False Memories

The opinion of other people can alter our personal memories without our realizing it, according to research by neuroscientists. Writing in the journal Science, Washington University scientists tell about an experiment related to memory conformity. Using an eyewitness style documentary, they found false feedback from others affected the responses of 7 out of 10 people to questions about what they remembered from the film. Even more remarkable is the fact that 4 out of 7 people were not simply conforming to the group, but actually reporting what they now believed to be true.

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.

Deleting Memory with a Pill

The careful application of inhibitors and other chemicals that interfere with reconsolidation should allow scientists to selectively delete aspects of a memory. The end result will be a menu of pills capable of erasing different kinds of memories—the scent of a former lover or the awful heartbreak of a failed relationship. These thoughts and feelings can be made to vanish, even as the rest of the memory remains perfectly intact. Being able to control memory doesn’t simply give us admin access to our brains. It gives us the power to shape nearly every aspect of our lives. There’s something terrifying about this. Long ago, humans accepted the uncontrollable nature of memory; we can’t choose what to remember or forget. But now it appears that we’ll soon gain the ability to alter our sense of the past. The problem with eliminating pain, of course, is that pain is often educational. We learn from our regrets and mistakes; wisdom is not free. If our past becomes a playlist—a collection of tracks we can edit with ease—then how will we resist the temptation to erase the unpleasant ones? Even more troubling, it’s easy to imagine a world where people don’t get to decide the fate of their own memories. Those scenarios aside, the fact is we already tweak our memories—we just do it badly. Reconsolidation constantly alters our recollections, as we rehearse nostalgias and suppress pain. We repeat stories until they’re stale, rewrite history in favor of the winners, and tamp down our sorrows with whiskey.

Jonah Lehrer 
Wired Magazine

Painful Memories

So many of our assumptions about the human mind—what it is, why it breaks, and how it can be healed—are rooted in a mistaken belief about how experience is stored in the brain. According to a recent survey, 63 percent of Americans believe that human memory “works like a video camera, accurately recording the events we see and hear so that we can review and inspect them later.” We want the past to persist, because the past gives us permanence. It tells us who we are and where we belong. But what if your most cherished recollections are also the most ephemeral thing in your head?

Because our memories are formed by the act of remembering them, controlling the conditions under which they are recalled can actually change their content. The… worst time to recall a traumatic event is when people are flush with terror and grief. They’ll still have all the bodily symptoms of fear—racing pulse, clammy hands, tremors—so the intense emotional memory is reinforced. It’s the opposite of catharsis. But when people wait a few weeks before discussing an event… they give their negative feelings a chance to fade. The volume of trauma is dialed down; the body returns to baseline. As a result, the emotion is no longer reconsolidated in such a stressed state. Subjects will still remember the terrible event, but the feelings of pain associated with it will be rewritten in light of what they feel now.

“When therapy heals, when it helps reduce the impact of negative memories, it’s really because of reconsolidation,” neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux says. “Therapy allows people to rewrite their own memories while in a safe space, guided by trained professionals…”

Jonah Lehrer
Wired Magazine

Total Recall

Microsoft research scientist Gordon Bell says we’re headed toward the day when electronic devices will be able to digitally capture our every moment. Technology will follow us, recording each person we meet, each walk around the block, each moment of disappointment and triumph. We’ll be able to tap into a digital database at any time in order to see our exact location at a specific time. His book Total Recall envisions easily finding our lost keys or discovering the name of a person we briefly bumped into on the street. We’ll be able analyze our routines and find ways to make our lives more productive.

What will happen to our sense of privacy? The courts may have found legal grounds for itin the constitution while at the same time, technology has pushing toward limiting it. Do we really want the ability to preserve all of our past?

Psychologists will tell you that when it comes to our past, we have selective amnesia. Like a cheerleader’s megaphone (with a small mouth on one end and a large opening on the other) we filter parts of our past, preserving only select memories. You can’t retain it all, so the types of events you decide to recall says something about you. Many mothers say they don’t remember the pain of childbirth, only the overwhelming feelings of bonding and holding their own child for the first time during its first moments of life.

But what happens when there’s no escaping what we’ve been through in life? Instead of painful memories fading over time, we’ll have the option of replaying them vividly in our mind over and over again. Some of us already do that... living in history's prison - unwilling to forgive ourselves or someone else and move on.

Stephen Goforth