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

by Julia Shaw

Researchers generally agree that the magic age at which we can begin to form memories that last into adulthood is 3.5 years of age,

The ‘stimulus input’ is the information going into our brains through our senses, and a ‘percept’ is simply a mental concept that is developed as a consequence of the process of perception.

Essentially, we often make educated guesses about the world as we perceive it, based on our past experiences.

Perception is experienced as a coherent and fluid process only because our brain is constantly making educated guesses, filling in the gaps in information.

hits about three years. Things that happened less than three years ago we generally assume were less recent than they actually were, while things that happened more than three years ago feel more recent.

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.

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. And this is thought to happen every time we recall any memory.

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.

hyperthymesia (constructed from the Greek words thymesis, which means remembering, and hyper,

hyperthymesics have largely come to be referred to as HSAMs; highly superior autobiographical memory

eidetic memory,

Hyman explains: ‘I have, for example, a rather vague picture of what my friends look like. Surprisingly, my interaction with my friends and the world is better because of this. I need to recognize my friends in different clothes, lighting, locations, and after they get a haircut.’9 These memory functions that seem like failures may thus exist because they offer us larger adaptive advantages.

So it seems that our facility for paying attention overwhelmingly works to make us notice only a small amount of information so that we have a chance of actually processing it, and, in certain situations, remembering it for the future. Memory feeds into attention to tell it what ‘important’ information is, based on past experience, and attention feeds back into memory to update our internal representations of the world.

Or, as the hypnosis researcher Graham Wagstaff28 put it, ‘there is a strong case for arguing that much of the special status that has been awarded to hypnosis may have resulted from a failure to consider the power of social pressures and the normal capacities of ordinary human beings’. He argues, as do many psychological scientists, that the positive effects we sometimes see when people have supposedly been hypnotised may result from regular phenomena such as relaxation, imagination and expectation.

turns out that our ability to recognise faces is actually the responsibility of a specific part of the brain, which has been named the fusiform face area. It is located approximately above your ears, relatively close to the surface of your brain.

We are simply generally worse at identifying someone of a different ethnicity, a phenomenon known as ORB – own-race bias.

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

It is also unlikely that there is such a thing as repression, hiding emotional memories from direct access, but we will get back to that in a later chapter.

‘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.’

What these types of questions imply is that we have the capacity for immediate powerful recollections of the circumstances we were in at particular significant moments. These are sometimes referred to as flashbulb memories. They are detailed and vivid, and typically involve recalling the situation in which a piece of historically important news was heard, along with a detailed recollection of the event itself.

Even our highly emotional memories can be totally false.

In general it seems that simply being shown photographs or asked particular questions can plant false details in our memories, even for incredibly emotional events.

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.

However, it seems that the opposite is true. The researchers found that those who wrote down the description of the perpetrator’s face actually performed significantly worse at identifying the correct person out of the line-up than those who did not.

Putting pictures into words always makes our memories for those pictures worse.

So, while some people who experience a PTE will be traumatised and go on to develop post-traumatic stress disorder, others may have almost no emotional response, and yet others may even feel somehow gifted and enhanced by surviving an experience. However, by setting up the expectation that everyone who experienced a particular event probably has – or should have – a severe adverse response, critical incident stress debriefing has the potential to adversely homogenise people’s reactions, pushing their memories and responses to be more negative than they naturally would have been.

The solution to all this is actually quite simple. If you know someone who has experienced a PTE, make sure they understand that you are available for support whenever they want it. Let them bring the event up if and when they need to, and certainly don’t force them to talk about things. They may never want to rehash the experience directly, as they may feel this would re-victimise them, and that is completely okay. Not talking about the event does not mean the person is not coping, or indeed that they are coping, it just means that they don’t want to talk. Everyone has their own method of dealing with the aftermath of such events.

‘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

‘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.’

Task-switching also seems to increase stress, diminish people’s ability to manage a work–life balance, and can have negative social consequences.

Research like this explores what is referred to as ‘post-event information’ – information that can influence our memories if we encounter it after we experience or witness an event. It might come from many possible sources – discussing the event with others in person or online, reading articles about the event or related events, seeing photos taken by ourselves or others, to name but a few. Any source of information has the potential to change our memories post hoc.

the social contagion of memory. They showed that one person’s memory can be influenced by another’s memory errors. A sort of false memory proliferation effect.

Normative influences are the influences of groups on their members – situations where we do not want to stand out, regardless of whether we believe the group to be correct or not. Informational social influences are also facilitated by groups, but do not necessarily require them. They are instances in which we believe that another person is better informed than us, so we adopt their information on the basis that it is probably correct – a situation where a group or, say, an interviewer really does know the correct answer.

Further, the advent of social media has enormously multiplied the potential sources of social influence and misinformation – a friend’s Facebook update, a Twitter post by a stranger, a Reddit discussion thread. It seems as though we no longer have full ownership of events in our lives, and are instead living in a time of intense ‘transactive memory’,

50 per cent of people cannot remember the phone number of their partner, and 71 per cent cannot remember the phone numbers of their own children – but I bet all of them know where they can find these numbers on their phones.17

because there is no evidence that repressed memories exist in the first place.

After 12 years of Freud being nominated for the Nobel Prize, the committee actually hired an expert to inquire into his work. The expert came to the conclusion that ‘Freud’s work was of no proven scientific value’.11