Memory misinformation: The truth about the lies you tell yourself

Note: This article is based on the work of Tyler Tervooren, who discusses memory problems and some ways to improve them.

All the good times you remember now didn't happen the way you think they did. Most of the tough times weren't as bad as you think. All the stories you hear from your parents and grandparents about the good old days are probably exaggerated.

This is what it means to be human. Man is the most advanced and intelligent being on earth, yet is swarmed with flaws and cannot realize most of them. One of the biggest flaws is humans' inability to accurately remember the events he lived. This is the lot of man in life, and he's learned to deal with it very effectively, but from time to time it may cause heavy damage.

For all the beautiful and horrific experiences and events that shape your life, recorded by the synapses in your brain, it turns out that relying on memories to help you make future decisions can be more of a risk than you once thought. This is why humans developed the written language: a subconscious recognition that thoughts cannot be trusted for longer than the period required to write them down.

Proof of memory unreliability

Man has a very strange relationship with stories, especially stories that are supposed to reveal important evidence to him. Strangely, he tends to believe stories, especially eyewitness accounts, more than any other form of evidence, although direct accounts have proven that they are often completely unreliable and absolutely not trustworthy.

So it shouldn't be that controversial. It's been proven time and again in courts around the world and through controlled psychological studies. One of these studies conducted by the researchers "Amina Memon" and "Rita Vartoukian" proved the extent of memory adaptability by repeating closed-ended questions only - one-word questions during the test.

In a series of questions, repeating closed-ended questions several times causes a person's confidence in their answers to drop significantly. You can find various examples of this in any crime drama series. The scene usually plays out as follows:

• Inspector: What color of hat was the defendant wearing at the time of the robbery?
• Witness: I think it was green.
• Inspector: How certain are you about that?
• Witness: I'm 99% sure.
• Inspector: Did you see the suspect up close?
• Witness: No, I was on the other side of the room.
• Inspector: Okay, You were on the other side of the room, how far do you think you were?
• Witness: I don't know, maybe 40 feet?
• Inspector: Well, it looks like you've been far, but have you seen him clearly and directly? Did you see the suspect wearing the hat unhindered?
• Witness: Actually, I was hiding behind a desk, but I peeped several times.
• Inspector: Let me get this straight. You were on the other side of the room hiding behind a desk, peeped "several times" to see what was going on, and saw the suspect wearing a hat?
• Witness: Yes, that's right.
• Inspector: Remind me again, what color that hat was?
• Witness: I think it was green.
• Inspector: How certain are you about that?
• Witness: I'm almost 75% sure.
• Inspector: No further questions.

This scenario is fictional, but it's not far from the truth; any experienced lawyer knows that. You can easily make someone doubt their certainty without even directly contradicting their story.

On the other hand, a study by John Shaw and Kimberley McClure provided solid evidence that a person strongly tends to convince themselves that something completely wrong is right. In their study, the researchers organized a break from a semester in college, and then studied how confident students were with their accounts of what happened over the course of five weeks.

They found through a series of questions that required students to repeat what they recall that their confidence in what they remember and believe rose gradually, regardless of the accuracy of their memory. This is called the Consistency Fallacy.

When you watch "Who wants to be a millionaire," you can see that the contestant struggles with a clear wrong answer, but they become more confident in their answer when they contemplate and repeat it over and over again. Only to get shocked when they find themselves wrong and come home empty-handed. You may now have an explanation for such a phenomenon.

In a study on people's confidence in memory, Debora Poole and Lawrence White found that when a person deals with incomplete information, they're more likely to use their own experiences to predict missing details, rather than admitting that they don't know. This conclusion may be the least shocking since everyone went through it at least once.

There's no doubt that you once talked with your relatives about the antics of a friend or relative, and since there was no explanation from that person, everyone, including you, had theories that they believe are more correct than those of others. Our minds don't cope well with missing information, and we can't accept incomplete stories, so instead, we complete the story from our own information regardless of its accuracy.

Do you know what happened in that movie that ended up mysteriously? You must know. When it comes to uncovering the truth, our unique talent for imagining things is a curse.

If there's anyone who knows the painful truth about our inability to tell the naked truth, it is Kirk Bloodsworth, who was convicted for murdering a nine-year-old girl and sentenced to death. The jury reached a unanimous verdict in just two hours after hearing the testimonies of five eyewitnesses. After nine years in prison, Bloodsworth was acquitted through DNA evidence, and was saved at the very last moment.

This is not uncommon: George Ryan, the governor of the state of Illinois in the United States, made a very unpopular decision to commute the death sentences of more than 167 prisoners after Northwestern University journalism students found exculpatory evidence. Earlier this year, the state of Illinois abolished the death penalty entirely.

That means we've spent so much time systematically killing the innocent, so who's responsible for such a terrible miscarriage of justice? It's you, me, and all of us. We've known this all along, but we don't dare to voice it out.

The Innocence Project, a team dedicated to finding the truth in justice, found that eyewitness testimony is responsible for more than 80% of wrongly convicted cases, which are solved using DNA evidence. All eyewitnesses believed they remembered correctly, but they didn't.

But why do we believe the stories and memories people tell us when there's overwhelming evidence to the contrary? That's because we can empathize with humans more than anything else. We're all the same at the end of the day, and to ignore people's ability to remember something that happened before their eyes is to admit that we can't remember the important events that happened before our eyes. This is hard to swallow, so instead of investigating deeper, we accept the lie quietly so as not to weaken our credibility.

Where do memories come from?

The latest research indicates that we have about 70,000 thoughts every day. Most of these thoughts are unconscious and can't be controlled. But think of the sheer volume of silly random thoughts that cross your mind daily, and the number makes sense.

Each of these memories requires a complex series of synapses that release electrical impulses in the right order to create an image you can remember later, and proteins - the building blocks of life - control these synapses.

The brain is the most studied organ of the body, but the least understood as well. Despite so much extensive research, we still don't know exactly where memories come from, but we know for sure that they're not only complex, but also fragile. Here's an example:

There is a coffee shop in the street below my house that I go to whenever I need a break from work. I go there three to four times weekly, so I'm a regular. But there's someone more regular than me. The honor goes to my neighbor Anna, the lady with mild brain damage who visits the coffee shop almost daily. I know Anna because her injury made her present herself to others in strange ways, and she doesn't always remember me.

On days when I can't ignore her, I try to learn more about her past and who she was before she became so forgetful. She has trouble remembering things now and can't remember the accident, but she can clearly remember her childhood and upbringing. As you can imagine, I've heard the story many times.

Anna had a terrible car accident when she was a sophomore in high school, and she also graduated in that same year. It makes no sense at all, and I insisted on it, but for Anna there is nothing wrong with how her story goes. That's how it works - Two illogical and diametrically opposed realities can exist no problem at all.

Anna's memory is very fragile, just like ours, and as a result of a tragic injury, she lost consciousness of an important part of her past. At least that's what it seems to me and others around her, but to her there's no conflict at all.

In 2009, scientists captured, for the first time, an actual photo of a memory in the making. It was a historic day and a major breakthrough for brain science, but for all the knowledge this photo brings about how we form memories, it leaves us with troubling conclusions about how we remember them.

In 1999, the psychology professor Karim Nader wanted to know whether the proteins responsible for recalling memories formed those memories in the first place. In other words, do the same processes occur in our brain when we recall a memory as they did when we first formed it?

The professor trained the lab rats to fear a high tone by applying a mild electric shock to them immediately after hearing it. After a short period of adaptation, the rats became very tired and afraid of the tone even without applying any electric shock. Then, the mice were injected with a drug that blocks the formation of new proteins in the brain. If the rats remain scared after hearing the tone, this indicates that the memories form only once and take root.

However, the results were contrary to expectations. After receiving the drug, the rats returned to normal and no longer showed any fear of the tone. The implications here are huge, because it suggests that memories are not invoked by the same proteins that made them, as they are at least partially rebuilt by new proteins each time we recall them.

This means that memory may literally change over time, and the real shock is that the mere fact of remembering it may be the reason for the distortion and change of memory. Whenever you remember something, the memory changes and moves away from the objective truth. It may literally change your history every time you think about it.

Did it really happen this way?

There's no way to predict exactly what you'll remember. When scientists tried to experiment on a group of people by exposing them to some similar new events in an attempt to discover a particular memory pattern, there was no correlation whatsoever between the memories they remembered. Each person in the experiment was unique.

The only hypothesis that can be drawn from these findings is that each person's unique set of past experiences, however biased, strongly influences the things they will remember in the future.

If that's true, it's very likely that your memories are biased, and that they're based on your past experiences and expectations. You may only subconsciously remember what you want to remember, whether it's true or not.

How to boost your memory?

The memories you make of your life events are questionable and highly susceptible to distortion, and there is no way to regularly predict what you will actually remember. It's a bleak outlook, but there's still hope. Despite its unreliability, there's one way you can control your mind accurately and carefully, and that is intentional memory.

When you start learning something, and then you learn and remember it, you create what is called intentional memory. Schools and educational programs around the world rely on intentional memory to teach the skills we need to build our human society, but they do it very poorly.

The proof? Just try to remember anything important you learned on purpose in a class you didn't like. You might remember general concepts, but you probably won't remember any useful information. What most schools fail to implement is a good system of remembering. However, where they fail, you can succeed.

The useful information you learn and remember, and more importantly how long you remember it, is governed by a scientific phenomenon called the "forgetting curve" - an equation discovered by the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus in the late nineteenth century through a series of comprehensive self-studies.

Although you don't realize it right now, there's a graph that accurately explains how long you'll remember the information you're studying. The forgetting curve controls your memory somewhat strictly. More than 50% of the information you learn at any given time disappears in less than 20 minutes, and 80% of it disappears after just 24 to 48 hours.

But this curve has loopholes. When Ebbinghaus discovered it, he also figured out a way around it by perfectly timing the reminders your brain needs to retain the information it will forget.

So, if you want to remember everything you've learned, all you have to do is remember every piece of information at the right time. Learning something you already know is much easier than learning something new, like remembering how to ride a bike. The problem is that modern life comes with a lot of responsibilities and complications, so it's impractical to try to time these memories all perfectly, even if you know exactly when they need to happen.

The modern world is also full of modern conveniences. You no longer have to dig deep to find free or inexpensive tools to boost your memory. A quick Google search returns about 134 million results. The best option comes from Piotr Wozniak, the Polish genius who devoted his life to memory retention studies.

Wozniak is the master of memory. His app is called SuperMemo, and it's available online for free. With timed reminders, the app uses the spacing effect to present the information you need to remember at exactly the perfect moment, of course, right before you forget it. He has been criticized because of the prices of his courses, but I have yet to read a single complaint of how successful it has been, which even the staunchest critics of his work admit.

Right now, I'm using one of the free courses in the app to memorize the capitals of all countries in the world, something I learned years ago, but like most people, I couldn't remember for long.

Software apps can help us remember what we're learning on purpose, but what about the rest of our lives? What about all the wonderful, terrible, and ordinary experiences we have by chance that get distorted with each passing day?

Unless you videotape your whole life, there's nothing you can do about it, and you probably shouldn't. After all, it's these distortions in memory that allow us to look back nostalgically in times of trouble or to criticize bad decisions that seemed right at the time. Our distorted memories are the source of our nostalgia.

To wrap it up

Lately, I've been keeping a diary, and instead of concentrating on the story of the day or how I felt during it, I've just been recording harsh and disturbing facts, just like the policeman taking notes at the crime scene. It wasn't fun. It was embarrassing sometimes, but maybe someday it will help me remember my life as it happened, and of course, there's no evidence that I'm going to remember it.