Are Our Memories Just Illusions?

From yesterday's lunch to how I felt when I first met someone, every memory we try to access in our minds is treated as a faithful account of something that actually occurred. Yet taking our memories as always reliable versions of what we lived through, rather than as mere stories that give meaning to certain situations, may be a mistake.

Julia has conducted numerous studies on memory to investigate this premise. In one of these studies, instead of following the traditional approach used in memory research and looking for failures in how we recall facts or confusion about details, Julia does the opposite: she tries to make people remember a personal event that never actually happened.

They recruited 100 volunteers who were led to believe they were participating in research about their childhood memories. But the study was actually designed to see if it was possible to implant a false memory of committing a crime. Julia herself began this study skeptically, not believing it would be possible to convince anyone that they had committed a crime in the past. She was completely wrong.

Implanting Memories

The approach with the interviewees started with the narrative of a true event, gathered from conversations with family members, which was really just a trick to build trust. The next step was to introduce the false fact: telling the person that at some point they started a fight so violent that the police had to be called. Julia provides details about the location and people involved, with the location being somewhere the person actually spent much of their adolescence and the names being people who were part of the interviewee's childhood.

At first everyone resists and says they know nothing about what she's describing; they definitely can't remember the event. Julia then begins to apply a series of cognitive methods to induce false memories through imagination exercises. Before even starting, she applies a small but effective manipulation: she says the proposed exercise works for most people, which makes the interviewee feel compelled to work hard to make the exercise succeed. Next, Julia asks the interviewee to visualize all the details of the story. After the imagination exercise, in the second interview, the person begins to transform how the situation could have happened (which was imagined) into how it probably happened. After some time, this easily converted into a memory of what actually occurred. By the third interview, the memory was already established with rich details. This happened with exactly 70% of the participants. All of them were convinced they had committed a crime in adolescence and remembered it clearly.

This study raised many questions about the techniques police use to obtain confessions for crimes, Julia's area of work. But it's not only in that regard that it raises something important. It shows us something unsettling: what we believe to be our past, our own personal history, can sometimes be a collection of false narratives.

How Memories Are Constructed

All the mental construction we call memory consists of stories we develop ourselves after an event occurs. Of course, we try to make this story as close as possible to what actually happened, but it's impossible for it to be completely faithful. Moreover, these stories are accessed many times, when we retell them to ourselves or to someone else. And each time we do, we're already accessing a shadow, not the actual event. So each time we access a memory, our imagination tries to reconstruct the recollection, the shadow, not the fact. And in that reconstruction we add, remove, or modify some elements, moving the narrative further and further from what really happened. When we remember, we almost always hold onto one aspect and forget another. Sometimes we actually invent and add elements that never occurred at all, all in an attempt to give a certain meaning to that situation. One sign of this dynamic is how over time we change our opinion about the same situation that happened in the past. For example, regarding an ex-partner. We might remember a particular action of theirs with a lot of anger at first, but after some time, when we recall the same action, we look at it with gentler eyes, and might even feel sympathy for the same thing that once caused us so much stress. This happens solely because we retell the story to ourselves in different ways, usually coloring it with the emotions we're experiencing at that particular moment.

Dare to Question Your Own Story

Memories begin with perception, and we can understand many things about what perception is, but one fact is that each individual possesses an absolutely unique perceptual filter. Beyond having unique sensory apparatus, we have a unique worldview, which means that each of us already brings a specific set of values and memories to every situation we experience, which predetermines how we will judge that situation. So as soon as we begin to construct a memory based on a fact, it's already filtered, contaminated, biased.

Who we believe we are is constructed through our memories; who we think the people around us are, the same. And everything I think about the world is also based on memories. Therefore, Julia recommends that we be more cautious, curious, and especially kind with our memories, with our own and with those of others.

We need to be cautious in the sense of paying attention to how we're remembering things and everything that might be influencing the way I'm recalling something. How am I feeling right now? What led me to think about this particular subject? Who am I telling this story to? What are my intentions in retelling this event? And so on.

We also need to be curious about immediately trusting our recollections; we should investigate whether that memory, in the heat of the moment, is really as reliable as we think it is. And finally, most importantly: we need to be kind, keeping in mind that just because someone is saying something that is demonstrably false doesn't mean the other person is lying, and just because someone (or we ourselves) is remembering something that makes a lot of sense doesn't mean it's actually a true story.

Being aware that we are active creators of how we see our own history can be an initial step toward not falling into, or toward getting out of, states of guilt, sadness, low self-esteem, and so on. This kindness toward our own memories can certainly lead us to a greater lightness in how we see ourselves and the world.

To learn more about Dr. Julia Shaw's studies, watch this TEDx talk: