Memory
10 Myths About Memory
Disclosing our misconceptions about remembering.
Updated February 6, 2025 Reviewed by Devon Frye
Key points
- Memory is more accurate and dependable than we give it credit for.
- Mistaken remembering results from mixing up memories and mixing in expectation, and not from fabrication.
- Memories can endure for a lifetime, maintaining vividness and providing life lessons.
Myth 1: Memory is too flawed and impermanent to be trustworthy.
Fact: Extensive research supports the accuracy and dependability of long-term memories—for both personal experiences and experimental materials.
We can consistently rely on memory for transitional and emotional events in our lives, such as the first year of college. More broadly, we have accurate long-term memory for thousands of personal episodes, as evidenced by substantial longitudinal studies of research psychologists Marigold Linton and Willem Wagenaar.
Moreover, some of these enduring memories come with lessons that guide and motivate us for many years.
In the lab, one resonant example of memory’s dependability comes from research on picture memory. People retain enough information from single brief exposures to hundreds—even thousands—of pictures to recognize nearly all of them, up to a year after the original presentation of the pictures.
Just a brief reflection reveals personal information that we remember easily and accurately: the names of friends, colleagues, and people in our family; our birthday; when we first fell in love; where we work; where we shop for groceries; scenes from movies; melodies and lyrics from hundreds of popular songs (even though some lyrics are misinterpreted); a stinging insult we received in class; our first kiss.
Myth 2: Everyday events are not remembered.
Fact: We remember ordinary events of daily life, even if we don’t make efforts to remember them.
In a comprehensive study, cognitive psychologist William Brewer recruited a set of devoted participants to wear beepers for 2½ weeks and write down what they were doing just before they were randomly beeped. They then wrote descriptions of their activities, including who they were with, where they were, and details about what they were wearing and the weather.
When the participants’ memory was compared to what they wrote just after they were beeped, the results showed that randomly sampled everyday actions were confidently recognized nearly 80 percent of the time—up to five months after they occurred.1
Myth 3: Memories fade with time.
Fact: Memories can have considerable endurance.
Large-scale studies of people who’ve lived through extended trauma show that traumatic events and other, associated events can be remembered vividly for a lifetime. The same durability has been shown with memory for nontraumatic events that are tied to specific places in our past.
With encoding and storage, human memory is remarkable—taking in and representing information from the world, with no discernible limit. It’s retrieval that sets limits. Even as retrieval pathways become overgrown and inaccessible with disuse, the memory representations themselves remain vivid and detailed. That’s how a memory we haven’t thought of for years can return with surprising clarity and detail when we encounter an unusual retrieval cue, such as a particular smell from our past.
Myth 4: We often fabricate memories.
Fact: Inaccuracy in remembering arises from mixing memories of actual events or from shaping existing memories to conform to knowledge or expectation—not from fabrication.
Memory images from different time periods can be overlaid on one another, creating an incorrect composite memory based on accurate individual memories.2
General knowledge or expectation can also alter our memories. Suppose we often go walking in a nature preserve and we usually go with a close friend. If asked about a particular walk, we may forget the specifics and insert our friend into the memory of that walk—even if we went with our neighbor.
These mistakes of commission are not imaginative inventions. (Even with young children, implanting a consequential memory with no basis in lived experience requires a determined effort at coercive persuasion.)
Computer code that is 99.3 percent accurate is wrong, but human memory should not be held to that same standard. The next time we hear about fabricated memories, we should ask: In what ways are the memories wrong? Chances are, there’s more accuracy than inaccuracy, and the inaccuracies can be identified and explained.
Myth 5: Forgetting is a flaw in our memory system.
Fact: Forgetting is necessary for effective remembering, allowing us to retrieve what’s important, set aside the inessential, form general concepts, and restore our vitality after painful events.
People who are better able to prune away irrelevant events are better able to remember pertinent events, a phenomenon known as adaptive forgetting.
Forgetting supports conceptual learning, encouraging specific memories of similar events to coalesce into general knowledge. If we repeatedly go out to Thai restaurants, for example, we will acquire a fuller understanding of Thai cuisine—even as we forget many of the individual meals.
Not retrieving memories of unpleasant events allows us to recover from the unpleasantness more quickly. Without such forgetting, we would remember our emotional pain all too well.
There are also clear, practical benefits to forgetting, especially with outdated information, such as where we parked our car yesterday, an old password we no longer use, or the details of a former long-term relationship.
Myth 6: The prevalence of errors in eyewitness testimony means that we cannot depend on memory.
Fact: We should not extrapolate from the special case of eyewitness testimony to characterize all of personal memory.
Eyewitness testimony is often based on remembering events in our periphery, a difficult and unusual test of our information processing system. Fleeting glimpses of unexpected events occur every day, but there’s no reason to attend and no consequences for not encoding them—unless the events become important later, as in the case of a crime.
Eyewitness testimony is incomplete not because of the frailty of memory but because of the selectivity of attention and encoding. If we were focusing on the crime in question, we would likely remember it more accurately.3
Myth 7: Memories recovered after a period of forgetting are less accurate than memories that were always remembered.
Fact: Memory accuracy is generally not related to memory persistence.
Memories that are unavailable for some time and then later retrieved are not less accurate than continuously available memories, a finding independently established by researchers Constance Dalenberg, Jennifer Freyd, and Linda Williams.
Myth 8: Documentation is always more accurate than memory.
Fact: Most of the time, when information in documents conflicts with memory, the documented information is more trustworthy—but not always.
Some documents depend on memory, such as doctors’ notes after appointments or diary entries, so they are subject to the same predictable mistakes as personal memory. Other documents are inaccurate due to human error in the recording of information. Still other documents are purposely deceptive.
As a result, documentation can be flawed. In fact, there are instances of oral testimony—given from memory—correcting the official record of historical events.
Myth 9: We think of memory as inaccurate because it is inaccurate.
Fact: We overemphasize memory errors because of the availability bias.
We are far more likely to recall instances of flawed memories than instances of accuracy, so we judge mistakes of memory to be more frequent than they actually are. We do not celebrate every time we find our way home or accurately remember the names of our friends, but we may note very clearly making a wrong turn when visiting a colleague, misremembering the name of a neighbor, or forgetting why we went into the garage.
Mistakes of memory are more newsworthy than accuracy, just as crimes are more newsworthy than lawful behavior, so they are highlighted in memory. (Ironically, remembering instances of our faulty recall is a form of accurate memory.)
Myth 10: With trauma, what happened to you is more important than how you remember what happened.
Fact: The power of early trauma to affect your present life depends heavily on how the traumatic events are remembered.
The stories we tell ourselves and remember are more influential than the events themselves. As psychologists Seth Pollak and Karen Smith noted, how we perceive and remember trauma directly affects “long-term neural and behavioral outcomes.”
The experience of trauma, therefore, has a powerful subjective component, and what we commonly regard as an adverse event may not be inherently or uniformly so. In their study of childhood trauma, psychologists Andrea Danese and Cathy Widom found that “psychopathology emerges as a function of subjective rather than objective experience of childhood maltreatment.”4
References
1... A summary of the Brewer study was published online 25 March 2010.
2. Winograd, E. (1994). The authenticity and utility of memories.” In The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative. Edited by U. Neisser and R. Fivush, 243-251. New York: Cambridge University Press.
3. Research on eyewitness testimony is vitally important—with life-and-death consequences, but we should not treat eyewitness testimony as typical of personal memory.
4. This entry was contributed by Psychology Today contributor Noam Shpancer.