
Why Our Memory Fails Us - kafkaesque
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/opinion/why-our-memory-fails-us.html
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tokenadult
Christopher Chabris is a very perceptive researcher on human perception, and
I'm glad to see this submission here. The lead example of faulty memory in the
article is very interesting, as it points to the problem of belief-motivated
recollection of "facts" that never happened. This is important for all of us,
as the article notes.

"Our lack of appreciation for the fallibility of our own memories can lead to
much bigger problems than a misattributed quote. Memory failures that resemble
Dr. Tyson’s mash-up of distinct experiences have led to false convictions, and
even death sentences. Whose memories we believe and whose we disbelieve
influence how we interpret controversial public events, as demonstrated most
recently by the events in Ferguson, Mo."

As I have written about this issue before here on Hacker News, the problem
with human memory is that each read operation is also a write operation. We
never go back to our memory of any event without rearranging our understanding
of the event, often to the detriment of recalling verifiable facts. When in
doubt, look it up. And be in doubt often when relying on your own memory.

~~~
api
I also like that he picks on Tyson... not because I don't like Tyson, but
because it's important to point out that these are universal human cognitive
failings that can befall anyone regardless of their belief system. Nobody who
has a human brain is immune to the issues with that organ.

Too often "Skeptic movement" people tend to pick on religious believers, new
agers, etc. as if obviously only those kinds of people fall prey to cognitive
biases, illusions, logical fallacies, and other failure modes of the mind.

~~~
DanBC
> Too often "Skeptic movement" people tend to pick on religious believers, new
> agers, etc. as if obviously only those kinds of people fall prey to
> cognitive biases, illusions, logical fallacies, and other failure modes of
> the mind.

That was particularly annoying on the bad science forums. Especially since the
whole point of the book was that people are subject to biases and well run
research is the way to combat those biases.

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dewarrn1
False memories of the kind that Chabris and Simons discuss are ubiquitous in
healthy people, and there are lots of interesting wrinkles in the literature
describing these memory errors — here are two of my favorites.

First, even individuals with extraordinary memory abilities are susceptible to
false memory phenomena [0]. People with what's been called "highly superior
autobiographical memory" (HSAM) can, for any given date in the last decade or
two, tell you what they did, what they ate, and what the weather was like with
extraordinary accuracy. However, when tested with standard laboratory tasks
that induce false memories, they are just as vulnerable as typical
individuals.

Second, focal brain injury may reduce susceptibility to false memories [1].
Full disclosure, this is some of my own published work. We investigated the
effects of damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) on false
recall in a standard laboratory test involving lists of conceptually similar
words (the DRM task [2]). Patients with vmPFC damage showed reduced (but not
abolished) false memories relative to healthy comparison participants. This is
especially interesting to us because vmPFC appears to be necessary for
decision-making in complex situations, particularly when prior knowledge must
be integrated into ongoing behavior. We believe that deficits in decision-
making accompanying vmPFC damage may stem from the same root cause the
reductions in false memory that we observed. Regardless, we’re not
recommending vmPFC resection for healthy people seeking more accurate memory
(not yet, anyway).

Although these are highlights, empirical work on false memories and other
kinds of memory errors extends back more than a century. It’s a fascinating
domain, and I very much enjoy working in it. More information on a variety of
related topics can be found at my website [3] and in my published work (see
Publications).

[0]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24248358](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24248358)

[1]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24872571](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24872571)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deese%E2%80%93Roediger%E2%80%9...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deese%E2%80%93Roediger%E2%80%93McDermott_paradigm)

[3] [http://david-e-warren.me](http://david-e-warren.me)

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colmvp
The article brings up Dr. Tyson.

He actually commented on this article and linked to these Facebook posts:

[https://www.facebook.com/notes/neil-degrasse-tyson/email-
exc...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/neil-degrasse-tyson/email-exchange-
with-the-federalist/10152354422065869)

[https://www.facebook.com/notes/neil-degrasse-
tyson/partial-a...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/neil-degrasse-
tyson/partial-anatomy-of-my-public-talks/10152360009440869)

------
spiritplumber
Why Our Memory Fails Us: Because we don't have badges. Cops have magically
perfect memory, even to the point that their memory trumps dashcam video.

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140405/17142626817/india...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140405/17142626817/indiana-
supreme-court-declares-officers-testimony-is-more-reliable-than-video-
evidence.shtml)

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guelo
Disappointingly, this article does not tell us why our memory fails us, only
that it does.

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ars
Just a little thought experiment:

What if those memories that differ between people are not because of bad
memory, but because the actual events are different?

Sort of a quantum superposition, which collapses the wavefront in different
ways for different people?

Maybe tie in multiple universes somehow, and events shift from one to the
other.

Would certainly be interesting if true :)

~~~
alexbecker
> Would certainly be interesting if true :)

Yes, except it's psuedoscientific crazy talk.

~~~
ChuckMcM
If by pseudo-scientific you mean difficult/impossible to falsify then I'd
agree with you. If you mean gobbledy gook then I would disagree.

There are some number of theorists that are working with multiple universe
theories defined by 'choices' in the quantum world. Its hard to prove that
such things exist (or don't exist) but one notion has that detangling a photon
from its entangled counterpart has you "actualizing" in one of two possible
universes. The GP thread posits macroscopic effects of that, which is both
impossible to prove and an interesting conjecture.

~~~
gizmo686
The GP posits interactions between the several possible universes, in the
sense that I am from universe A and am litterally talking to someone from
universe B. While it is conceivable that this type of cross universe
interaction is possible, it is not at all possible in our current
understanding of physics, and if it where possible, it would have to be
possible in a very subtle way or else we would have already noticed it (in the
same sense that relativity breaks Newtons laws in a very subtle way).

Assuming that such interactions our possible, we have no reason to believe
that the macroscopic effects would be to transfer intact memories between
universes, or for the universes to be similar enough for us not to notice this
effect explicitly, but different enough for events to occur differently for
different people.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Fair enough.

I'm not an adherent to the many worlds interpretation, and I claim no specific
expertise in this space. That said, I read your comment as implying that a MWI
would be, by definition, acyclic? To be honest I was thinking that might not
be the case on the theory that you could arrive at the same universe by many
paths. Some part of me wants infinity constrained slightly :-)

