Remember Not to Trust Your Memory

REMEMBER NOT TO TRUST YOUR MEMORY

Did you know that you can’t trust even your most precious memories? They may come to you in great detail and feel 100 percent accurate, but it doesn’t matter. They easily could be partial or total lies that your brain is telling you. Really, the personal past that your brain is supposed to be keeping safe for you is not what you think it is. Your memories are pieces and batches of information that your brain cobbles together and serves up to you, not to present the past as accurately as possible, but to provide you with information that you will likely find to be useful in the present. Functional value, not accuracy, is the priority. Your brain is like some power-crazed CIA desk jockey who feeds you memories on a need-to-know basis only. Daniel Schacter, a Harvard memory researcher, says that when the brain remembers, it does so in way that is similar to how an archaeologist reconstructs a past scene relying on an artifact here, an artifact there.1 The end result might be informative and useful, but don’t expect it to be perfect. This is important because those who don’t know anything about how memory works already have one foot in fantasyland. Most people believe that our memory operates in a way that is similar to a video camera. They think that the sights, sounds, and feelings of our experiences are recorded on something like a hard drive in their heads. Totally wrong. When you remember your past, you don’t get to watch an accurately recorded replay.

Even knowing what I know about human memory, however, I continue to live as though my memories are reliable and accurate. One has to in order to function in daily life. Most of the time it all works out fine, which is why the human brain does it this way. But it can be tough sometimes because I’ve peeked behind the curtain. I’ve seen the Wizard. I know what’s really going on in my head. No longer can I be absolutely sure about all the places I’ve been and the things I’ve done. For example, one special day long ago I found the courage to kiss Kimberly, the most beautiful girl in my third-grade class. Or did I?

Did I really start that glorious day as I remember, by giving her the note I had spent an hour crafting the night before, the one that asked her to be my girlfriend? I can see it in my head right now. There was just one line: “Do you love me?” There were three boxes below it for her to check yes, no, or maybe. After the final bell that day, did I really man up, as I recall, and lean in with my little eight year-old body to execute the most romantic kiss on the cheek in the history of all elementary schools? I can see the replay in mind, clear and in great detail. I’m confident that I remember it correctly. But did it really happen that way? Because of the way our brains work, I can’t be sure, no matter how confidently my memories assure me that it did. Who knows? Maybe it did happen, but it was in fourth grade rather than third. Maybe it was Kimberly I dreamed of kissing but it was another girl whom I kissed. Or worse, maybe I missed Kimberly’s cheek and kissed a goat by accident while on a school field trip to a farm. Maybe my classmates ridiculed me for it on the long bus ride back to school. I don’t remember anything like that happening. But perhaps that’s because my brain edited and embellished a bitter memory to help me cope—all without consulting me first, of course. It’s possible because, like it or not, that’s how human brains work when it comes to memory. Was Kimberly a goat? I hope not, but short of photographic evidence of the big kiss, or documentation from an official animal-endangerment investigation, I’ll never know for sure. Don’t laugh at me—for all you know, there may be a goat or two in your past since all human brains operate on a foundation of creative deception when it comes to memory.

To try to make it easier for people to understand how memory really works, I describe it like this: Imagine a very tiny old man sitting by a very tiny campfire somewhere inside your head. He’s wearing a worn and raggedy hat and has a long, scruffy, gray beard. He looks a lot like one of those old California gold prospectors from the 1800s. He can be grumpy and uncooperative at times, but he’s the keeper of your memories and you are stuck with him. When you want or need to remember something from your past, you have to go through the old codger. Let’s say you want to recall that time when you scored the winning goal in a middle-school soccer match. You have to tap the old coot on the shoulder and ask him to tell you about it. He usually responds with something. But he doesn’t read from a faithfully recorded transcript, doesn’t review a comprehensive photo archive to create an accurate timeline, and doesn’t double-check his facts before speaking. He definitely doesn’t play a video recording of the game for you. Typically, he just launches into a tale about your glorious goal that won the big game. He throws up some images for you, so it’s kind of like a lecture or slideshow. Nice and useful, perhaps, but definitely not reliable.

Your memories are stories about your past. Without informing you, the old man might take it upon himself to leave out some parts of the story just because he feels they are unimportant. He also might get confused and accidentally toss in a few scenes from that horror film you watched last year. He’s good at that. He can blend the past you are recalling with another past or an entirely made-up event in seamless ways that you probably won’t catch. Also, as with most stories that are told and retold, the key elements, names, and imagery all change over time. With each telling, the facts and people can easily get shuffled or lost entirely. That’s the reality; your memories depend on the whims of an inconsistent and somewhat flakey storyteller. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not condemning the old man. He does all this to try to be helpful to you. And it usually works just fine. It’s the best way most of the time because we don’t want or need to remember everything we see, hear, and experience in life. It’s too much information, and a brain can only store and utilize so much. The key point to keep in mind is that when it comes to remembering very important or unusual things—such as a murder, an alien abduction, or a ghost sighting—the old man might not get it right, so we can’t trust memory alone.