Everyone has their own way of remembering. Some people have astonishing memories — just look at the contestants who recite pi to hundreds of decimal places, or those who can rattle off a deck of cards. As for me, even holding on to a neighbour's phone number can be a struggle. I have friends with formidable memories too: I've asked more than a few of them about things that happened years ago, and many of them still remember — whereas I have no impression of the details at all.
But can our memory really be fully trusted? How much faith do you place in your own? In real life, memory isn't actually as stable as a computer file (barring a malfunction, of course), nor does it stay fresh forever like a book on a shelf. In fact, memory is surprisingly easy to distort — whether by ourselves or by others. The things we assume we can recall easily and accurately can in fact be reshaped by other people's choice of words, by our own past, by our own experiences, or by the way a scene was set.
Do you trust your own memory?
These influences — which we may never even notice — can revise our memories to varying degrees, and can even lead us to manufacture false memories of things that never happened. Many famous psychologists have run experiments on the memories of different groups of people, and some of their conclusions may come as a shock. So consider this a small bit of mental preparation: there's no need to feel unsettled after reading on. The two well-known experiments below simply reflect what makes the psychology of memory so fascinating.
In the 1970s, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus ran a pioneering experiment on eyewitness testimony. Her participants were first shown a short clip of a traffic accident. Afterwards, she asked them about what they had seen, phrasing the question in different ways — for example: "How fast were the two cars going when they hit each other?" versus "How fast were the two cars going when they smashed into each other?" The participants who were asked about the cars "smashing" estimated a higher speed than the other group, who were asked about the cars that "hit" each other. This test showed how an eyewitness's memory can shift in response to other people's leading questions, or simply to the way a question is worded.
In 1991 (1), Elizabeth Loftus invited 24 people to take part in another experiment. She first asked their family members about things that had happened in their childhood — such as which supermarket they usually went to, or which countries they had visited. She then gave each participant a notebook recording four events from their childhood. Three of the four had really happened during the participant's childhood; one had never happened at all — getting lost in a supermarket at the age of five. Over the next five days, participants were asked to recall as much detail as they could about these four childhood experiences, and to write "I don't remember" if they genuinely had no recollection.
The result was that, of the 24 participants, no fewer than 7 went on to invent — and write down — recollections of the fourth event, the one that had never happened at all (getting lost in a supermarket). So how can we guard against creating false memories and strengthen the trustworthiness of our own?
Why memory matters — the raw material of our life stories
I recently finished a book by the American author Tara Westover, written about her own youth — it's called Educated, and the author's personal memoir might offer us a small piece of advice. Faced with her parents' doubt and distrust of what she had to say, with their repeated, blind defence of her brother, and with their refusal to acknowledge the terrible things she had been through, the author came to question both her own memories and those of others — she once doubted whether she and the people around her had really suffered repeated violence at her brother's hands. What I find both fortunate and unfortunate is that she had recorded these experiences, one after another, in her own diaries. From the author's perspective, those diaries became precious truth and recollection, and at the same time bore witness to the cruelty she had endured.
Of course, we can also debate whether something written down in the heat of the moment, under the sway of emotion, is complete and balanced — but in terms of timing, a record made on the spot can be counted as relatively reliable. While writing her book, Tara also frankly admitted to being uncertain about some of the details of her experiences. To pin down her own account and recover the fragments of her memory, Tara tried to reconstruct how things had originally unfolded through the recollections of her relatives. Although there were several events that she and her family remembered the same way, she and her family understood and remembered certain scenes differently — for instance, how some accidents unfolded and who was present. Reconstructing how things had originally unfolded through the recollections of family and close friends is another way of strengthening the reliability of memory.
Memory is both a precious record of each of our pasts and a force that shapes how we understand the people and the world around us today, as well as where we place ourselves. It is also building the person we will be tomorrow. Memory may be full of uncertainty, but the most important thing is this: once we have this awareness, we can start today to protect our precious memories as best we can.
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