6. Your Memory Sucks
Elizabeth Loftus is one of the world’s foremost researchers in memory, and she’ll be the first to tell you that your memory sucks.
Basically, she’s found that our memories of past events are easily altered by other past experiences and/or with new, incorrect information. She was the one who made everyone realize that eyewitness testimony isn’t really the gold standard people thought it was in courtrooms.
Loftus and other researchers have found that:
-Not only do our memories of events fade with time, they also become more susceptible to false information as time passes.
-Warning people that their memories might contain false information doesn’t always help eliminate the false information.
-The more empathetic you are, the more likely you are to incorporate false information into your memories.
-Not only is it possible for memories to be altered with false information, it’s possible for entire memories to be planted. We’re especially susceptible to this when family members or other people we trust are the ones planting the memories.
Our memories, therefore, aren’t nearly as reliable as we might think — even the ones we think we know are right, that we know are true.
In fact, neuroscientists can predict whether or not you will misremember an event based on your pattern of brain activity when you’re experiencing it. Your shitty memory seems to be built right into your brain’s software in some cases. But why?
At first, this might seem like Mother Nature screwed up when it comes to human memory. After all, you wouldn’t use a computer that consistently lost or changed your files after you stopped working on them.
But your brain isn’t storing spreadsheets and text files and cat GIFs. Yes, our memories help us learn from past events which theoretically helps us make better decisions in the future. But memory actually has another function that we rarely think about, and it’s a much more important and much more complex function than simply storing information.
As humans, we need an identity, a sense of ‘who’ we are, in order to navigate complex social situations and, really, just to get shit done most of the time. Our memories help us create our identities by giving us a story of our past.
In this way, it doesn’t really matter how accurate our memories are. All that matters is that we have a story of our past in our heads that creates that part of the sense of who we are, our sense of self. And rather than using 100% accurate versions of our memories to do this, it’s actually easier to use fuzzy memories and fill in the details on the fly in one way or another to fit the version of our ‘selves’ that we’ve created and come to accept.
Maybe you remember that your brother and his friends used to pick on you a lot and it really hurt sometimes. To you, this explains why you’re a bit neurotic and anxious and self-conscious. But maybe it didn’t hurt you as much you think it did. Maybe when you remember when your brother picked on you, you take the emotions you’re feeling now and pile them on to those memories — emotions that are neurotic and anxious and self-conscious — even though those emotions might not have much to do with your brother picking on you.
Only now, this memory of your brother being mean and making you feel bad all the time, whether true or not, fits with your identity of a slightly neurotic, anxious person which, in turn, keeps you from doing things that might cause embarrassment and more pain in your life. Essentially, it justifies the strategies you use to get through the day.
And so you might be asking, “Well, Mark, are you saying that ‘who I think I am’ is just a bunch of made up ideas between my ears?”
Yes. Yes I am.