Why Our Memory Fails Us

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/opinion/why-our-memory-fails-us.html

by kafkaesque • 12 years ago

76 26 12 years ago

ars5• 12 years ago

Just a little thought experiment:

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 :)

alexbecker• 12 years ago

Would certainly be interesting if true :)

Yes, except it's psuedoscientific crazy talk.

blueflow• 12 years ago

Everything was "psuedoscientific [sic!] crazy talk" before it was widely recognized in the science world.

ars5• 12 years ago

Is that a bad thing? It's a thought experiment.

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

If by pseudo-scientific you mean difficult/impossible to falsify then I'd agree with you. If you mean gobbledy gook then I would disagree.

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.

Florin_Andrei• 12 years ago

Okay, I'm gonna take the bait.

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.

4ydx• 12 years ago

So talking about something that happens on a very very small scale as if it should happen on a large one? You sound like Depak Chopra.

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.

tokenadult• 12 years ago

Christopher Chabris is a very perceptive researcher on human perception, and I'm glad to see this submission here. The lead example of faulty memory in the article is very interesting, as it points to the problem of belief-motivated recollection of "facts" that never happened. This is important for all of us, as the article notes.

"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.

api• 12 years ago

I also like that he picks on Tyson... not because I don't like Tyson, but because it's important to point out that these are universal human cognitive failings that can befall anyone regardless of their belief system. Nobody who has a human brain is immune to the issues with that organ.

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.

DanBC• 12 years ago

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.

WalterBright• 12 years ago

My father kept a diary during WW2. A few years ago, when he read it, he told me he was shocked because what he wrote didn't line up with what he remembered.

jared314• 12 years ago

the problem with human memory is that each read operation is also a write operation

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.)

vanderZwan• 12 years ago

I once attended a lecture on how writing, photography and film fundamentally changed our perception of time by fixing the past - we're all familiar with the experience of lookingat old photos and thinking "I looked like that?!"

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.

spiritplumber• 12 years ago

Why Our Memory Fails Us: Because we don't have badges. Cops have magically perfect memory, even to the point that their memory trumps dashcam video.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140405/17142626817/india...

dewarrn1• 12 years ago

False memories of the kind that Chabris and Simons discuss are ubiquitous in healthy people, and there are lots of interesting wrinkles in the literature describing these memory errors — here are two of my favorites.

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...

[3] http://david-e-warren.me

colmvp• 12 years ago

The article brings up Dr. Tyson.

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...

guelo• 12 years ago

Disappointingly, this article does not tell us why our memory fails us, only that it does.

Why Our Memory Fails Us

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