Your Memory Doesn't Work How You Think It Works
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Memory is a tricky business.
The crucial thing is: it doesn’t work how we pretend it works.
I learned this through a truly spectacular mini-series on Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, Revisionist History (the first episode of that series is here.)
We treat memory as though it’s some kind of video recording of events that happened. But the truth is, it’s nothing like that at all.
From what I understand it’s more like this: a way that our brain constructs to remember what might be the key lessons from events in our lives.
To do this it conflates stories and events together.
It confuses what happened to us with what happened to others.
It’s more like a myth which preserves the meaning for future generations than a history documentary that shows things exactly as it was.
And what this means is that it remembers things that never happened.
They run fascinating experiments, which Gladwell recounts on Revisionist History.
For example, they invite a group of people to come into a lab and say what exactly they were doing on September 11th, 2001.
Then they invite them back a year later and ask them again.
And again.
And after a few years, their stories are wildly different from what they said at first, but the people deny this, saying ‘I must have misremembered before’.
Sometimes, to really test people, the researchers get them to hand write their stories. That means that they are confronted, years later, by words they undeniably wrote, but which contradict their current memory.
Gladwell tells some pretty tragic stories about this, including a US reporter being forced to apologise for lying… when that wasn’t what was happening at all. As far as he was concerned, his memory told him he was telling the truth.
There are other experiments where researchers fabriate a photograph from someone’s life that never happened. And a surprising number of people invent a memory to back up the existence of the photograph.
This has rather shocking connotations for something like our justice system, which relies on eyewitnesses.
It also gives a slightly different slant to those times when your husband tells a story about you as though it was about him.
It means the argument you have with your sister about what happened when you were six becomes extra tricky.
And recently, I was thinking about some of the memories I have that make me cringe.
Times when I did things that were way out of alignment with my values.
In fact, as I’ve written before, the power of that guilt in some ways defines my values.
But… how do I know if they actually happened?
Given the flexibility and fallibility of our memory, we should probably be pretty careful about how much we let our memories affect us decades on.
Having a journal (or a blog) is a pretty good way of cementing memories. And when I read back old blogs, I sometimes get a flash of the experience of the people reading their old memories in their own handwriting - I decide I have to trust my writing from six years ago over my memory now because it was closer to the event.
We should also be careful about how much blame we put on people for mistakes of memory. For example, if you listen to Revisionist History and find I’ve misremembered the stories from it… well, that shouldn’t be that surprising (but please correct them in the comments).
An old friend of my dad’s is a storyteller.
He gathers people in an iron age roundhouse in North Wales and recount stories, old and new, with beautiful poise.
He told me that to remember a story - not word for word, but enough to retell it - he needs to tell the story twice in the first 24 hours.
That has always worked for me: tell the stories as they happen, when they happen, and they seem to stay in memory in a more complete way.
But above all, from this reflection on memory, is the invitation to be a little less certain, a little less confident in your memory, and a little more curious.
How does someone else remember it? How can you piece together the things that two people are certain about? What could the differences mean?
And be careful with memories you may be torturing yourself with.
From the memory research, the truth would seem to be this: it may not even have ever happened.
So take some meaning from it, but don’t let what happened in the past ruin your experience of the future.
You’re allowed to forgive yourself.
It might never even have happened.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.