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

by Julia Shaw

Simply seeing photos of completed tasks made it more likely for participants to think that they actually had completed them, even without the researcher making that implication – they thought they had done things simply because they saw photos of them. Seeing a photo made participants about four times more likely to say they had done something they had not done. This effect extends to more complex autobiographical experiences as well.

When researchers manipulate images or introduce misinformation to suggest that people did things that they never did, the problem unsurprisingly becomes even worse. In 2002, research by Kimberly Wade and Maryanne Garry at the Victoria University of Wellington, along with their colleagues Don Read and Stephen Lindsay from the University of Victoria, showed24 that half of the participants in a study could come to recall details of a hot-air balloon ride they had never taken simply through being asked to remember the supposed event while being shown a photoshopped image of themselves in the balloon basket.

It seems that photos can quite severely mislead our memories, especially when coupled with deliberate misinformation. One of the main reasons for this is presumably similar to the cause of verbal overshadowing; when we see a photo we create a new memory of that occasion which can interfere with our memory of actually experiencing (or not experiencing) an event. When we think about the event we may then have trouble distinguishing between our memory of the photo and our actual experience – possibly even entirely replacing a real visual memory with another. Emotional or not, verbal or visual, our memories can be readily manipulated.

The basic human assumption that we can adeptly multitask is the result of a fundamental underappreciation of how memory and attention actually work. As neuroscientist Earl Miller from MIT puts it, ‘People can’t multitask very well, and when people say they can, they’re deluding themselves … The brain is very good at deluding itself.’1

Miller suggests that the better word to use in the sorts of situations that we like to think of as involving multitasking is task-switching: ‘When people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost.’

So while we may feel like we are getting things done quicker, instead we are just...

This corresponded with what they found in their review of the academic literature, where there is strong evidence to show that romantic partners are often annoyed and upset when their partner uses a cell phone during time spent together. This is also borne out in work by marketing professor James Roberts with Meredith David from Baylor University Hankamer published in 2016.8 Roberts coined the term ‘phub’ – an elision of ‘phone’ and ‘snub’ – to describe the action of a person choosing to engage with their phone instead of engaging with another person. You might, for example, indignantly say ‘Stop phubbing me!’ According to Roberts, phone attachment leading to this kind of rude behaviour has been linked with higher stress, anxiety and depression. So, if you want the interactions in your life to be more productive, safe and meaningful, either be on your phone or be present in the offline world, with a definite emphasis on the latter.

As I have briefly mentioned once or twice already, metamemory is our knowledge of our own memory and the way in which it functions. This is a type of metacognition, a type of thinking about thinking. Having this ability means that we can muse about why we remember, how we remember, and how good we are at remembering individual pieces of information.

Hart described the feeling of knowing as the sense we have when we think we have something stored in our memory but cannot recall it.

This lends support to the idea that we may have an intuitive understanding of the things that we remember and things that we do not. It is the reason why we sometimes say things like ‘I’ll know it when I see it’ – because sometimes we just know we know something, even if we can’t directly remember the information.

the bizarreness effect – our tendency to have a better memory for the unusual – is well documented.

Another popular mnemonic is the ‘memory palace’. A memory palace, also known as the method of loci, is when we use a place for which we already have memories to build associations on. Typically this method involves forming a strong memory of a house, our palace, where we picture the exact layout and how each room is decorated. We then use that real memory as a place to store our memories. It’s a bit like having a virtual memory world where we can store real memories. When we picture ourselves going through that virtual world, we can then leave things in it, along the lines of ‘I’ll just put this memory here for now.’

people can get memories fundamentally wrong, believing things that never actually happened. And precisely when versions of memories fit well with who we think we are, or who we want to be, these memories may be extra likely to become part of our perceived personal past.