A team of psychologists showed the quick deterioration of memories by interviewing people about how they first learned about the 9/11 attacks just a few days after the attacks took place. When the researchers came back after one year, more than a third of the details recalled by study participants had changed. In three years time, nearly half of the details were different.
Jonah Lehrer offers this conclusion about these experiments in Wired Magazine:
This research helps explain why a shared narrative can often lead to totally unreliable individual memories. We are so eager to conform to the collective, to fit our little lives into the arc of history, that we end up misleading ourselves.
Humans are storytelling machines. We don’t passively perceive the world – we tell stories about it, translating the helter-skelter of events into tidy narratives. This is often a helpful habit, helping us make sense of mistakes, consider counterfactuals and extract a sense of meaning from the randomness of life. But our love of stories comes with a serious side-effect: like all good narrators, we tend to forsake the facts when they interfere with the plot. We’re so addicted to the anecdote that we let the truth slip away until, eventually, those stories we tell again and again become exercises in pure fiction.
