Faulty Memory
Katey Phillips
Nothing bothers me more than when someone tells a story involving me, but they tell it wrong. It baffles me that they would choose to add in surely false details and omit important ones. But I really ought to calm down, because the thing is, I am probably remembering the event differently than they are. If I were to tell the story, I might baffle them. Who is to say which memory is more correct?
Memory is imperfect. Our brains are not recording devices. Instead, memories are constructed in both the encoding phase and retrieval phase. In other words, a great deal of what we think we remember is, in a sense, made up.
Elizabeth Loftus speaks about implanting false memories in her TED talk titled "The Fiction of Memory":
Memory is imperfect. Our brains are not recording devices. Instead, memories are constructed in both the encoding phase and retrieval phase. In other words, a great deal of what we think we remember is, in a sense, made up.
Elizabeth Loftus speaks about implanting false memories in her TED talk titled "The Fiction of Memory":
It must be noted that everyone is subject to the threat of false memories. Tara Thean of Time Magazine reports that "false memories afflict everyone — even people with the best memories of all." In a UC Irvine study, 20% of subjects - those with normal and "highly superior autobiographical memory" alike- when prompted, "remembered" seeing footage of a plane crash that did not exist. Read more here.
Claudia Hammond has hypothesized that the fallibility of memory has a purpose: "To envisage the future we rely on memory, recombining any relevant recollections to create possible outcomes. This remix of memories allows us to preview future events in a window in the mind. Memory is essentially a reconstructive process; when we want to re-experience an event we don't summon up a tape from the library -- we alter memories as we lay them down in order to make sense of them, then we reconstruct them when we recall an event and even change them again if new information has come to light. A similar process takes place when we imagine the future -- the neural signatures of remembering the past and imagining the future are remarkably alike." Read more here.
Jennifer Horton of Discovery.com has compiled a list of the Top 5 Ways False Memories are Formed:
5. Misinformation - receiving wrong details of an event from outside sources.
4. Misattribution - mixing up details of separate events.
3. Fuzzy Tracing - remembering the gist of something but not the exact details.
2. Emotion - emotions effect how we record our memories (broadly with less detail or narrowly with more).
1. Inference - filling in incomplete memories with things that seem to fit but may be based on stereotypes or biases.
Read more here.
Claudia Hammond has hypothesized that the fallibility of memory has a purpose: "To envisage the future we rely on memory, recombining any relevant recollections to create possible outcomes. This remix of memories allows us to preview future events in a window in the mind. Memory is essentially a reconstructive process; when we want to re-experience an event we don't summon up a tape from the library -- we alter memories as we lay them down in order to make sense of them, then we reconstruct them when we recall an event and even change them again if new information has come to light. A similar process takes place when we imagine the future -- the neural signatures of remembering the past and imagining the future are remarkably alike." Read more here.
Jennifer Horton of Discovery.com has compiled a list of the Top 5 Ways False Memories are Formed:
5. Misinformation - receiving wrong details of an event from outside sources.
4. Misattribution - mixing up details of separate events.
3. Fuzzy Tracing - remembering the gist of something but not the exact details.
2. Emotion - emotions effect how we record our memories (broadly with less detail or narrowly with more).
1. Inference - filling in incomplete memories with things that seem to fit but may be based on stereotypes or biases.
Read more here.
Our emotional memory is also subject to change.
Daniel Kahneman speaks about how our remembering selves perceive events differently from our experiencing selves in his TED talk titled "The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory":
Daniel Kahneman speaks about how our remembering selves perceive events differently from our experiencing selves in his TED talk titled "The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory":