The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory

by Julia Shaw

‘Our memories are constructive. They’re reconstructive. Memory works … like a Wikipedia page: you can go in there and change it, but so can other people.’ – Professor Elizabeth Loftus

Semantic memory, also called generic memory, refers to the memory of meanings, concepts and facts.

episodic memory, or autobiographical memory.

This term refers to our collection of past experiences.

Episodic memory is the mechanism that keeps track of memories that occurred at a particular time and place.

‘Confabulation denotes the emergence of memories of experiences and events which never took place.

Our brain is divided into four major sections. The parietal lobe, which sits right at the top of the brain, is responsible for integrating sensory information and language, which is necessary for short-term memory. The frontal lobe is the section that sits at the front of the brain, behind the

forehead. This part of the brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as thinking, planning and reasoning. The prefrontal cortex, the very front part of the frontal lobe, is assigned particular credit for complex thinking, and is associated with abilities such as planning complex behaviour and decision-making. The prefrontal cortex is a part of the brain that used to be severed in some individuals who presented with severe mental illness, in a procedure known as a prefrontal lobotomy. These crude interventions, which were essentially completed by shoving an ice pick through the patient’s eye socket and into the brain, were known to severely affect the patient’s personality and intellect. This was considered justified at the time because it was thought to diminish the symptoms of their illnesses.

Colour constancy refers to the way our vision compensates for differences in lighting to estimate what colour things ‘really’ are.

how bias in perception

Sometimes referred to as the fourth dimension – an extension of our 3D physical reality – time is something that could be considered a primarily internal phenomenon. It is characterised by linearity, sequentiality and change; by growth or destruction.

Our subjective perception of time is known as chronesthesia,13 and it is studied by researchers from fields as diverse as neurophysiology, psychology and philosophy.

One line of research argues that the way we perceive the passage of time is through our sense of chronology. In other words, we remember the order in which events happened, which then allows us to infer when and for how long an event took place.

Distributional information refers to a wider set of information, including in general how long,

Instead of accurately dating the events, the overwhelming majority of participants engaged in what is referred to as temporal displacement, or ‘telescoping’, which means moving things around in time.

Change blindness is the reason that in our everyday lives we miss our partner’s haircuts, or say things like ‘he came out of nowhere’ when we are driving.

Change blindness is a function of two bottlenecked processes, processes that need to filter a great deal of information and can only do so much at once. The first is our limited ability to perceive the world through our senses.

The second is our limited short-term memory capacity.

There may also be a third reason. Ira Hyman argues that we experience change blindness because we have conceptual representations of our experiences in our memories.

In my personal conception of the term, brainwashing refers to changing a person’s ideology or epistemology – changing their ideas about the world and the knowledge they believe they have of it. In certain kinds of false memory research, including my own, scientists have been able to have a small temporary effect on a person’s view of the world – perhaps, for example, making them think they have committed a crime when they have not.

simply got caught up in a string of psychological biases.

The police can develop ‘tunnel vision’, where they overvalue evidence that supports their argument and discredit or ignore information that contradicts it.

And it’s not just the police – this kind of process can happen to anyone, because incorrect information can seep into any of the coherent stories we construct to understand reality. To use a term stolen from one of the world’s leading legal psychologists, Peter van Koppen, we can al...

when we need to make sense of an event, but do not have enough information to do so, we tend to import other plaus...

Events in our minds need to have a linear progression, connections, reasons. Once we have this kind of plausible narrative, we can become incredibly confident in its accuracy. But what exactly is the relationship between conf...

We may not necessarily believe we are absolutely

brilliant at everything – far from it – but we do generally think that we are better than average at pretty much everything. Which is, of course, statistically impossible – if everyone thinks they are above average, clearly a lot of people are wrong. Yet, studies have found this overconfidence effect in all kinds of areas.

‘Humans exhibit many psychological biases, but one of the most consistent, powerful, and widespread is overconfidence.’

our memory is selfish. We are less likely to remember something done by someone else than something we did ourselves.

This is partly because watching a partner do a chore, or having them report to us that they did it, provides us with a far less rich and complex memory trace than if we had performed the task ourselves because there is simply less sensory input. The memory trace being weaker means that we are probably more likely to forget that it happened in the long run. On the other hand, we will always have stronger and more meaningful memories of those occasions when we have done chores. This means that unfortunately the game is always rigged against our partners – our recollections of our own contributions are always likely to be stronger and more significant.

Besides the superiority illusion, we also suffer from survivorship bias. This is an error whereby we tend to focus on successes and overlook failures, literally focusin...

Lack of visibility of our own failures along with an excessive-focus on achievements leads to overconfidence in our abilities and assessment of opportunities, hence the survivorship bias.

There is one more illusion that may play into our tendency to be overconfident. It is related to the greater strength and accessibility of our memories of our own actions and insights compared to those of others – the illusion of asymmetric insight.

Asymmetric insight helps explain why in arguments and debates we may believe that the other side will never understand our point of view.

Even if we wish to be humble and take pains to avoid overconfidence illusions, we may not be able to – they are largely the by-product of selective memory processes we cannot control.

Prospective memory is our ability to remember to do things – we have already touched on it in previous chapters. It is the memory that is necessary in order for us to stick to goals and do things that are important for our future.

The Dutch have a great saying that applies here: one witness is no witness.

The first of these, they say, is the traumatic

memory argument, which is the view that we remember traumatic events differently, and often worse, than other kinds of events. The underlying assumption behind this argument is that the high emotional impact of traumatic situations overrides our other processing abilities. Proponents of this viewpoint would argue, for example, that a soldier in a war zone may be so severely shell-shocked that they have trouble encoding or recalling a coherent memory of a battle. We can actually trace this idea all the way back to Aristotle: ‘Memory does not occur in those who are in a rapid state of transition, whether owing to some perturbing experience or their period of life; just as no impression would be left if a seal were stamped on running water.’

traumatic memory argument,

The current evidence from systematic and methodologically sound studies strongly suggests that memories of traumatic events are more resistant to forgetting than memories of mundane events.’ This is both good news and bad news, as it seems to increase the likelihood of accuracy for eyewitness and victim testimonies (though they will still be up against all the problems discussed previously), but it also means that traumatic memories we might rather forget could haunt us forever.

This suggests that flashbulb memories may not be as permanent or accurate as Brown and Kulic originally proposed, and that people are overconfident in the accuracy of their recall for these kinds of events – which supports the idea covered in earlier chapters, that confidence does not necessarily imply accuracy.

The original Brown and Kulic study had significant methodological problems, including having a small sample, relying only on self-report, assuming that participants’ reported memories were accurate, and making unfounded assumptions about how the brain works.

In reality, memories of witnessing cultural events may not be as strong and protected as we often assume.

This process of realising that a particular memory is inaccurate or impossible is called recollection rejection, a term coined by memory scientists Charles Brainerd at Cornell University and his colleagues in 2003.12

Regarding trauma memories, there is also potential for the integration of grossly false information about events that we have, or think we have, experienced ourselves.

Even our highly emotional memories can be totally false. How do I know this? Because it’s part of my job as a researcher to show that even our most vivid memories may be up to no good.

That means that the most compelling explanation for the results we got is that even people like these are susceptible to social pressures and bad memory retrieval techniques that helped them to imagine things, and helped them to mistake those imagined things for real experiences.

The evidence seems to be that these memories feel real to rememberers, and they therefore look real to others – they can become part of the rememberer’s personal past, whether they actually happened or not.

It’s not only outside sources that can dramatically alter our recollections of emotional events; we are also prone to distortion from internal influences. One way this can happen is through sharing our memories with others, something that most of us are likely do after important life events – whether it’s calling our family to impart some exciting news, reporting back to our boss about a big problem at work, or even giving a statement to police. In these kinds of situations we are transferring information that was originally encoded visually (or indeed through other senses) into verbal information. We are turning sensory inputs into words. But this process is not flawless; every time we take images, sounds or smells and verbalise them we potentially alter or lose information. There is a limit to the amount of detail we are able to communicate through language, so we have to cut corners. We simplify. This is a process known as verbal overshadowing, a term coined by psychological scientist Jonathan Schooler.