Read more: “The grand delusion: Why nothing is as it seems“
I remember it like it was yesterday. It’s a warm and sunny English afternoon and I’m playing outside in the garden. Suddenly a shiny silver aircraft appears in the clear blue sky. My mother picks me up and points to it; neighbours come out of their houses to watch. The aeroplane is out of Heathrow airport on one of its earliest flights.
I can play this memory over and over in my head as easily as watching a YouTube clip, and yet I know it almost certainly cannot be real. Even though Concorde could have passed over our house on test flights, I only lived there until 1971, when I was barely out of nappies. And Concorde was white, not silver.
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Where does the mismatch between my memory and reality come from? “We’ve known since the 1960s that memory isn’t like a video recording – it’s reconstructive,” says psychologist . The collection of snapshots known as “autobiographical memory” is not a true and accurate record of your past – it is more like a jumble of old diary entries, photographs and newspaper clippings. “Your memory is often based on what you’ve seen in a photograph or stories from parents or siblings rather than what you can actually recall,” says .
In other words, one of the most important components of your self-identity – your autobiographical memory – is little more than an illusion.
If that sounds implausible, consider that over the past three decades psychologists have demonstrated beyond any doubt that memory is staggeringly fallible and suggestible.
Most of the evidence comes from false-memory research, where psychologists deliberately plant fake memories into people’s heads. In one famous experiment, Wade and colleagues used doctored photographs and fake parental testimony to convince people they had been taken on a fictitious hot air balloon ride as a child. In another, pioneering researcher , now at the University of California, Irvine, planted memories of meeting Bugs Bunny at Disneyland – impossible, as Bugs is a Warner Bros character.
The success rate of such flagrant manipulation is only about 30 per cent, but Gallo says that everybody’s memory is susceptible to some extent. “It’s an automatic consequence of how our brains process information,” he says. “You cannot remember everything so your mind summarises and remembers the gist of experiences. You form associations and draw inferences. That gives memory great power, but it comes at a cost.”
It’s one thing to implant memories in a controlled lab setting, but how often does it happen in real life? “We don’t have a firm grasp on that,” says Gallo. “How could you really know, without some measure of what actually happened or some corroborating evidence?” Even so, he says the fact that memory is so easily tricked in the laboratory suggests that it must be in daily life too.
There are a number of lines of evidence that this is the case. Some of the best come from studying “flashbulb” memories of momentous events such as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 or the death of Princess Diana. Many people have a vivid recollection of what they were doing when they heard the news of such events, and are very confident that these memories are accurate. But guess what: these memories turn out to be wrong a surprising amount of the time.
Within days of 9/11, psychologists at the where they were, what they were doing, how they heard the news and who they were with at the time. A year later they asked them again. More than half of the participants had changed their story on at least one count – while still expressing supreme confidence that their memories were accurate.
Flashbulb memory is also highly suggestible. In 2002, psychologists from the University of Portsmouth in the UK went to a local shopping centre and asked people about their memories of the death of Diana, including whether they had seen “the footage” of the actual crash. Nearly half said they had, despite the fact that no footage exists. An even higher percentage of people confidently “remembered” seeing non-existent TV footage of a Boeing 747 crashing in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1992.
If such vivid and confidently held memories can be so riddled with inaccuracy and open to revision, it is probably true that all autobiographical memories are suspect. “I don’t think you can put a figure on it, but I’d be confident that the vast majority are not 100 per cent accurate,” says Wade.
Again, there is evidence that this is the case. When researchers at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand asked twins about their shared childhood, they discovered that most pairs have at least one disputed memory – an event they are both convinced happened to them and not to their twin. Gallo also suggests that spousal arguments, which often revolve around disputed accounts of the same event, is an area ripe for exploration.
It also turns out that my Concorde memory is not that unusual. Last year, Giuliana Mazzoni at the University of Hull in the UK found that 20 per cent of people have autobiographical memories that they do not believe to be true, often because they contradict established fact.
Does it matter that our autobiographical memories are flawed? “In some ways it’s terrifying to think just how spectacularly wrong they might be,” says Wade. “Memories are part of your narrative, part of your self-identity.” There are legal ramifications too. If you witnessed a crime and were asked to give testimony about it in court, how confident would you be of giving an accurate report?
In many other respects, though, it matters not. My memory of seeing Concorde has no material effect on my life. In fact, according to Wade, the illusory quality of memory is now seen as a strength rather than a weakness. Memory is no longer conceived as being exclusively about the past, but as part of a generalised “mental time travel” module that allows us to construct and test future scenarios based on past experience. If memory were inflexible that would not be possible. It seems having a head full of half-truths is the price we pay for being able to see the future.
Read more: “The grand delusion: Why nothing is as it seems“
“The illusory quality of our memories is now seen as a strength rather than a weakness”
