
How Much of Your Memory Is True? - robg
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jul-aug/03-how-much-of-your-memory-is-true
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DenisM
Anyone who worked in tech support knows that users lie. Most often they don't
know they lie, but if you have the log files you can clearly see what's going
on.

I imagine anyone who works in law enforcement is also well aware of the
fallibility of memory, they just don't bring it up in the court room.

At any rate, this is not a surprising news the article makes it out to be. Our
memory is crap. Write things down if you want to be sure of them.

~~~
jacobolus
I recommend the film _Rashomon_ , one of my favorite explorations of the theme
of fallible memory. Several observers all remember a scene completely
differently, and the film shows each version in turn, without offering any way
to tell whether any is more true than another.

Also, _Memento_ is a great mind-bender, if you think writing things down makes
anyone sure of anything.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
I felt that the interesting bit of rashmon is that you don't know how much of
each alteration is intentional or not.

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diiq
I worked as a magician for a number of years; I was constantly being asked to
"do that one trick you do" --- followed by a description of some phantasm I
had no clue how to create.

Their memory made me a miracle worker. (I always politely declined, "too
tired" for a repeat performance.)

~~~
jeffcoat
The magician is an excellent example for yet another reason: one of the
classic tricks in his arsenal is to narrate what's going on as he does it, and
only lie just a little bit.

As you well know, when a magician tells you that he surely couldn't have
influenced the cards which were in your hand the whole time (that little bit
where he helped you straightened out the deck you just cut of course doesn't
count), the trick's already over.

But when it's all over, what narrative does the audience tell themselves?

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jacquesm
This is a pretty scary subject for me. I used to have pretty much total recall
of facts from my youth aged roughly six up to the present. Lately I've been
discovering holes in it and it scares the willies out of me.

How much of it is true casts doubt on the remainder, a thought that I find
even more frightening. A short while ago I had to do a write up of a bit of my
history and I found that without spending some serious thought about for
instance the order of events I could not instantly put together a sequence of
some of the major events in my life about 2 decades ago.

Maybe memory works like 'RAM', if you don't refresh some bit frequently enough
by thinking about your past it fades slowly over time.

~~~
david927
I think it definitely works like RAM -- and that's a problem. It's open to
influence. When I was 10, I burned my eyebrows nearly off in an "experiment
gone wrong" and my memory of it was at the house we lived in a year later. I
don't know how I got the memory of it in the wrong place, but I think the way
I "refreshed" the memory gave me the confidence that it really happened the
way I (wrongly) remembered.

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BigZaphod
Not much of mine is true. I remember being so much smarter than I apparently
am... :)

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jeffcoat
None of your memories are true. Not as far as you can tell by introspection,
at least.

We tell ourselves stories about ourselves -- our favorite subject -- and those
narratives, compressed versions of our experiences, become our memories.
They're all, every one of them, shaded by the theme we want for the story.

That doesn't have to be a bad thing: keep telling yourself as the hero of the
story of Good Samaritin, the Valiant Little Tailer, or the Adventurous
Entrepreneur, and you start to believe it ... and then you start living up to
the story.

