ElysianState

Hello.

I took the PSAT this weekend. I vividly remember a single question that I spent about 10 minutes on, but every time I try to recount exactly what was in the question, I find that I come up with the same problem: I can’t remember what the question itself was. I know it was a math problem. I know it was difficult. But everything else about it seems to be blurry. Was it a problem involving 3 variables? Or was it 2? Did it ask me to find a sum of solutions? Or a product?

Even memories that you make weeks, days, hours ago can disappear without warning. And when they do, I find that I rely on memories that may not be as accurate as I thought they were. Even memories that I can remember in thorough detail aren’t necessarily more accurate than ones I can barely recall. Such a memory is called a “flashbulb memory”, a long-lasting one that’s usually about a shocking or surprising event. No matter how much you can recall from a flashbulb memory, there is no evidence actually tying these towards accuracy in memory.

So what memories CAN we trust? What’s accurate and what isn’t? This problem is pronounced in legal issues where multiple people have different recounts of the same event. We can call these memories that contradict each other “Unreliable Memories”, which refer to recollections of past events that are inaccurate or distorted in some way. An important detail to take away from this is that gaps in these memories are filled with false information. This can come from many factors, but the one that I find affects me the most is the idea of a Memory Schema, which is a mental model or structure that groups similar objects or concepts together. For example, if I tried to remember something from elementary school, I would likely fill in a memory of a classroom with regular things I’d EXPECT to find in a school, like a blackboard, pencils, desks, etc. This can lead to gaps being filled in automatically when we can’t remember something exactly. Maybe I’d remember dropping a pencil in class when I actually dropped a pen, because my brain filled in the concept “pencil” with “classroom”. Funnily enough, this also has the inverse effect of causing us to remember something extremely out of place, such as if we had a dog in class one day. Since it directly contrasted with my schema of the classroom, I would be more inclined to remember it easier.

Memory is a central part of both who we are and how we perceive who we are. If we find that we cannot rely on our own memories, our views on past experiences suddenly become challenged. I find that this sudden change in the way we perceive ourselves is because we can misinterpret what memories really are. While it may be easy to see them as something like a taped recording the brain makes, a memory is more like a reconstruction of events which we recall every time we think of them, like a story we would tell someone else. This means that these memories can be slightly reshaped based on emotional changes to us since the event itself. The misinformation effect, which occurs when post-event information like leading questions can alter the memory of the event. To summarize the misinformation effect, you can imagine two people witnessing a car accident while walking home from work one day. The police ask them separately, asking one how fast the car was going before they crashed into each other and the other how fast the car was going before they bumped into each other. The person who was asked using the word “crashed” is more likely to say that the car was going faster than the one who was asked using the word “bumped”. You can probably guess how easy people can be manipulated to change the way they recall something through this.

There’s a lot more I could say about this. I might want to come back and talk about this again soon. There are many interesting studies on this topic that I want to dive deeper into and write about. But I did want to touch on how we could try to make memories more reliable, if possible at all. I just mentioned leading questions-these directly harm memories by causing us to remember them differently through a sort of bias. By avoiding these kinds of questions or words when recalling past events, we can try to avoid as much of this as possible. While there might not be a way to avoid making unreliable memories, what we can do is reduce overconfidence in them instead. By taking awareness in the fallibility of memories, we can both question and reflect on our recollections, giving us another chance to think about what we remember before we decide if it is the truth or not.

Take some time next time when you argue about something that happened before. I’ve learned recently that much of what I remember never happened or happened in a different context than how I recalled it completely. I think that’s all from me today.