The Mandela effect is likely a variation on this.
Our memories are much worse than we think they are. Anyone who has ever dealt with eyewitness testimony knows this, and that's immediate memory.
Our memories are much worse than we think they are. Anyone who has ever dealt with eyewitness testimony knows this, and that's immediate memory.
Interrogations during school (with trained actors) we had to extract 80% of the information and write a report on it containing 90% of the information we extracted, with no notes, up to several hours after the interrogation.
Interestingly, I learned how to “tag” memories as authentic (so I could write about them later) which has had interesting implications later on in my life.
Do tell.
Anyway, occasionally someone will “bring up” a meeting detail later on and be confused by it. This isn’t malicious, but sometimes it can be so far from what was actually discussed that people question their own memories and something slightly different arises from the ashes. I used to point out what was actually discussed, but I learned that doesn’t usually come across that well (you’re now questioning a teammate’s memory and aptitude, and requires a bit more delicate politics than I care to involve myself with). These days, I just sit back and watch it play out. It’s pretty rare-ish.
once upon a time it also meant Califoria Youth Authority, lol
You use direct questioning once you’ve succeeded at your approach, when you lose trust, or when you’re not trained properly on approaches because you can fuck it up pretty bad.
So you’d get a couple of paragraphs explaining what the character was picked up for, etc.
The first steps was learning how to direct question. The actors would pretty much shut down if you did something wrong like try an approach or ask leading questions. And they wouldn’t respond for the rest of the session. The goal was to force it into our head that once someone is willing to answer us, don’t stop asking the right questions. During the test though, the actors would give you wrong information instead of shutting down.
Then we started learning of approaches. The actors goals here was much the same except this time their goal was to not give you information unless they felt like you deserved it. I’ll never forget this one time, I got baited into a religious discussion. It was so obviously a trap and I fell right into it. Didn’t get a single bit of information because I pissed off the guy for not knowing enough about his religion.
Most of the time the first bit is figuring out core motivation. Is the person motivated by power or emotion?, and then giving them that as a carrot or taking it away. So you are genuinely trying to get to know the person, and that person is stuck in a room with you so they don’t have any other choice other than not saying a word (the worst!!).
If it’s done right, you end up caring for these people to some degree. Even though you don’t want to because sometimes these people have done absolutely terrible things. It’s a rough job. It wasn’t until I became a parent and realized that emotion is similar to when your kid misbehaves. You love your kid, but the child has to be punished. So while your child is sitting in the corner, tears streaming down the face in shame and betrayal, you love them but have to teach them that there are consequences. It’s nearly the same emotions as that moment except every single day, all day.
Off-duty cops are clueless, especially the drunk ones. A drug dealer friend once got a cop room mate for a couple years. That was hilarious and he would always pick us up if we were too drunk to drive, which we always made a fake scene about why a squad car was picking us up. Sometimes I miss my 20’s… nah, I don’t.
But there are people with true photographic memories who faithfully remember exact details. I think it was the book Subliminal where the author discusses how these people often struggle to put those details into a larger contextual understanding. They get the details but miss the gist.
The traditional notion of photographic memory is being able to recall any and every aspect of a scene upon a single viewing. But in countless experiments where a researcher asks the subject about some obscure detail, nobody has ever been able to demonstrate this--i.e. they may have happened to spot a particular detail, but keep iterating the experiment and they regress to the mean.
To memorize something, a person has to focus their attention on the object such that they can draw associations--inside the scene, outside the scene, etc. Perhaps this can indeed be subconscious. "Conscious" and "subconscious" are such nebulous words, and people's experiences of them so varying, that disputing that it could be done subconsciously requires a degree of certitude I don't think anybody (scientist or otherwise) could rightly possess.
There are indeed people with ridiculously amazing memories, including astounding visual fidelity. But it's misleading to say that it's "photographic". These people aren't glancing at a scene, blinking their eyes, and committing the whole thing to memory like a camera. Rather, their brains seem to be adept at scanning and drawing an incredible number of associations between visual elements and objects within the scene, but never the entirety of a sufficiently complex scene unless given a commensurate amount of time. And in fact, it turns out that with sufficient effort and practice many if not most people can begin to exhibit such astounding feats of memory.
> I think it was the book Subliminal where the author discusses how these people often struggle to put those details into a larger contextual understanding. They get the details but miss the gist.
Perhaps you're referring to the fact that people who exhibit extraordinary episodic memory (i.e. like the stereotypical autistic savant who can remember what they ate on any prior date, though most aren't autistic, AFAIU) usually have normal or sometimes deficient semantic memory. Note that episodic memory isn't the same thing as visual memory. Visual memory can be both episodic and semantic--e.g. if you're a visual-spatial thinker.
This is exactly it. Thanks for clarifying and explaining the distinction. I won't use "photographic memory" in the colloquial sense anymore :)
> Other examples include memories of the title of the Berenstain Bears children's books being spelled Berenstein,[16][17] the logo of clothing brand Fruit of the Loom featuring a cornucopia,[18] and the existence of a 1990s movie titled Shazaam starring comedian Sinbad as a genie.
I've noticed that I can vividly recall experiences in other countries but my memory has altered itself to match the side of the road I'm currently used to driving on, and have confirmed this experience with others.