How Much of Your Memory Is True? | Hacker News Reader

How Much of Your Memory Is True?

discovermagazine.com

29 pointsrobg14 comments

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.

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.

Anyone who has had work responsibilities including reading trial transcripts, as I have, knows that people will report under oath, subject to cross-examination, all kinds of memories that can't possibly be true. The finder of fact has to figure whom to believe, if anyone.

Even writing stuff down is oddly fallible because a lot of thoughts and memories don't really translate into written word very well - and even if they seem to at the time of writing, reading those words later can cause an entirely different impression to form in the minds of different people (including your own). Our ability to really communicate in any accurate way is surprisingly bad. It's kind of amazing we've achieved all that we have with such a lossy storage system, IMO.

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.

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

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.

Nope, they leave that to the lawyers.

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.)

So fund-raising is easy for your startup, right?

Wait... You don't have a startup? But you had one just 10 minutes ago!?

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?

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.

you should be suspicious of your certainty about your younger memories.

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.

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

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.

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