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

by Julia Shaw

the true root of your ‘you-ness’ almost certainly lies in your personal memories.

More generally, memories form the bedrock of our identities. They shape what we think we have experienced and, as such, what we believe we are capable of in the future. Because of all this, if we begin to call our memory into question we are also forced to question the very foundations of who we are.

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

we generally remember things better if we are in the same state during the recall of a memory as during the encoding of it.

Time is memory; memory is time.

‘What remains in a lifetime of memories?’ Apparently what remains most are memories from between the ages of 10 and 30. The findings of the study supported what others had shown before them – that before the age of five most people report almost no memories. Then, between five and ten, the number of memories begins to increase, hitting a peak for both genders in the late teens. This period of increased reported memories stays quite high until the early twenties, when it begins to drop and then stabilise for the remaining decades. So we seem to retain the most memories of our teens and twenties.

To summarise, fuzzy trace theory proposes that memory illusions are possible because each of our experiences is stored as multiple fragments, and these fragments can be recombined in ways that never actually happened. Clearly, our brains are biological and chemical marvels which have some built-in mechanisms on a physiological level that can lead to the generation of complex, physiologically-based, memory illusions. These potential routes for error are largely incidental as a result of the benefits of an associative memory system, for without these associations we would be unable to have the creative, adaptive minds we cherish.

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.

This is evidence that the more information we forget related to a concept, the stronger links between the remaining relevant information become. As the researchers put it, ‘These findings indicate that, although forgetting can be frustrating, memory might be adaptive because forgetting confers neural processing benefits.’ We become more efficient rememberers if we filter out the less relevant information. It allows us to become better at remembering the important stuff in life.

Overall, from looking at all the various cases of exceptional memory, one thing is certain: no one has an absolutely perfect memory. Indeed no one can have a perfect memory. But we should be grateful for that. We may not all have powerful recall for particular kinds of information, like HSAMs or savants, but when our memories are working at their best we remember most things pretty well. Functionally our memories turn out to be well rounded, able to deal with the many different kinds of information that are launched at us on a daily basis. What is more, our memories are built to forget. Forgetting is a beautiful mechanism that trims down our neuronal connections to make our brains more efficient at storing only the information that is most important to us. When we realise the beauty of forgetting, we also see that perhaps the ability to remember everything would be a super-burden rather than a superpower.

attention is a prerequisite for memory formation. Put simply, attention is the glue between reality and memory. If we do not pay attention to a stimulus in our environment, we cannot remember it. It’s as simple as that. Attention and memory cannot operate without each other.

learning is inherently a memory process – to gain lasting effects from exposure to things in our environment we need to be able to remember them.

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 all be ‘defective detectives’, struggling to be unbiased evidence collectors.

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.

This kind of research, which has been repeated in many other learning contexts, shows that even though all of us know that we can forget things, we seem to systematically underpredict how much we will forget. To make matters worse, this effect seems to increase as time delays increase

So, while eyewitness identification is at the core of most legal trials, research shows that there are fundamental memory characteristics that make any such identification a whirlwind of possible errors. In such cases, independent pieces of corroborating evidence are needed if we are to feel at all confident that an identification is correct. The Dutch have a great saying that applies here: one witness is no witness.

‘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.

Putting pictures into words always makes our memories for those pictures worse. Further research by Schooler and others has suggested that this effect may also transfer to other situations and senses. It seems that whenever something is difficult to put into words, verbalisation of it generally diminishes performance. Try to describe a colour, taste or music, and you make your memory of it worse. Try describing a map, a decision or an emotional judgement, and it becomes harder to remember all the details of the original situation. This is also true when others verbalise things for us. If we hear someone else’s description of a person’s face, a colour or a map, our memory of it is also impaired. Our friends may be trying to help us when they give their verbal account of something that happened, but they may instead be overshadowing our own original recollections.

no memory, no matter how emotional, is safe from corruption. Emotional memories have no special protected place in our brains – they are just like all other memories. Understanding this can make us more considerate of the memory errors of others, can inform our approach to the investigation of criminal offences, and can help us empathise with survivors of extreme situations.

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 overloading our brains.

Scientists have therefore been arguing for years that the hazards associated with talking on the phone while driving have more to do with the inability to multitask than the inability to use the hand that is holding the cell phone. The current laws in many countries which allow hands-free phone use, while banning hand-held phone use, seem to be either ignoring or fundamentally not understanding this information.

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.

Indeed, people are often willing to provide a very obviously incorrect answer if it conforms with the answer that everyone else is giving. While we might be comfortable accepting that some people are naturally ‘followers’ and will inevitably behave that way, what is shocking is that nearly 75 per cent of the participants in the experiments conformed to the obviously incorrect answer provided by the group at least once, demonstrating that actually the majority of us can be influenced by our peers. We can all be victims of situational demands. When asked later why they had conformed, most participants claimed that they knew the answer was wrong but did not want to stand out. Some, however, claimed that they had really believed that the group must have known the answer better than they did.

Ariely and his colleagues15 have conducted numerous experiments which have demonstrated that when members of our in-group do something, we are likely to follow suit. This is true for the good and the bad – for example, we are more likely to cheat if at least one of our in-group members does as well. Ariely’s research has also demonstrated that we are less likely to conform to those with whom we do not identify – out-group members.

Opponents of false memory research often claim that we are silencing victims and defending the guilty. There is, of course, a legitimate concern here – it would be an awful thing for someone who has had any kind of traumatic experience to be disbelieved. But given that there is empirical evidence that false memories do exist – and can be created – any conception of justice must surely also be concerned with trying to protect the innocent from false conviction. There is no doubt that this is a highly sensitive, difficult area, but sweeping the idea of false memory away completely and trying to pretend it does not exist is unhelpful. Ultimately there is no quick resolution.

Everyone has the right to a fair trial, and that trial is only fair if there are empirically based standards of evidence. We need to ensure that trials become less biased against people who are accused of crimes, and take more to heart the truism that just because you have been accused of doing something bad it does not mean you did it. Given what I know about memory, I would not want to live in a world where a single memory by itself is enough to enact legal sanctions. According to the international organisation the Innocence Project,16 which is dedicated to exonerating convicts who they strongly believe are innocent, faulty memories, particularly of eyewitnesses, are the major contributing factor for wrongful convictions. For example, in 2015, out of 325 cases where modern DNA testing proved innocence beyond reasonable doubt, a whopping 235 cases involved eyewitness misidentification. This suggests that false memories play an absolutely critical role in the imprisonment of the innocent.