![]() ![]() In the realms of memory, the fact that it is vivid doesn't guarantee that it really happened.Įven highly emotional memories are susceptible to distortion. Two weeks after they were shown the pictures, about half of the participants "remembered" the childhood balloon ride, producing some strikingly vivid descriptions, and many showed surprise when they heard that the event had never occurred. ![]() She then doctored some of the images to show the participant's childhood face in one of these never-experienced contexts, such as the basket of a hot-air balloon in flight. She colluded with the parents of her student participants to get photos from the undergraduates' childhoods, and to ascertain whether certain events, such as a ride in a hot-air balloon, had ever happened. These recollections can often be very vivid, as in the case of a study by Kim Wade at the University of Warwick. If the experimental conditions are set up correctly, it turns out to be rather simple to give people memories for events that never actually happened. Psychologists have conducted studies on eyewitness testimony, for example, showing how easy it is to change someone's memories by asking misleading questions. We know this from many different sources of evidence. That makes them curiously susceptible to distortion, and often not nearly as reliable as we would like. Autobiographical memories are stitched together as and when they are needed from information stored in many different neural systems. They are mental reconstructions, nifty multimedia collages of how things were, that are shaped by how things are now. Sci-fi and fantasy fictions might try to persuade us otherwise, but memories are not discrete entities that can be taken out of one person's head, Dumbledore-style, and distilled for someone else's viewing. Memories are not filed away in the brain like so many video cassettes, to be slotted in and played when it's time to recall the past. When you ask people about their memories, they often talk as though they were material possessions, enduring representations of the past to be carefully guarded and deeply cherished. It is distinguished from semantic memory, which is memory for facts, and other kinds of implicit long-term memory, such as your memory for complex actions such as riding a bike or playing a saxophone. The sort of memory I have described is known as "autobiographical memory", because it is about the narrative we make from the happenings of our own lives. This is quite a trick, psychologically speaking, and it has made cognitive scientists determined to find out how it is done. I become a time traveller who can return to the present as soon as the demands of "now" intervene. I am back there, amid the sights and sounds and seaside smells. ![]() I am somehow able to reconstruct the moment in some of its sensory detail, and relive it, as it were, from the inside. When I cast back to an event from my past – let's say the first time I ever swam backstroke unaided in the sea – I don't just conjure up dates and times and places (what psychologists call "semantic memory"). It's no surprise, then, that there is fascination with this quintessentially human ability. "Our memory is our coherence," wrote the surrealist Spanish-born film-maker, Luis Buñuel, "our reason, our feeling, even our action." Lose your memory and you lose a basic connection with who you are. And, for better or worse, your remembered life story is a pretty good guide to what you will do tomorrow. To know who you are as a person, you need to have some idea of who you have been.
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