Large numbers of people hold beliefs about memory that conflict with modern science. Perhaps the most pervasive false belief, held by about 60 percent of Americans, is that memory works like a video camera. In other words, the things we experience in our lives are recorded, stored and preserved in our brains as faithful reproductions, and retrieving our recollections is simply a matter of reviewing the video tape.
But over the last 150 years or so, researchers have found that this analogy is wrong in startling ways. Memory is not like a video camera; a better way to think of it is as an act of reconstruction, or what you might call "mental paleontology." This is the analogy that psychologist Ayanna Thomas likes to use.
"A paleontologist uncovers a fossil, just as we have to uncover a memory....but that paleontologist doesn't have all of the pieces," she says. "And what that individual has to do is fill in the gaps with best guesses and prior experience."
What Thomas and other researchers have found, over and over again, is that our recollections are fallible. And the implications of this extend far beyond how we recall our childhoods or where we left our keys. They extend into serious settings, like the criminal justice system, where we constantly ask people to make recollections or remember things under oath.
This week on Hidden Brain, how we remember, why we forget — and the simple lessons we all can learn to make our memories sharp and vivid.
More resources:
The Cognitive Aging and Memory Lab at Tufts University
"Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory," by Elizabeth F. Loftus and John C. Palmer, 1974
"A picture is worth a thousand lies: Using false photographs to create false childhood memories," by Kimberley A. Wade, Maryanne Garry, J. Don Read and D. Stephen Lindsay, 2002
"Creating bizarre false memories through imagination," by Ayanna K. Thomas and Elizabeth F. Loftus, 2002
"Replication and Analysis of Ebbinghaus' Forgetting Curve," by Jaap M. J. Murre and Joeri Dros, 2015
"Retrieval practice protects memory against acute stress," by Amy M. Smith, Victoria A. Floerke and Ayanna K. Thomas, 2016
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