Is Your Memory Deceiving You?

GRAYLL
GRAYLL
Sep 29 · 7 min read

It’s a bright and beautiful morning, and we are stepping out into the day ahead of us with a strong sense of who we are, where we came from and where we’re going… or are we? It’s a funny thing, memory — we imagine that our sense of self is built upon our reliable interpretation of the memories of our past and how we apply those experiences. This is true — in a way — but also a little misleading. We imagine that our own recollections are trustworthy, and don’t tend to question our memories until they fail us. Darn it, where did we leave our keys?

Not As Reliable As We Imagine

In truth, our memories are something that morph, stretch and merge over time. Our brains tend to favour recall of certain types of memories, and can transform or even falsify memories without us even realising it. You might mistakenly assume that each of your memories is like a video recording, but each memory is in fact a patch work of different pieces of information that must be re-constructed each time we draw that memory back together, and sometimes our sourcing becomes a little questionable!

In psychology, the phenomena of the malleability of our memories is referred to as memory bias. Our biases can serve to impair or enhance our ability to recall events accurately, and different kinds of biases fall at the mercy of several all-too-human inclinations. For example: conformation bias is the inclination to warp our recollections in such a way as to enforce our point of view; illusory correlation is the inclination to inaccurately connect entirely coincidental occurrences; and cryptomnesia is the inclination to decide that we’ve come up with an idea ourselves when we are in fact drawing on the memory of someone else’s suggestion — many readers may recall working for a boss with a terrible case of cryptomnesia at one point or another. The question is, did that boss exhibit cryptomnesia, or could the bias have actually been your own?

So, How Do Memories Form?

During each experience of our lives, different aspects of the moment — from the sounds we hear and the scents we smell, to the data we take in and the emotions we experience — are stored in many different areas of the brain. We encode all of that incoming information either visually, in the form of an image, acoustically, in the form of a sound, or semantically, in the form of an associated meaning. As an aside to the vast amount of information we encode and store, we also tend to skim over details of any given moment as we get distracted by little things, such as the tag sticking out of the clothing of the person we’re talking to, or thinking about what we’re going to have for lunch.

The acting master-hub of all of this stored data is our medial temporal lobe which is contains of our amygdala, and our hippocampus. Our understanding of this part of the brain began with Henry Molaison — an American patient who, back in 1953, had a substantial part of this area removed in an effort to cure his severe epilepsy. While the extreme surgical damage to his hippocampus did indeed cure his seizures, it impeded his ability to recall and form new memories.

A Data Hub For The Brain

Thanks to the science that began with Henry, we now know that the hippocampus serves an invaluable role in piecing together all of the various chunks of information our brain stores, and that the role of the amygdala in this instance is to do with emotion. The more emotionally or viscerally relevant an experience, the more our amygdala fires up our hippocampus, making our recall much more vivid and intricate.

This explains the findings that older adults retain a higher number of memories from their late adolescence and early adulthood than later in life, when significant life changes and notable first experiences forged emotionally charged memories. The same older adults also exhibit the positivity effect bias, meaning that we are all more inclined to hold onto positive memories in the longer term — like remembering when sparks first flew in a new romance, while forgetting an embarrassing moment with an old crush!

The Untapped Potential Of The Mind

Competitors at the World Memory Championship perform incredible feats such as memorising hundreds of numbers, images and words in sequence. These memory sports competitors may appear to achieve the impossible, but they use some nifty tricks and know-how to achieve these mind blowing examples of memory retention with relatively normal brain matter. Our ability to accurately record information can be revved up by knowing that connecting what we want to remember with an emotion, a location or a story will improve our ability to retrieve it. Flexing our memory muscles also strengthens our ability to apply it, as was discovered in a study of London cab drives, whose hippocampi actually grew as they undertook the discipline of memorising all 25,000 of London’s sprawling city streets.

Using mnemonics, such as creating a story to tie together items on a list can offer a powerful assist. Remembering the sequence “dog”, “banana”, “shoe”, and “police man” might seem challenging until we visualise a smartly dressed dog slipping on a banana, only to have his shoe fly off and hit the head of a police man! Memory masters also draw on a concept referred to as the memory palace. This doesn’t have to be as glamorous as it sounds, as the basic premise is that by constructing sequential associations within a the imagined form of familiar environment, which might be our favourite theme park or our home town, we are more likely to retain that specific memory.

It is also useful to know that memories associated with our current state are more accessible. When experiencing something sad, we are primed to access other sad memories, and when experiencing something happy, we are able to draw up positive memories more effectively. This also appears to be the case in relation to our hormonal state. The environment within our body — be it flush with stress hormones or awash with serotonin and dopamine after a vigorous hike with someone we care about — impacts our ability to draw stored memories to mind.

Why The Limitations?

We begin to trace the fallibility of our memories when we realise that the same regions of our brain fire both when we recall moments from our past, and when we think about something entirely imaginary. Our brains perform these two tasks in parallel, and intertwine the two in such a way that we are unlikely to register. As we gain new experiences and insights our brain re-analyses stored data, and each time we recall a memory, it will likely evolve into something slightly — or entirely — new as we splice in connected bits and pieces from other memories, or even a TV show we watched during a bout of insomnia.

This sounds like a major flaw in our wiring. How can we trust ourselves to make strong life decisions when our ability to recollect is so patchy? During her study of memory, neuroscientist Donna Rose Addis identified that this neural plasticity helps us out in a specific way. Our brain’s capacity to mash together memory and imaginings allows us to trouble-shoot our futures, by playing out and testing scenarios in our minds in preparation for taking on our next adventure.

Improving Our Memories, While Knowing Our Limits

Recognising that our memories are not a high fidelity record of our past, but more of a self-made mix-tape of evolving recollections is hugely valuable when it comes to forging a path towards personal and financial advancement. We can use this knowledge to our advantage by acting to reinforce and protect our memories by practising self-care in the form of adequate sleep, nutrition and limited alcohol intake. We can also vastly improve our memory through meditation and active stimulation. As we do this we would also be wise to acknowledge the way our minds work with the goal of making better life decisions.

When it comes to our own consciousness, knowing that human recall, and thus decision making, can be launched from foundations of unknown origin makes the rise of applied Artificial Intelligence an exciting prospect, as we use machine learning to circumnavigate human error. This is a fundamental for the GRAYLL team, working to launch an A.I. driven App that will facilitate digital investments for any user, regardless of their financial means or understanding of trading and digital asset investing.

For the memory-buff, the new generation of digital investment’s Blockchain systems and Distributed Ledger Technologies hold great appeal because of the immutable and transparent way that transactions are recorded. So, perhaps a balance lies ready to be struck between using modern technologies to side-step our limitations, and free-up our time to focus on applying our minds to the valuable experiences of our lives. After all, the positive memories that we create are the ones that will truly stay with us in the end.

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