Is Your Memory Deceiving You?
PART I
In truth, our memories are something that morph, stretch and merge over time. Our brains tend to favour recall of certain types of memories, and can transform or even falsify memories without us even realising it. You might mistakenly assume that each of your memories is like a video recording, but each memory is in fact a patch work of different pieces of information that must be re-constructed each time we draw that memory back together, and sometimes our sourcing becomes a little questionable!
In psychology, the phenomena of the malleability of our memories is referred to as memory bias. Our biases can serve to impair or enhance our ability to recall events accurately, and different kinds of biases fall at the mercy of several all-too-human inclinations. For example: conformation bias is the inclination to warp our recollections in such a way as to enforce our point of view; illusory correlation is the inclination to inaccurately connect entirely coincidental occurrences; and cryptomnesia is the inclination to decide that we’ve come up with an idea ourselves when we are in fact drawing on the memory of someone else’s suggestion — many readers may recall working for a boss with a terrible case of cryptomnesia at one point or another. The question is, did that boss exhibit cryptomnesia, or could the bias have actually been your own?
So, How Do Memories Form?
During each experience of our lives, different aspects of the moment — from the sounds we hear and the scents we smell, to the data we take in and the emotions we experience — are stored in many different areas of the brain. We encode all of that incoming information either visually, in the form of an image, acoustically, in the form of a sound, or semantically, in the form of an associated meaning. As an aside to the vast amount of information we encode and store, we also tend to skim over details of any given moment as we get distracted by little things, such as the tag sticking out of the clothing of the person we’re talking to, or thinking about what we’re going to have for lunch.
The acting master-hub of all of this stored data is our medial temporal lobe which is contains of our amygdala, and our hippocampus. Our understanding of this part of the brain began with Henry Molaison — an American patient who, back in 1953, had a substantial part of this area removed in an effort to cure his severe epilepsy. While the extreme surgical damage to his hippocampus did indeed cure his seizures, it impeded his ability to recall and form new memories.
A Data Hub For The Brain
Thanks to the science that began with Henry, we now know that the hippocampus serves an invaluable role in piecing together all of the various chunks of information our brain stores, and that the role of the amygdala in this instance is to do with emotion. The more emotionally or viscerally relevant an experience, the more our amygdala fires up our hippocampus, making our recall much more vivid and intricate.
This explains the findings that older adults retain a higher number of memories from their late adolescence and early adulthood than later in life, when significant life changes and notable first experiences forged emotionally charged memories. The same older adults also exhibit the positivity effect bias, meaning that we are all more inclined to hold onto positive memories in the longer term — like remembering when sparks first flew in a new romance, while forgetting an embarrassing moment with an old crush!
