These posts make more sense when read in order.
Please click here for the first article in this series to enter the rabbit hole.
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| Does this picture remind you of past vacations on the beach? © John Richard Stephens, 2024. |
In memory of golden summer hours
And whispers of a summer sea
—Lewis Carroll, The
Hunting of the Snark, 1876
Most of us don’t question the accuracy of our own autobiographical memory. After all, we were there. We experienced it firsthand. We’re our own eyewitness. How could we remember it wrong? It can be as real to us as if it were yesterday. But sometimes our memories aren’t firsthand. We’ve created some from family photographs or stories friends and relatives have told us. Maybe we’ve picked up bits from old letters or diaries. It’s possible we’ve taken the gist of things from memories and second-hand sources and have filled in the rest. Astrophysicist and author Carl Sagan wrote, “Perhaps what we actually remember is a set of memory fragments stitched onto a fabric of our own devising. If we sew cleverly enough, we have made ourselves a memorable story easy to recall.”[1] Maybe that’s the story of our own lives.
This brings us to nostalgia, which is when we remember a polished up version of the past. There’s a note in my notebook from the 1980s that says, “The more things change, the more they stay insane.” I don’t know whether I heard that somewhere or came up with it on my own, but it is appropriate here. Nostalgia was originally thought to be a mental disorder—a disease. Now we consider it to be an emotion—one that’s partly caused by the way our memories are processed and filtered. While group nostalgia can strengthen bonds within the group, it can also create discrimination against those who are outside the group. Unfortunately there were no “good ol’ days”. Go back and look at the newspapers or the history of those times. They were plagued by poor medical care, World War I, the depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, Vietnam War, the draft, riots, the Gulf War, 9/11, the Afghanistan War, various recessions, the threat of nuclear war, other wars, more riots, the pandemic, climate change—it doesn’t stop. And it has been continuous.
One metastudy included 235 surveys based on more than 574,000 responses and found that most people of all ages, ethnicity, political leanings in 59 countries agreed that the world today is less ethical, moral, and honest today than it was in the past, and people have believed this since the surveys began in 1949. They all think that kindness is gradually disappearing. I find it particularly startling that most feel the decline started around the time of their birth. As I’ve spent years studying history, I’m surprised because I can clearly see the improvement over the centuries.
There is evidence of recent progress. In 12 million responses to 140 surveys that asked about current state of morality, respect, and volunteerism over the previous year, there was no change from 2002 to 2020, while those same respondents continued to bemoan the decline.[2] Another meta-analysis of 511 studies with 63,342 participants found the cooperation between strangers in the United States had actually increased over the 61-year period from 1956 and 2017.[3] Respected Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker found that on most levels—including health, safety, peace, happiness—things are improving throughout much of the world, while atrocities such as genocide, violence, and child abuse are actually diminishing.[4]
People love nostalgia and sentimentality—so do I—but it’s not real. The problem is that when we long for a past that never existed and try to turn back the clock, it hinders us from making a better future.
Usually we long for the period when we were growing up and weren’t aware of world affairs. For many of us, our golden age was the period of our youth—the carefree days before we had to earn a living and had bills and responsibilities. The days were longer and time was slower. We had time to enjoy things.
Time wasn’t slower; our perception of time is now faster, partly because we’re busier and partly because we’re slowing down, so the world seems to swirl around us. We get into routines and do many things automatically without much thought, and the weeks pass quickly by.
And, of course, the old days weren’t all that carefree anyway, since there were endless hours in school rooms, bullies, traumas, and the difficulties of growing up, but we tend to filter those out most of the time, or separate them from the good memories.
With our autobiographical memories gradually becoming contaminated and altering every time we lay them back down, who we think we are changes over time. We change throughout our lives, but our brains to a very good job of making us feel like we’re the same person.
Why would we evolve to have inaccurate memories?
Retrieving memories appears to be the same process we use to retrieve the meaning of words. When you hear “Mad Hatter”, your subconscious refers to your memories to decipher the meaning of the name. Basically the same thing happens when your recall is triggered. This process becomes increasingly automated as you get older. This automation makes the process faster and more efficient, but it comes at a cost.
A couple of studies found that the recognition of words is slower in children and adult schizophrenics, than in other adults who have reinforced their word recognition over years. The downside of this is those adults are more prone to false memories. The process that improves the efficiency of memory retrieval also seems to make it more susceptible to errors.[5]
Regarding similar but unrelated research, British professor Lars Chittka said, “On the surface creating false memories would seem to be bad for our survival, but historical research suggests that false memories are often those that fall in with previously learned rules and cultural norms which can be useful.
“Our research suggests that individuals who are particularly good at learning rules and classifying objects by common properties are also particularly prone to false memory illusions. So, like optical illusions, it might be that false memories are a by-product of the clever ways our brains monitor the world around us.”[6]
When it comes to survival, accurate memories might not be that important. What is important, is remembering enough so you can do better in the future. And some distortions may improve our memory. For example, memories appear to exaggerate the differences between similar objects, much like a child examining two pieces of cake, and it may do this to make the memory easier to recall and prevent similar memories from interfering with one another.[7] Others make us feel better about ourselves, which may improve our lives.
Constantly rewriting our memories might be a mechanism we use to correct errors that creep in. It may just be more noticeable when the process goes wrong, such as when, as Loftus said, “it gets people into trouble, like in ‘stolen valor cases’, when someone says they were a brave soldier on the battlefield and it turns out they were really behind a desk on that day.”[8]
Sometimes we adopt someone else’s memories. We hear someone tell a personal account and forget the source, thinking it happened to us. Julia Shaw says it’s “quite common to ‘steal’ entire memories, particularly from siblings.”[9]
Some of our memories are better than others. While they’re not perfect and can cause all sorts of problems, most of the time they seem to be good enough for us to get by.
In the past few years I’ve had several encounters with things from my past that I found quite fascinating. They brought home to me how our memories are distorted. One of them happened a few days ago from when I’m writing this. A couple of times over the years I had mentioned to my wife a strong memory I had about the closing credits of the original Flintstones cartoons, which I hadn’t seen in about fifty-five years. I recalled how Fred was preparing to go to sleep by putting their saber-toothed cat out. The cat raced back into their house and locked Fred out. As he pounded on the door calling for Wilma, the scene panned out showing the city at night with all its lights. I didn’t really remember much else of the cartoons themselves, but I was sure that only the first season had this ending and as a kid I was very disappointed when they deleted what I thought was the best part of the show. I’ve always loved looking at lights in the distance at night.
So Elaine and I pulled up a couple of the shows and skipped to the end. There it was, but quite different than I remembered it. The essential elements were there, but the village scene looked different and it was shown twice with abrupt cuts, rather than one shot pulling back and it didn’t pull back farther to show a larger city. The second show’s ending we saw didn’t have that scene, so it looks like my memory was correct about it only being in the first season.
It’s difficult to estimate how much of that memory was fictitious—perhaps 30%—but the key elements were all there. That’s not bad compared to a couple hundred people who remember watching Sinbad’s 1990s film, Shazaam. Some viewers insist they can clearly recall nearly every scene in this movie which never existed. False memories can be vivid and convincing.
Most of the time we don’t get to confirm the accuracy of our memories, so when we’re confronted with our own faulty memories, it can be rather disconcerting. After all, it’s our memories of our past that defines us and reminds us of who we are. By remembering incidents in our lives that never happened, this undermines our sense of self. How well do we really know our pasts and ourselves? Perhaps not that well, when this knowledge is combined with that from my early explanation of biases.
When I worked in various mental health facilities, some patients began questioning all their memories after being confronted with the conflicting and illogical nature of some of them. If those obviously false memories were wrong, how could they be sure about the rest? These were the patients who were recovering. The rest insisted that even their most outlandish memories and thoughts were accurate.
This may give new meaning to the Cheshire Cat’s comment, “We’re all mad here.”
[1] Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, New York City: Random House Publishing Group, 1995.
[2] Adam Mastroianni, “Your Brain Has Tricked You Into Thinking Everything Is Worse”, The New York Times, June 20, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/opinion/psychology-brain-biased-memory.html.
[3] Mingliang Yuan, Giuliana Spadaro, Shuxian Jin, Junhui Wu, Yu Kou, Paul A. M. Van Lange, and Daniel Balliet, “Did Cooperation Among Strangers Decline in the United States?”, Psychological Bulletin, vol. 148, nos. 3-4, 2022, pp. 129–157, https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/bul-bul0000363.pdf, https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000363.
[4] Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now, New York: Viking, 2018.
[5] Basque Research, “False memories: The hidden side of our good memory”, ScienceDaily, February 5, 2014. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140205080015.htm, citing Pedro M. Paz-Alonso, Simona Ghetti, Ian Ramsay, Marjorie Solomon, Jong Yoon, Cameron S. Carter, and J. Daniel Ragland, “Semantic processes leading to true and false memory formation in schizophrenia”, Schizophrenia Research, vol. 147, no. 2-3, 2013, pp. 320-25, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.schres.2013.04.007. And Pedro M. Paz-Alonso, Pamela Gallego, Simona Ghetti, “Age Differences in Hippocampus-Cortex Connectivity during True and False Memory Retrieval”, Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, vol. 19, no. 10, 2013, pp. 1031-41, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355617713001069.
[6] University of Queen Mary London. “False memories could be a side-effect of human ability to learn rules”, ScienceDaily, September 24, 2014. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140924113039.htm, citing Kathryn Hunt and Lars Chittka, “False memory susceptibility is correlated with categorisation ability in humans”, F1000Research, 2014, https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.4645.1.
[7] Stephanie Pappas, “Your brain warps your memories so you can remember them better”, Live Science, March 9, 2021, https://www.livescience.com/brain-distorts-similar-memories.html.
[8] Clare Wilson, “Can I trust my memories?” (interview with Elizabeth Loftus), New Scientist, no. 3201, October 27, 2018, pp. 36-37, and as “Memory special: Can you trust your memories?”, October 24, 2018, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032010-700-memory-special-can-you-trust-your-memories/.
[9] Julia Shaw, “How false memories can shape a criminal court case”, BBC Science Focus, June 17, 2022, https://www.sciencefocus.com/comment/how-false-memories-can-shape-a-criminal-court-case/.
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