Have you ever gotten into an argument with a friend or family member regarding a memory? About how things actually happened? You’re willing to bet you have it correct, but the other person seems so sure of themselves that you can’t tell what’s real and what’s not anymore. How is it possible that two people who experienced the same event can’t agree on one memory?
Our brains control us as human beings. They are the fundamental organs that control every process in our bodies. The development of our brains is what differentiates us from any other animal; this is what makes human beings ‘intelligent’.
The brain consists of two different types of cells - neurons and glia. Neurons are one of the most diverse cellular populations in the human body that are responsible for thoughts, actions, learning, and memory. They collect information, process it, then generate an output/signal which is sent to the body.
There are 3 steps in the process of remembering a fact, event, or something with an emotional connection:
Encoding - initial storage into memory
Storage/Consolidation - maintaining the stored memory
Retrieval - reactivating the memory for further processing
When encoding, mere exposure is not enough - the more deeply you process information, the better it is encoded. Let’s apply this to a school context; if your teacher put a list of keywords and definitions up on the board, simply looking and reading the information is not a high enough level of processing for you to actually remember everything you just saw.
Retrieval works best when conditions are similar to those of encoding and the context is the same. Have you ever wondered why teachers always tell us that the best study tip is doing practice papers? It’s because the practice test mimics the context of an actual test, and it becomes easier to retrieve this previously encoded information later in more stressful conditions.
Looking at all these baseline concepts, we still pose the question, “why do our memories fail?” There are 4 common problems for memory failure: forgetting, interference, misattribution, and false memory.
There are two main types of forgetting: passive, and directed. Passive forgetting is the natural escape of information from one’s memory. Even with perfectly encoded material, there is substantial memory loss. Passive forgetting slows down with time, so very long-lasting memories tend to be permanent. On the other hand, directed forgetting is a choice not to remember certain information, for example if someone tells you not to worry or to forget about something. It poses the question of whether it’s possible to be used as a coping mechanism for people to intentionally block out traumatic events.
The next type of memory failure is interference. Interference is when similar/overlapping information can cause problems within memory, producing storage and retrieval errors. When previously acquired information messes with new learning, it is called proactive interference, and when recently acquired information changes old memories, it is called retroactive interference.
An example of this is when you get a new phone number. You are so used to your old number that you will continue to give people that number instead of your new one. This interferes with your ability to recall the new information and adapt to changes in your knowledge quickly.
Another type of memory failure is misattribution, which is the act of incorrectly linking memories to their source. Within this, there are 3 different types:
Memory misattribution is when information is recalled correctly but mistakenly associated with an incorrect source.
Source amnesia is when information is correctly remembered, but the source is not remembered at all.
Cryptoamnesia is mistakenly remembering someone else’s ideas as one’s own; this has taken place several times in the music industry for which artists have been sued for plagiarism without realizing that it wasn’t their original work.
False memory is the last form of memory failure, which modifies and manipulates memories after coding. An example of this was the research paper ‘Wade et al’ in which they Photoshopped people into photos of events they had never really participated in. After viewing the photos, most kids claimed that the event had actually happened and they “remembered” details not shown in the photos.
Memory can be a useful tool, often used in court cases in witness statements, in taking tests/exams, and in many other ways. After looking into the different types of memory failure, it makes us question just how reliable one’s account of an event can be. How many false convictions have there been as a result of these types of memory failure? How many lives have been changed due to memory failure?
We should always be questioning and developing our perspectives because memories are never concrete. We should be trying to come up with the best solutions to give us the least possible margins of error and the best possible outcomes. We as humans would have no substance without our memories and emotions.
We are our memories, so we have to live in the moment, but never forget to remember.
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