jaw. I remember being disturbed at her reaction and thinking to myself “Wow, this is a bigger deal than I thought!”
When the first plane hit I was driving on the way to school.
When the second plane hit I was sitting on a couch in the university coffee house reading a book on the history of US-China relations. Needless to say I didn’t get very far.
I have a very clear memory of what I was doing when Kennedy died. It happened on my 7th birthday, and I have a perfect vision of sitting at the end of the long table we had at the time. I was surrounded by the usual collection of horrid scabby friends making the usual seven-year-old din and mess, when all the adults went very quiet. I heard mutterings of “president” and “shot” and the whole mood of the party changed. Even at that age I realised something very serious had happened.
I’ve often wondered how much of that memory has been establishment over time. Quite a lot I suspect, although it appears to have been a constant recollection for as long as I can remember.
I remember what I was doing when I found out about 9/11 very clearly. I was in the eleventh grade, and I woke up to get ready for school. I went on AOL to check my mail and saw something about the towers being hit by planes. I didn’t think much of it until I went to school and found out what really happened because school was at a standstill. I still didn’t think much of it even then and don’t even now. Guess I’m just apathetic.
I was at work listening to the radio during 9/11. I raced home after I heard the 1st tower fell (I had a flexible job at the time) in time to see the 2nd tower tower fall. Went back to work and was in a daze for the rest of the day.
Meant to reply to Michael. Sorry for the netiquitte breach
Yes. I was playing International Superstar Soccer on the N64. At first I thought it was one of the “Fiction Portrayed as Fact” documentaries that were popular at the time. Except it was on 3 channels simultaneously.
I was working at a firm on 7th Ave., just north of Time’s Square on 9/11. I was at my desk complaining to a co-worker that the Yankees made me sit in a pouring rain for an hour before calling off the game with the Red Sox the night before. A colleague ran in and told us that a plane had hit one of the towers, and we all ran down to my boss’ office on the south side of the building, where we had a clear view down Broadway to the damaged tower.
Standing there we watched the second plane hit. And then watched them both collapse. Awful, awful images.
Spent half the day wondering if my Dad made it through the Path station under the towers before it all happened. Once I knew he was ok, spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how to get out of the city without public transportation.
I was at Columbia University and I was in a graduate biochemistry class that went from 9-10:30. It was a Tuesday morning. I lived on 55th and Broadway at the time. I came out of class and there were 10+ messages on my cell phone and I thought “who the hell is calling me at 10:00 on a Tuesday morning???” The messages were from friends and family back in Texas who were frantic about my whereabouts. I had only lived in NYC for about 8 months and had never lived outside of Texas before that. Anyhow, it took me about an hour to retrieve and return the call of my first message– my best friend. I couldn’t understand what she was telling me and in exasperation, she told me to get to a tv. When I saw the film clips of the second hit, the two towers falling, the pentagon destruction, and the still missing plane, my first thought was “My god! I’ve just moved into the epicenter of WW III!!!”
I was in the 7th grade when it happened. I was on a bus going to some nature camp in Wisconsin. This was when I still lived in Chicago. We arrived at the camp and they brought us to a room and told us what happened. They said that the World Trade towers had been hit and collapsed and that the pentagon had been hit and one side collapsed and two planes crashed in Pennsylvania. They didn’t have all the information then I guess. We stayed there for the rest of the week and I only really started to get some information when we got home. They did not show us any news during that week nor did they give any other information. I sort of feel weird about 9-11 most likely because for 5 days I heard nothing about it besides what had happened. However I must confess that I did not know at the time what the twin towers were though.
JFK: I was home sick from school (in England). Saw it on the news.
9/11: Standing in the lobby of my office building (in Belgium), watching it on TV. I remember because I should have been there (coming out of the Millenium Hotel at around 08:45), but the trip was cancelled two days before.
Well I was in grade school when JFK was killed – they sent us home (the assumption back then was that we all had somone at home to let us in) w/o telling us why so I found out when I met my grandmother crying in the living room and she told me why.
911 – I had driven down to the Savin Rock conference center for the semi-annual CLPPPC meeting and when I walked into the building the meeting room was practically empty as almost everyone who had already arrived was in the storage/maintenance room watching the live coverage on tv – plane 1 had hit but plane 2 hadn’t yet so everyone was considering it a freak accident. The meeting ended up cancelled – the only such meeting where there was food leftover because everyone had pretty much lost their appetites.
9/11 I was in high school (10th grade?) during break. We had a geography class and we’d have another geography class. We were in the classroom waiting for the teacher to come back. When he returned he told us what happened. Class was immediately derailed to talk about the implications of such a thing and what it might mean to us in Brazil (answer: nothing at all other than sympathy for the dead).
Uh, I think you are all underestimating the power of confabulation. Unless you can get somebody else to back up the details of your story, there is no reason for me to believe your memories are any more reliable than my brother’s (clear, detailed, long-running) memories of attending a baseball game he never attended. The whole point here is that just because you “remember” something doesn’t mean it actually happened.
I’m not doubting anybody specifically, but I do doubt that all of you managed to have picture-perfect memories of an event that happened eight and a half years ago.
I am trying to remember when God show His existence when I was a christian.
Neurologist Oliver Sacks once had a patient who became colorblind after a brain injury. Not only could he not see certain colors, he couldn’t imagine them or remember them. Memories of cars and dresses and carnivals were suddenly drained, washed down. (You can read more about his research in his book, “The Island of the Colorblind.”)
I read about that case in Sacks’ An Anthropologist on Mars. Good book, fascinating case studies.
I have a memory of driving down a freeway in Chicago when I was on holiday there. The person I was with pulled into the left hand lane and came inches from knocking off a motorcyclist to near certain death, before saying “sorry man, I nearly killed you.” This wouldn´t be much of an interesting memory, except for the fact that when I close my eyes and visualise it, I´m sitting in the passenger seat on the LEFT side of the car. This is, of course, where I normally sit in Britain, so my brain´s switched the memory over to the “normal” (and obviously best) side of the road.
I have tried so many times to explain to friends who swear they remember seeing ghosts and other weird occurrences with perfect clarity that our memories are fragile fleeting things, and try to give examples of my own faulty remembrances. They always agree with me to a point, their memory is like that too except for THIS instance that proves that ghosts/angels/demons/magic exists.
“THIS instance that proves that ghosts/angels/demons/magic exists.”
I think they create memories at the “right” time in a person.
Who’s “they”? The person remembering?
I really really hope you don’t mean the “ghost”…
I remember seeing a documentary about Roswell. They did an experiment where they took some volunteers out on an “tour”. They took the group to an “alien crash site” and they had some actors there to play military personnel. One or two months later they asked those who took the tout to tell them what they saw on the tour and it was not an accurate description on what they saw. Some even claimed the military personnel fired their guns at them. This clearly shows that memory is not as accurate as everyone thinks and that for cases when one is extra emotional like when one sees a “ghost” for example, the memory can be even more altered due to stress or stimulus overload due to emotion.
I just finished reading The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons which mentioned the same kind of stuff, and other ways we’re blinded by faulty memories or situations. It was a pretty good read. Instead of that window example, they have one in their book involving words related to sleep without mentioning sleep. I of course wrote sleep down…and I saw the gorilla (mostly because I knew to watch for it).
Wait, how’d I get here?
(Looks around and scratches chin)
In The Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley argued that the primary purpose of our brain is not to record but to filter out, and it is not a huge pipe for recieving information but more of a reducing valve.
“I now think that perception is useful because it is not veridical. The argument that evolution favors veridical perceptions is wrong, both theoretically and empirically. It is wrong in theory, because natural selection hinges on reproductive fitness, not on truth, and the two are not the same: Reproductive fitness in a particular niche might, for instance, be enhanced by reducing expenditures of time and energy in perception; true perceptions, in consequence, might be less fit than niche-specific shortcuts. It is wrong empirically: mimicry, camouflage, mating errors and supernormal stimuli are ubiquitous in nature, and all are predicated on non-veridical perceptions. The cockroach, we suspect, sees little of the truth, but is quite fit, though easily fooled, with its niche-specific perceptual hacks. Moreover, computational simulations based on evolutionary game theory, in which virtual animals that perceive the truth compete with others that sacrifice truth for speed and energy-efficiency, find that true perception generally goes extinct.” Donald Hoffman, Cognitive Scientist, UC, Irvine; Author, Visual Intelligence
From the link:
From what I understand from recent cognitive research it’s less about the amount of time between an event and your memory of the event and more about how often you have recalled that event in the intervening time. As he says, building a memory introduces errors, and the more often a memory is rebuilt the more errors accumulate. That’s why something that you haven’t thought about for a very long time can seem so vivid in your memory. That fact that you haven’t thought about it in so long may mean that it’s actually a more accurate memory than more recent memories which you have recalled often.
I’m very glad that when I went through the 97B course at Ft. Huachuca there was an hour of instruction on the many problems with eyewitness accounts. I worry about how much this subject is covered in our law enforcement academies – certainly the people who end up on juries are not aware of it.
One of the most interesting books I’ve ever read is The Seven Sins of Memory (or at least I remember it being interesting…). I’d recommend it to anyone and everyone.
well, that would explain why when my sisters and I get together (we’re all over 55) and talk out childhood events, we all remember them differently. Sometimes the details are completely the opposite from one to the next.