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

by Julia Shaw

Take this thought experiment as an example: What if you awoke one morning and could not remember anything that you have ever done, or thought, or learned? Would this person still be you?

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

Semantic memory works alongside episodic memory, or autobiographical memory.

Instead, memory errors can be considered the norm, not the exception.

Similarly, false memories – recollections that feel like memories but which are not based on any real occurrence – are experienced all the time.

Any event, no matter how important, emotional or traumatic it may seem, can be forgotten, misremembered, or even be entirely fictitious.

Due to our psychological and physiological configuration all of us can come to confidently and vividly remember entire events that never actually took place.

Research has long established that as adults we cannot accurately retrieve memories from our infancy and early childhood. To put it simply, the brains of babies are not yet physiologically capable of forming and storing long-term memories.

Two of the main processes during which this occurs are known as confabulation and source confusion.

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

Just by repeatedly imagining the event happening, and saying out loud what they were picturing, 25 per cent of participants ended up being classified as having clear false memories of the event.

Baby brains increased in total volume by 101 per cent in the first year, and by an extra 15 per cent in the second. That means they more than doubled in size.

According to Maja Abitz17 and her team, adults actually have whopping 41 per cent fewer neurons than newborn babies in important parts of the brain that play a role in memory and thinking, such as the mediodorsal nucleus of the thalamus.

Two weeks later participants were tested on their memory of the story. The researchers found that participants who had experienced the emotional condition could recall an average of 18 details of the event, while those in the neutral condition could recall only 13. In later experiments with a slightly modified method, it was again found that participants in the emotional condition performed better.

Further, according to Roger’s own research from 1994,16 and the review of the literature by him and his colleagues in 2010, we only think of ourselves as future-time superheroes. When estimating the efficiency of others we are actually comparatively pessimistic, overestimating how long it will take them to complete tasks, and often predicting that they will run into problems that will delay their completion of the task.

This leads us to one of today’s most en vogue biochemical theories of memory: retrieval-induced forgetting. This theory states that whenever we remember we also forget. So, while it seems intuitively appealing that every time we recall a memory we consolidate it and form a stronger and more accurate memory, this is far from the truth. Instead, every time a memory is recalled it is effectively retrieved, examined, and then recreated from scratch to be stored again. It is the equivalent of keeping a file of index cards, pulling one out to read it, throwing it away, and then copying out a new version on a fresh card for filing once more.

So if bad memory interviewing introduces inaccurate information, it can actually lead to a restructuring of the biochemical stamps of memories in the brain with non-medical procedures. This is how retrieval, if interrupted, can actually induce forgetting in a number of ways. It makes every event, every time it is recalled, physiologically vulnerable to distortion and forgetting.

It really is quite amazing that although by the late 1970s researchers essentially considered the existence of photographic or eidetic memory a myth (except as an incredibly short-lived and rare occurrence in children), the idea is still such a frequent misconception in society today.

Even if photographic memory were to exist – and it seems doubtful that it truly does – it appears that memory Photoshop would exist right beside it. Along with advances in actual photography, our memory-photo analogy may need a similar upgrade. We no longer use Polaroid cameras, and we should no longer be calling memories photographic, at least not in a way that implies perfection and permanence.

In this correlational exercise, for every hour of baby media watched per day by infants between 8 and 16 months, they were found to know six to eight fewer words.

Can we actually learn new complex information, or significantly reinforce memories, while we sleep, as the subliminal learning advocates suggest? The answer is a definitive no. There is no evidence that we can learn words or facts, or benefit from any sort of personality-pumping propaganda, while we sleep – not even when information is delivered in the convenient form of an iPhone app.

The Innocence Project2, an organisation dedicated to getting innocent people exonerated through DNA testing, has helped to release at least 337 people who were wrongfully convicted. On average, these people served 14 years in prison for a crime they did not commit. Faulty memory played a role in at least 75 per cent of those cases.

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. Police are overconfident in their ability to detect liars. Students are overconfident about their course grades. CEOs are overconfident in their business decisions. Teachers are overconfident in their teaching ability. The problem is so persistent that in a 2011 article published in Nature, social scientists Dominic Johnson at the University of Edinburgh and James Fowler at the University of California4 argued that ‘Humans exhibit many psychological biases, but one of the most consistent, powerful, and widespread is overconfidence.’

In 2001 Emily Pronin at Stanford University and her colleagues published a paper7 on this bizarre bias, appropriately entitled ‘You don’t know me, but I know you’. Over six studies the team demonstrated that we think we know our close friends and roommates better than they know us.

They collected data on these kinds of free trials, and found that not only do many people stick with the services; they are far more likely to stick with them if the trial is longer. In their sample, retention was 28 per cent for those who were given a 3-day trial and a whopping 41 per cent for a 7-day trial group.

In another study demonstrating this phenomenon, published in 2004,10 Asher Koriat and his colleagues at the University of Haifa in Israel showed that participants estimated that their memory would be essentially the same at immediate recall as one year later.

For example, super-recognisers were heavily involved in identifying people involved in the 2011 London riots, identifying significantly more culprits than facial recognition programs.

They found that if the participant was Caucasian, they generally used a triangular pattern to look at the faces. They looked at eyes, mouth, nose, and then explored other parts. For East Asian participants there was a different pattern; they focused far more centrally, seemingly mostly looking at the nose. And they did this regardless of the ethnicity of the person in the photo.

I approach high levels of confidence with high levels of caution because if it is overconfidence, it can be incredibly destructive.

All researchers followed the same protocol, and they found that even when the experiment was conducted by different researchers, in different countries, and with different participants, the verbal overshadowing effect was constant. Putting pictures into words always makes our memories for those pictures worse.

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

A 2014 review of academic research on the impact task-switching has on efficiency, by Derek Crews and Molly Russ from Texas Women’s University,2 suggests that it is bad for our productivity, critical thinking and ability to concentrate, as well as making us more error-prone.

It appears that our brains are cognitive misers, picking whichever information appears easier to remember – either the statement or the location where it could be found again.

According to Elin Skagerberg and Daniel Wright,23 a whopping 88 per cent of real-world eyewitnesses have co-witnesses, many having more than three others watching an event, and over half discussed the event with at least one of the others who were there.

But, from trying to divide our attention more, to having the potential for misinformation to come from virtually anyone, to putting less effort into remembering facts because we can just Google them later, there is also a far more problematic side to social media memory.

They claim that the scientific literature does not support the model proposed by Summit, because they found a ‘dearth of empirical support’. In other words, the idea that children often deny abuse when confronted about it is largely a myth.

False memory researchers like Chris French, however, argue that the very foundations of these assumptions are inaccurate. The idea of conscious memories being separate from, and in conflict with, unconscious memories was never based on science.

‘there is no credible evidence for the operation of this psychoanalytic notion of repression and very strong evidence that the conditions under which therapy takes place are indeed ideal conditions for the generation of false memories

Rich false memories exist, whether we want them to or not.

According to research from 2013 published by psychological scientist Lisa Geraci from Texas A&M University and her colleagues,7 the bizarreness effect – our tendency to have a better memory for the unusual – is well documented. As they put it, ‘this bizarreness effect is a robust finding in recall that has been obtained across a variety of encoding tasks and delays.’