"Everything was so!": Why do we remember what never happened

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Human memory is flexible and easily completes pictures. And so sometimes it fails.

Imagine that you are sharing a vivid childhood memory with your family. But both parents and brothers and sisters look at you in amazement: everything was completely wrong or never happened at all. It reminds you of gaslighting, but your relatives hardly conspired to drive you crazy. Perhaps false memories are to blame.

Why you shouldn't rely on your own memory unconditionally

Human memory is often thought of as a reliable data store. For example, with the light hand of Arthur Conan Doyle, who invented Sherlock Holmes, they present it as an attic littered with necessary and unnecessary information, or a palace of reason in a more modern interpretation. And to get to the desired memory, one has only to carefully clean up the "trash" around it.

Polls show that most people have no doubts about the accuracy of information retrieved from memory. Memorizing, in their opinion, is the same as recording data on a video camera. Many people consider memories to be unchanged and permanent and believe that hypnosis helps to retrieve them more effectively. That is why, for example, 37% of the respondents believe that the testimony of one person is enough to bring a criminal charge.

However, here's a real case. In the early 1980s, a woman was attacked by four unfamiliar black men and raped her. Police later detained two suspects. One of them was Michael Green. During the identification, the victim did not recognize him. But when, after a while, the police showed her photographs, among which was a picture of Michael Green, she marked him as the attacker. When the photo was shown again, the victim confirmed that he was the culprit. Michael Green was convicted and spent 27 of his 75 years in prison. It was only possible to prove his innocence in 2010 using a DNA test.

There were many questions to this case as a whole, they related not only to the quality of testimony - for example, racism could play a role. But this is an eloquent illustration of the fact that the statements of one person are clearly not enough if there is a risk that an innocent person will spend more than half of his life in prison. Michael Green was imprisoned at 18, released at 45.

Where do false memories come from?

One of the most famous contemporary memory scholars, Elizabeth Loftus, tested how accurate eyewitness accounts are and what factors will influence their memories. She showed people the accident records, and then asked about the details of the accident. And it turned out that some of the wording of the questions makes people take false memories for real.

For example, if you ask a person about a broken headlight, he will most likely in the future talk about it as what he saw. Although, of course, the headlights were all right. And if you ask about the van parked near the shed, and not "Have you seen the shed?" She, of course, was not there either.

For example, the testimony of witnesses to incidents can be considered unreliable: after all, we are usually talking about a stressful situation. But here is another experience of the same Elizabeth Loftus. She sent the participants in the experiment four stories from their childhood, which were allegedly recorded from the words of older relatives. Three stories were true and one was not. It described in detail how a man as a child got lost in a store.

As a result, a quarter of the participants in the experiment "remembered" what was not there. In some cases, with repeated interviews, people not only confidently reported fictional events, but also began to add details to them.

Getting lost in the mall is stressful too. But in this case, anxiety seems to play into the hands of a person: he will definitely remember something like that, if it happened. However, the results of experiments show that it is easier to deal with false memories than it seems.

How False Memories Become Collective

Memory can fail not only for one individual person. It happens that false memories become collective.

For example, many people know the phrase of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, which he uttered during the famous New Year's address on the eve of 2000. “Dear Russians! I'm tired, I'm leaving,”- this is how the politician announced his resignation, right?

If you immediately realized what was wrong, then, most likely, you have already specifically clarified this issue before. And you know what Yeltsin said: “I have made a decision. I pondered it for a long time and painfully. Today, on the last day of the outgoing century, I am retiring. " The words "I am leaving" are heard several times in circulation, but they never coexist with the statement "I am tired" - there is simply nothing like that in it.

Or here are some more recognizable examples. The cartoon lion never said "Roll me, big turtle." In the film "Love and Doves" there is no phrase "What is love?", But there is a verbal "shootout": "What is love? "Such is love!"

If we knew these quotes from the words of others, we could shift the blame onto an unscrupulous retelling agent. But often we ourselves revise the source a million times and continue to believe that everything happens in it exactly as we remember. Sometimes it is even easier for people who come across the original to believe that someone insidious has made corrections to it than it is that the memory may fail.

For such cases of distortion of collective memory, there is a special term "Mandela effect". It is named for the President of South Africa. When it became known in 2013 about the death of the politician, it turned out that many were convinced that he had died in prison in the 1980s. People even claimed to have seen news reports about it. In fact, Nelson Mandela was released in 1990 and in 23 years managed to take the presidency, receive the Nobel Peace Prize and do much more.

The term "Mandela effect" was coined by researcher Fiona Broome, who became interested in the phenomenon of mass delusion. She could not explain it, but other researchers are in no hurry to make an exact verdict. Unless, of course, you take seriously the theory of time travel and alternative universes.

Why memories fail us

Memory is flexible

Of course, the brain can be thought of as a data warehouse. Just not as an archive room with a bunch of boxes, in which information is gathering dust in the form in which it was put there. It would be more accurate to compare with an electronic database, where the elements are interconnected and constantly updated.

Let's say you have a new experience. But this information is sent to the archive not only to its own shelf. The data is overwritten in all files that are associated with the received impressions and experiences. And if some details have fallen out or contradict each other, then the brain can fill them with appropriate ones logically, but absent in reality.

Memories can change under the influence of

It's not just the experiments of Elizabeth Loftus that prove this. In another small study, scientists showed participants photographs from their childhood, and the pictures showed truly memorable events, such as a balloon flight. And among the three real images, one fake was crept in. As a result, by the end of the series of interviews, about half of the test subjects “remembered” fake situations.

During the experiments, memories were intentionally influenced, but this can happen unintentionally. For example, leading questions about an event can steer a person's story in a different direction.

The memory is distorted by the psyche

You've probably heard about how traumatic events are displaced from the archives of the brain. And the person, for example, forgets the episode of abuse that he faced in childhood.

In the other direction, distortions also work, and memory brings to the surface a one-sided "truth". For example, those nostalgic for the times of the USSR can talk about an ice cream for 19 kopecks and that supposedly everyone was given apartments for free. But they no longer remember the details: they did not give it, but handed it over, not to everyone, but only to those who are in the queue, and so on.

How to live if you know that you can't even trust yourself

Memory is not the most reliable source of information, and in most cases it is not such a big problem. But exactly as long as there is no need to accurately reproduce certain events. Therefore, one should not rush to conclusions based on testimony and someone's memories, if they are presented in a single copy.

If you are anxious to record events as accurately as possible, it is better to use more reliable formats for this: a piece of paper and a pen, a video camera or a voice recorder. And for detailed biographies, a good old diary is suitable.