Why you shouldn't rely unconditionally on your own memory
Human memory is often perceived as a reliable storage of data. For example, with the light hand of Arthur Conan Doyle, who invented Sherlock Holmes, they present it as an attic filled with necessary and unnecessary information, or palaces of the mind in a more modern interpretation. And to get to the desired memory, you just need to carefully clear away the “junk” around it.
Surveys show What People Believe about How Memory Works: A Representative Survey of the US Population that most people do not doubt the accuracy of information retrieved from memory. Memorizing, in their opinion, is the same as recording data on a video camera. Many people believe that memories are immutable and permanent and believe that hypnosis helps to retrieve them more effectively. Therefore, for example, 37% of respondents believe that the testimony of one person is enough to bring charges of a criminal offense.
However, here is a real case. In the early 1980s, a woman was attacked and raped by four black men she did not know. Police later detained two suspects. One of them was Michael Green. During the identification parade, the victim did not recognize him. But when police showed her photographs some time later, including a photograph of Michael Green, she marked him as her attacker. When the photo was shown again, the victim confirmed that he was the criminal. Michael Green was convicted and served 27 of his sentence of 75 years in prison. Cleared, and Pondering the Value of 27 Years was able to prove his innocence only in 2010 using a DNA test.
There were many questions about this case as a whole, they concerned not only the quality of witness testimony - for example, racism could have played a role. But this is an eloquent illustration of the fact that the statements of one person are clearly not enough if there is a risk that an innocent person will spend more than half his life in prison. Michael Green was imprisoned at 18 and released at 45.
Where do false memories come from?
One of the most famous modern memory researchers, Elizabeth Loftus, tested Make-believe memories, how accurate eyewitness accounts are and what factors will influence their memories. She showed people recordings of accidents, and then asked about the details of the accident. And it turned out that some wording of questions causes people to mistake false memories for real ones.
For example, if you ask a person about a broken headlight, he will most likely in the future talk about it as something he saw. Although, of course, everything was in order with the headlights. And if you ask about the van parked near the barn, and not “Did you see the barn?”, the witness, when asked again, will begin to remember the building. She wasn't there either, of course.
Let’s say that the testimony of witnesses to incidents can be considered unreliable: after all, we are usually talking about a stressful situation. But here is another experience of The formation of false memories of the same Elizabeth Loftus. She sent experiment participants four stories from their childhood, which were allegedly written down from the words of older relatives. Three stories were true, but one was not. It described in detail how a man got lost in a store as a child.
As a result, a quarter of the experiment participants “remembered” something that did not happen. In some cases, during repeated interviews, people not only spoke with confidence about fictitious events, but also began to add details to them.
Getting lost in a shopping center is also stressful. But in this case, anxiety should seem to play into the person’s hands: he will definitely remember something like this if it happened. However, experimental results show that confronting false memories is easier than it seems.
Record impressions from all senses
When I put a deposit in my memory bank, I try to make it meaningful so that I can withdraw the interest in the form of happiness in the future.
Our senses can take us back in time to times and places where we were happy. Therefore, if you keep a diary, do not forget to record the impressions received through all your senses. Last year I was lucky enough to spend a few days with my friends John and Millie. John is one of the editors of the World Happiness Report, and if there was a World Kindness Report, John and Millie would undoubtedly be at the top of it. They are some of the most wonderful people I have ever met in my life. Let me give you an entry from my diary. As you read it, remember the Chinese proverb attributed to Confucius: “The palest ink is better than the best memory.”
Hornby Island, Canada, June 2018
Every evening the deer come. Sometimes they come very close to the house and eat Millie's flowers that are on the porch. At low tide, the seals bask in the sun on a small reef, and we can hear them even from home.
Hornby Island is located on the west coast of British Columbia. Three ferries and six hours from Vancouver. Four generations of this family came here. John's father bought this land, and now John and Millie's children and grandchildren come here. John's father donated much of the land to the state for a public park (now called Helliwell Park) because "it's too beautiful to keep."
When the sun is shining, it's so warm outside that you can write right on the porch. In the north, on the other side of the water, snow-capped mountain peaks are visible, and when the wind blows, I feel the cold on my face.
I'm working on a new book. There's no internet here, so the only distraction I have is the smell of strawberry jam or rhubarb pie Millie is making. John is also writing, he is diligently tapping two fingers on the keyboard. Knock-Knock.
Today we walked through the forest. There was a strong smell of pine - I think it was Douglas fir. We looked for eagle nests and Millie worked in her garden, the biggest I've seen in a long time. She grows tomatoes, artichokes, bell peppers, raspberries, apples and pears, to name a few. The garden is fenced to prevent deer from entering.
In the evenings we drink white wine, eat crab, asparagus and talk about Paris, politics, potato salad and everything else.
How false memories become collective
Memory can fail not only one individual person. It happens that false memories become collective.
For example, many people know the phrase of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, which he said during his famous New Year's address on the eve of 2000. “Dear Russians! I’m tired, I’m leaving,” this is what the politician said about his resignation, right?
If you immediately realized that it was wrong, then most likely you have already specifically clarified this question before. And you know what Yeltsin said in the New Year’s addresses of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin: “I made a decision. I thought about it long and painfully. Today, on the last day of the passing century, I resign.” The words “I’m leaving” are heard several times in the address, but they are never adjacent to the statement “I’m tired” - there’s simply nothing like that in it.
Or here are some more recognizable examples. The cartoon lion cub never spoke. How the lion cub and the turtle sang the song “Take me for a ride, big turtle.” In the film “Love and Doves” there is no - What kind of love??? - Such love!!! “Love and Doves” contains the phrases “What is love?”, and there is a verbal “shootout”: “What is love? - Such love!
If we knew these quotes from the words of others, we could shift the blame to the unscrupulous reteller. But often we ourselves review the source a million times and continue to believe that everything in it happens exactly as we remember. Sometimes it is even easier for people who come across the original to believe that someone insidious made corrections to it than to believe that memory can fail.
Screenshot: YouTube
For such cases of distortion of collective memory, there is a special term “Mandela effect”. It is named after the President of South Africa. When the death of the politician became known in 2013, it turned out that many were sure that he had died in prison back in the 1980s. People even claimed to have seen news reports about it. In fact, Nelson Mandela was released in 1990 and in 23 years managed to take the presidency, receive the Nobel Peace Prize and do much more.
The term “Mandela effect” was coined by researcher Fiona Broome, who became interested in the phenomenon of mass delusion. She was never able to explain it, but other researchers are in no hurry to make an exact verdict. Unless, of course, you take theories about time travel and alternative universes seriously.
Avoid judgments and evaluations
An interview is not an argument or an exchange of opinions. The interviewer seeks to find out what the other person thinks, not to prove his point. Of course, there are exceptions here too. But, as a rule, the interviewer is prepared for the fact that his opinion may differ from the opinion of the interlocutor. Such differences can be very serious. When American historian Claudia Kunz was writing a book about women in Nazi politics, she had to interview the leader of the National Socialist Women's Organization, Gertrud Scholz-Klink, Lady Führer über Alles, as historians called her. . Many years after the war, Gertrud Scholz-Klink did not repent of what she had done in the past and did not feel the need to justify herself. This interview was a great challenge for the researcher. Although such situations do not arise very often, people often differ in their views, albeit on less significant issues. But if we decide to listen to another person, we must give him the opportunity to speak freely, without confusing him with our own thoughts about what he heard.
Why memories fail us
Memory is flexible
Of course, the brain can be thought of as a data store. Just not like an archive room with a bunch of boxes in which information is gathering dust in the form in which it was put there. A more accurate comparison would be with an electronic database, where the elements are interconnected and constantly updated. The fiction of memory.
Let's say you have a new experience. But this information is sent to the archive not only on its own shelf. Data is overwritten in all files that are associated with the impressions and experiences received. And if some details are missing or contradict each other, then the brain can fill them in with logically appropriate ones, but those that are absent in reality.
Memories can change under the influence of others
This is proven not only by the experiments of Elizabeth Loftus. In another small study, scientists showed A picture is worth a thousand lies: Using false photographs to create false childhood memories to participants with photographs from their childhood, and the pictures contained truly memorable events like a hot air balloon flight. And among the three real images, there was one fake one. As a result, by the end of the series of interviews, about half of the subjects “remembered” the unreal situations.
During the experiments, memories were influenced on purpose, but this can also happen unintentionally. For example, leading questions about an event can direct a person’s story in a different direction.
Memory is distorted by the psyche
You've probably heard about how traumatic events are repressed from the brain's archives. And a person, for example, forgets an episode of abuse that he encountered in childhood.
Distortions also work in the other direction, and memory brings a one-sided “truth” to the surface. For example, those nostalgic for the times of the USSR can talk about ice cream for 19 kopecks and that supposedly everyone was given apartments for free. But they no longer remember the details: they didn’t give it, but they gave it away, not to everyone, but only to those who were standing in line, and so on.
How to live if you know that you can’t even trust yourself
Memory is not the most reliable source of information, and in most cases this is not such a big problem. But only as long as there is no need to accurately reproduce certain events. Therefore, you should not rush to conclusions based on testimony and someone’s memories, if they are presented in a single copy.
If you are concerned about recording events as accurately as possible, it is better to use more reliable formats for this: a piece of paper and a pen, a video camera or a voice recorder. And for detailed life stories, a good old diary is suitable.
Literature[ | ]
- Memoirs // Literary encyclopedia of terms and concepts / Ed. A. N. Nikolyukina. - Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences: Intelvac, 2001. - Stb. 524—525—1596 p. — ISBN 5-93264-026-X.
- Memoirs // Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron: in 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - St. Petersburg, 1890-1907.
- Memoir literature in the Literary Encyclopedia (inaccessible link) (inaccessible link from 06/14/2016 [2000 days])
- Kolesnikova L. A.
Historical and revolutionary memoirs (1917-1935) as a mass source on the history of Russian revolutions. Author's abstract. dis. ... doc. ist. Sci. - M., 2005. (inaccessible link)
