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

by Julia Shaw

does not impair performance – and may even enhance it – for information that was originally in word form: word lists, spoken statements, or facts, for example.

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.

Vicarious traumatisation occurs when someone tells another person about an event and they experience adverse trauma-like symptoms as a result.

From being (or not being) in a helicopter that is attacked, to committing (or not committing) a serious crime, to group disclosure of traumatic events, no memory, no matter how emotional, is safe from corruption.

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:

Our brains are able to seamlessly switch from one complex thought to another because neurons can work together by operating on a certain frequency of electrical signal, allowing synchronicity regardless of how they are physically joined together. As the authors put it, neurons hum together.

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.

So it’s clear that memories are contagious; if I let out one of my memories, it is possible for you to catch it and make it your own.

But that’s not all. Deutsch and Gerard coined the term ‘groupiness’ to describe how cohesive a particular group is – how much its members tend to conform. In sociology the term for this is entitativity, essentially meaning the degree to which the group works as a single entity. We tend to divide the world into ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’, meaning those that we identify ourselves as being a part of, and everyone else. For example, your in-group may be your university alma mater, while the out-group may include students from a rival institution.

Let’s start with the memory processes involved. Unless you are currently looking into a mirror, your perception of what you look like is a type of memory. It is a memory not only of when you last looked in the mirror earlier today, but of all other times you looked in a mirror or looked at photos of yourself. This means you almost certainly have a composite image of, say, your face in mind when you think of yourself. The problem is that this patchwork memory of what you look like never stood a chance because it can never actually exist in reality. You cannot look today like you did every day until today. Ageing alone makes that impossible, never mind everyday blemishes and style changes. This helps us to understand why, in response to certain photos, we say, ‘That’s a bad picture of me!’ Often what makes it a bad picture is simply that it is at odds with what we think we look like, at odds with our memory of ourselves.

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.

he demonstrated that when his participants had this feeling of knowing, they were often correct. However, this information could only be recognised, not recalled. This means that, for example, if we have a feeling of knowing, we are likely to be able to correctly recognise information in a multiple-choice test but will not be able to produce it from scratch in an open-ended question.

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.

this feeling is still far from perfect and can mislead us. A classic feeling of knowing error in everyday life is a situation in which you think ‘I know that guy’ because his face seems familiar, even when in reality you have never seen him before.

By creating this kind of multisensory picture we are engaging many more parts of our brain than if we were to try to remember the words alone. Instead of just using the parts responsible for language, we are now actively making connections in the regions of our brain responsible for vision, touch and hearing.

Knowing that our memories are unreliable also inspires us to seek out exactly how and when memory processes break down. For me it has proven an insanely fascinating ride, trying to figure out these memory illusions in the lab and to generate practical applications for the police, the military and the business world. I hope that for you this also proves true, as you can search for applications far and wide and open a Pandora’s box of potential fascination and intrigue, allowing you to see as amazing a process we too often take for granted. How and why we remember is a topic that never gets old. Finally, understanding all the shortcomings that our memory system presents allows us to adhere to a whole new ethos. Our past is a fictional representation, and the only thing we can be even somewhat sure of is what is happening now. It encourages us to live in the moment and not to place too much importance on our past. It forces us to accept that the best time of our lives, and our memory, is right now.