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We all like to think of memory as an efficient computer or camera, capturing our experiences precisely for handy retrieval—or at least as reliable as a highly organized file cabinet. Nothing could be further from the truth. But that doesn’t stop each and every one of us from arguing—maybe even screaming—when some close intimate (a parent, sibling, spouse, lover, friend) challenges our recall of a specific occasion. “No,” we’ll say in a tone of voice that conveys our absolute certainty, "You’re wrong. That’s not what happened at all.”
Of course, memories do much more than warm the heart on a lonely night or remind us why we fell in love in the first place; human beings actively draw on memory to inform our behaviors, decisions, and thoughts in the present. “Oh, I’m not doing this again," you say to yourself when you encounter a situation which is distressingly familiar. Alternatively, a situation which echoes one of the happier moments in your recall is likely to make you highly motivated to continue. Of course, the wisdom of these choices very much depends on your reliability of your memory—which, it turns out, is highly variable. Sometimes, it’s close enough to pass for accurate, but way too often it isn’t.
Confronting how selective and potentially unreliable human memory actually is can be absolutely unnerving, and maybe even scary. Personally, I’d much prefer to take Mark Twain’s comforting, black-and-white statement to heart—“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything”—even though I know, thanks to psychological research, it doesn’t hold water.
So let's stick to just the facts. Here's what science knows:
1. A memory is nothing more than a recreation.
Put aside those camera and screenshot metaphors because the brain, alas, just can’t handle all the stimuli it’s bombarded with at once; it picks up bits of experience selectively and then, in what is pretty much a reconstructive process, makes a “whole” out of all those pieces. Forget the word “retrieval” entirely, and focus in on the word Daniel Gilbert uses: “reweaving.” As he writes in Stumbling on Happiness, ”When we want to remember our experience, our brains quickly reweave the tapestry by fabricating—not by actually retrieving—the bulk of the information that we experience as a memory.” This explains why “eyewitness” accounts are both unreliable and may differ enormously—each person’s brain is doing its individual job of reweaving—and why one person’s “memoir” of what happened in a family or situation often is hotly contested by others who shared the experience.
2. Memories are permeable and can be altered through suggestion.
This isn’t just true of early childhood memories—for which it’s often hard to distinguish what you actually remember from what other people told you about the experience, along with details drawn from photos and videos you’ve been exposed to—but all memories. Because memory is a “reweaving” process, the work of Elizabeth Loftus and others has shown that even relatively recent memories can be altered in significant ways, without your conscious awareness. More distressing, as one experiment showed, memories can be implanted. (Yes, the operative response here is “Yikes!”)
Researchers had subjects watch four video clips, each about four minute minutes in length, showing various scenarios—a bank robbery; a warehouse burglary; a liquor store holdup; and a domestic dispute. One week later, they were given multiple-choice questions about the situations they’d witnessed, along with a series of questions about a drug bust which they hadn’t been exposed to. The format of the questions pertaining to the unseen event was the same as that of the witnessed events. One week after that—two weeks after seeing the videos—the subjects were asked to write accounts of two of the situations they’d witnessed along with an account of the drug bust. An astonishing 64% of the participants reported remembering the drug bust! (Other experiments have showed similar or even more pronounced results.)
3. A sorting process affects what you remember.
It turns out that what’s captured in memory isn’t the everyday experience but the out-of-the-ordinary, noteworthy, or atypical experience. That’s why, depending on your age group, you’re likely to recall precisely where you were on November 22, 1963, when you heard the President had been shot or, if you’re younger, what you were doing on September 11, 2001. In contrast, it’s unlikely you’d have any memory of November 21, 1963 (unless it were your birthday or some other special occasion) or September 10, 2001. Alas, the atypical pops into our heads across the spectrum of experience—it’s not just limited to historical events—and that, in turn, wreaks havoc on our ability to use memory to inform our decisions and thought processes.
That’s exactly what Carey Morewedge, Daniel Gilbert, and Timothy Wilson found in a series of experiments which explained why our ability to forecast how we will feel in the future is so lousy: Absent the humdrum, unremarkable memories—which would paint a reliable picture of what an experience was like—our atypical memories totally skew our perceptions. Take, for example, deciding whether you’re going to eat at a restaurant you’re familiar with and where you know the food is good enough, or whether you should walk into that little place that just opened that you know nothing about. What pops into your head is that fabulous meal you had five years ago—when you took a chance on a totally unknown place you’d never heard of—and that makes up your mind. What your memory isn’t bringing up is a series of other experiments in dining—all of them off-the-cuff—which were culinary disasters.
That’s a pretty benign example, but there are many others which can influence our behavior in significant and important ways. Adapting from an example Morewedge and his co-authors use in their discussion, say you are anticipating a trip to the dentist. The memory that’s vivid is the horrible and painful visit you had years ago; you remember it because it was anomalous and that prompts you to skip the new appointment. The authors suggest that if you could, in the moment, recognize that your memory is atypical—you’ve had tons of work done over the years that was okay and utterly forgettable—you’d make a better decision.
4. How you remember an experience is shaped by its ending.
This aspect of memory is totally counterintuitive, and downright strange: It has to do with the distinction between our experiencing self and our remembering self, as explained by Daniel Kahneman. Our experiencing self is aware of the sequence of events and decides on the basis of the peak of feeling whether a situation was largely pleasurable or painful; our remembering self, on the other hand, pays attention to endings, not duration.
Perhaps there’s no experiment as counterintuitive as the one Kahneman and his colleagues conducted, what he calls the “cold hand” experiment (its formal name is “cold pressor.”) The purpose of the experiment was to demonstrate the differences between the experiencing and remembering selves.
Participants had to put a hand into water cold enough to be painful (14 degrees Celsius) and, using a keyboard, indicate with their other hand how much pain they were experiencing. One trial lasted 60 seconds and the other 90, but in the longer experiment, the water was warmed a single degree for the last thirty seconds, making it less uncomfortable. When asked whether they would repeat the shorter or longer experiment, 80% of the participants chose the longer one. Did the researchers just happen upon a group who were gluttons for punishment? Nope—it’s just the brain at work, choosing the least aversive memory (that warmer water at the end). As Gilbert dryly noted, "The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.”
Or, as Marcel Proust (who knew a thing or two about memory) put it, “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
5. Different emotions may affect memory differently.
If there’s one thing we all tend to believe, it's that our memories of emotionally packed events—the highs, the lows, the triumphs and the tragedies—are the ones endowed with greater accuracy. But while it may be true that the brain does less reweaving when emotions run high, it’s not precisely a slam dunk, as Linda J. Levine and David A. Pizarro have found.
It appears to be true enough that while emotional memories are neither fixed in time nor indelible, they do tend to be more “long-lasting, vivid, and detailed” than emotionally neutral ones. Still, emotionally-charged memories, like all memories, are subject to biases and the flow of information gleaned from what happened after the event. Students who’ve gotten a good grade on an important exam are likely to underestimate how anxious or panicked they were beforehand, for example. Similarly, when a relationship totally goes up in smoke—a fierce breakup or fractious divorce—the memories of the halcyon days of love will be seen in a different light, and it’s not uncommon for people to conclude, revisiting memories, that they were never happy.
Levine and Pizarro suggest that emotions act as a highlighter—think a yellow or pink felt pen—to our memories and that different emotions highlight differently: A happy memory, they write, will be broad and inclusive, filling in the gaps in memory with information gleaned from elsewhere. People tend to believe they remember happy events more accurately but they actually don't: The truth is that there’s not much urgency in remembering the happy memory with accuracy; there’s no lesson to be learned. That’s not true of aversive events. those that result in a cascade of negative feeling, and that’s where being expansive might be detrimental. Here, they suggest, the highlighter had more of a fine-tip and is more discriminating, since the goal is to avoid that same circumstance and the feelings aroused by it in the future.
In the end, we can all perhaps agree with what Vladimir Nabokov wrote: "I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it becomes.”
Copyright© Peg Streep 2014
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Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on Happiness. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.
Morewedge, Carey K., Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson, “The Least Likely of Times: How Remembering the Past Biases Forecasts of the Future,” Psychological Science (2005), vol. 16, no.8, 626-630.
Loftus, Elizabeth, “Illusions of Memory,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (March 1998), vol. 142, no 1., 60-73.
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2011.
Levine, Linda L. and David A. Pizarro. “Emotion and Memory Research: A Grumpy Overview,” Social Cognition (2004), vol. 22, no.5, 530-554.
