Why Our Memory Fails Us
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"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.
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.
I consider it an attribute of human memory, rather than a problem. Emotionally charged memories can haunt people for decades, negatively affecting their daily lives. (PTSD is a general condition, not something only reserved for solders.)
Once people understand the malleability of memory, they can desensitize themselves, remove emotional attachments, or degrade memories entirely on purpose. (In a strange twist of fate, this effect is at the heart of many alternative medicine / pseudoscience techniques, from hypnosis-based trauma release to scientology's auditing.)
We also rely on these media as metaphors for our memory, which partially explains why we make the mistakes mentioned in the article: it leads to a tendency to believe memory is a fixed, static thing.
My girlfriend and I recently discovered a really odd source of friction in our relationship caused by the fallability of memory: she tends to remember her interpretation of what is said in English rather than what is literally said, even if it was said a few seconds ago. Combined with me being a scatterbrain in general this lead to (pointless) discussions about who misremembered something. We think it's because she is a non-native speaker: in her head she has to translate what is said to her own native language to make sense of it, which might interfere with the memory being formed (and if it turns our her memory of the sentence is more "semantic" than "literal", she also has to translate that memory back to English when remembering).
After we figured this out we've managed to avoid that cause of pointless fights. It did require recorded proof to convince her that her memory was as fallible as mine though - like Tyson in the article she was overconfident in its reliability.
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
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24872571
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deese%E2%80%93Roediger%E2%80%9...
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/partial-a...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140405/17142626817/india...
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 :)
Yes, except it's psuedoscientific crazy talk.
So like I remember one thing, but once the waveform collapsed it ended up being different. But my memories are either of what could have been (the other state of the waveform), or alternately memories from a different universe.
I thought it was an interesting idea so I wrote it. I'm not trying to start new physics.
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.
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.
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 :-)
And because people don't usually falsely remember things in a way that is inconsistent with how things turned out only subtle changes would be transfered.
This is just an idea I'm playing with for fun, I'm not trying to start new physics.
If you can find video recordings of the same event happening differently, then this would be interesting.
The whole thing is that people don't remember falsely things that are in contradiction with how things played out.
They remember thing falsely in a way that could have actually happened - that's why they believe them.
So you would never have a memory like this that would be impossible - it would only be little things that could have gone either way.
> 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.
Then the observers with differing memories would actually live in different "multiverse tracks" (different universes with a common origin in the past) and would never interact with each other, ever again.
The fact that they can interact, even indirectly via a 3rd party like a cross-examiner, is proof that they live in the same worldtrack, and therefore the wave has "collapsed" the same way for both.
But don't worry we will have something similar to this in the not so distant future when editing video footage quickly and with picture perfect results makes it hard to determine if evidence is real.