There Are Reasons Our Memory isn't Perfect
For one thing, we prefer the cliff notes of events that pertain to the future
Hiya!
Memory is endlessly fascinating to me. You probably know the evolutionary reason we can remember anything all — it’s a survival skill. Remembering the past helps us prepare for the future, ideally at least. You also probably know that our memory isn’t perfect. In fact, it’s not even all that reliable.
How often have you misremembered an event, or an answer slipped out of your mind? Why does our brain do this? Wouldn’t objectively accurate memories keep us safer than ones that can be manipulated, are glitchy, and only offers a subjective recollection of our experiences? It turns out there are reasons behind our brains’ apparent flaws.
Memory Can Be Influenced
I may have told you before that I’ve kept a regular journal since fourth grade. Over the years, I’ve pulled them out to revisit my past and see what my younger self decided was important enough to document, and I can’t tell you how often what I wrote about an event conflicts with what I remember today. For one reason or another, my memories have warped.
Then again, it’s not just me. I just happen to have a written record of my life’s events to experience this phenomenon. But no one remembers everything perfectly because human memory is easily influenced. This study from 2004 found that our memories of an event can be influenced when we’re asked questions afterward.
“The results suggest that questions asked immediately after an event can introduce new—not necessarily correct—information, which is then added to the memorial representation of the event, thereby causing its reconstruction or alteration.”
I’m a verbal processor, which is why journaling works well for me. Still, I often talk my problems out with friends or family before coming to a solution. So, it’s possible I conversed with others after journaling, and those conversations influenced my memory of the events.
Usually, every single detail of an experience doesn’t matter. What matters, and what our brain tends to remember, is the gist of a situation and the outcome. This allows us to compare situations later on when faced with a similar predicament.
Schema Frameworks
Consider situations in your life you’re familiar with, like going to a sit-down restaurant. Pretty much no matter where you go, you know what series of events to expect when you walk in.
For instance, there may be a greeter to whom you tell your name and the number of people in your group. When a table is available, the greeter escorts you to it and provides you with a menu. After a few minutes, you inform the wait staff of your food order, and they report it to the kitchen staff who cooks it. Once it’s ready, the wait staff brings the meal to your table. When you’re finished, you pay for the meal and leave. If you have leftovers, maybe you take them in a box to go.
Yes, this situation is familiar because you've experienced it multiple times, so you know what to expect. But there’s another reason too, and it’s called your schema framework (or schema’s). See, your brain develops schemas to help you predict the series of events you might experience, but they also help you understand why you perform them.
Typically, this is a good thing. It’s why we’re not surprised every time we dine out. We know the routine and what is expected of us. We know to follow the greeter to the table and that we’re expected to pay for the food we order.
Sometimes though, schemas influence your memory. You may forget your leftovers on the table if you usually finish your meal or misremember what you ordered later on while telling the story.
Egocentric Bias
You know how people can experience the same event but remember it completely differently? Weirder still is that each person could be remembering the experience accurately, even when the group doesn’t totally agree.
For instance, you’re well aware of the amount of work you contribute to a group project but only hear about the contributions from everyone else. This is because we only know our subjective experience of an event. We can’t know how someone else experiences something unless they tell us.
As a result, afterward, you may place more emphasis on your portion of the project because it’s the most vivid perspective for you. This is a cognitive bias known as our egocentric bias.
Egocentric bias occurs when we rely too heavily on our perspective or attempt to see things from someone else’s point of view. Likewise, egocentrism can cause us to either over or underestimate how different someone else’s perspective is from ours.
Basically, egocentric bias is how our ego, or sense of Self, influences the way we perceive the world. This means it also influences how we make decisions and process information.
If you’re new to a gym, for example, you might feel self-conscious and your egocentric bias may cause you to overestimate the degree of which someone is judging you because it might make you assume other people are as focused on you as you are. When really, everyone else is too focused on themselves to notice anything you’re doing.
This is why it’s important to understand and be aware of how egocentrism influences our decisions and how we process information.
Perspective Shift
Our technology allows us to capture and save our memories in perfect preservation. After uploading a video to Facebook in college, I can watch it all of these years later, and it won’t have changed a bit. We’ve invented plenty of ways to capture moments from the past to hold on to in the perfect form.
But memory doesn’t work that way. It isn’t supposed to be rigid or unchangeable records; its job is to help us make decisions and predict the future. Our memory needs to be malleable and flexible so it can change throughout the years as we learn new information and forget the irrelevant details. In order to survive, thrive, and grow, we need to realize that sometimes we need to take what we’ve learned from the past and let the rest go.
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