Relationships February 13, 2017
Memories are the tape and glue that hold us together. They’re our earliest images of ourselves and the people around us. It’s the sound of laughter from your childhood, playing with your siblings on a swing set. It’s the smell of your grandma’s homemade pie. It’s what makes you, you.
But at what age do we start to remember our earliest memories? How reliable is our memory at all? And why is it important to realize that our memory isn’t perfect? ENTITY recently chatted with Dr. Daniel Schacter, Harvard professor of psychology and author of “The Seven Sins of Memory,” and Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, memory expert and professor of Social Ecology, Law and Cognitive Science at UC Irvine, to find out just how accurate your autobiographical memory really is.
Memory is defined as the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information, something remembered from the past, or a recollection. Science says that children begin to develop memory around nine months old, when a child is becomes unwilling to leave a parent; they are missing their mother’s eyes. However, psychology researcher Conor Liston argues that “memories recalled from the first or second year of life are probably not reliable” because children at this age don’t have the tools to describe those memories, an essential part of remembering something correctly.
According to Dr. Schacter and Dr. Loftus, age can affect the validity of one’s memories for even more reasons than a toddler’s lack of words. “Young children are even more susceptible to contamination from misinformation [than other people],” says Dr. Loftus. However, Dr. Schacter points out that the impact of one’s age depends on the memory. In some cases, age plays a big role in the distortion; in other, you remember your favorite childhood toy just fine!
There are three stages that memory goes through, starting at around nine months. The first stage is primitive memories. This is simply sights and sounds that infant and toddlers experience in their daily life, like their mother’s eyes and voice. The second stage is semantic memory, or the accumulation of general knowledge – concepts and language – or emotional memory. The final stage is absorbed memories. These are episodic or autobiographical memories or recollections of personal experiences.
There is also a period of life that is referred to by psychologists as childhood amnesia. This is the memory loss of the infant years due to the unsophisticated neural technology needed to form and hold onto more complex forms of memory. Think of childhood amnesia like this: because a child’s brain is not fully developed, there are large holes trying to retain little pieces of memory. That means that the little pieces of memory slip through the large holes because there’s nothing there to prevent them from leaving.
So, when you say you really can’t remember screaming for your pacifier every two hours as a baby, you’re telling the truth – and your parents have nobody but your brain to blame.
So, you’ve learned that memories from your childhood might get lost in transit and disappear. But what about the memories you do have – how accurate are they?
First of all, the earliest memories you remember are probably ones with strong (positive or negative) emotions. But even though it may feel like you can close your eyes and see exactly what happened, there are actually a variety of ways that your memory can be distorted. Let’s say that you remember breaking your arm from falling off the neighborhood jungle gym. Those two events might have really happened, but you could’ve actually broken your arm by tripping during a soccer game and have fallen at the playground another day. This is an example of what Dr. Schacter would call “misattribution.”
That’s not the only way that details of your memory could be fudged, either. According to Dr. Schacter, people can also experience “suggestibility,” where a suggestion of some event causes them to unknowingly construct a false memory, and “bias,” in which your own values or beliefs distort your understanding of what happened in the past. So, when your Aunt Sue and Uncle Charlie both say the other one burned the Thanksgiving turkey five years ago…they aren’t lying. They both might actually “remember” their version of the events!
The fact is, memory distortion is an innate part of human nature. In fact, studies have even found that people with “highly superior autobiographical memory” (basically, people who have memory superpowers) can be susceptible to false memories. Crazy as it sounds, animals aren’t immune either, with scientists first implanting false memories in mice back in 2013.
All of this goes to show that, as Dr. Loftus explains, “Many people think memory works like a recording device: you store it like a video recorder and play it back. But it works more like a Wikipedia page – you can go in there and edit it, but so can other people.”
So, how can you tell if a memory is real or made up? And what good is memory anyway if we can’t trust our own minds?
First off, Dr. Loftus says that, when you’re trying to tell a real memory from a fake one, it’s nearly impossible. “False memories, like true ones, can be detailed, emotional and expressed with confidence,” she explains. “And even neuro-imaging has failed to reliably discriminate false from true memories.” Dr. Loftus discovered the believability of false memories first-hand during a 2010 study with her colleague, Jacqueline Pickrell. They provided study participants written accounts of four events, three of which the subjects had actually experienced. The fourth – a story about being lost in the mall around age three or four – was fake. However, one third of the subjects still reported remembering the false event. Even after two follow-up interviews, 25 percent still vividly “remembered” the false story.
Unfortunately, these made-up memories can have dangerous effects, like accusations against innocent people. In fact, as of 2014, eyewitness misidentification contributed to 72 percent of the 318 wrongful convictions lated negated by DNA evidence, according to the Innocence Project. As a result, Dr. Schacter says, “We need to realize that memories need to be carefully scrutinized and matched against objective evidence when possible, especially in legal settings.”
Before you start railing at your faulty memory, however, consider this: memory is not intended to solely be a mental recording of your life. “A lot of recent research in my lab and others indicates that memory plays an important role in allowing us to imagine future experiences,” says Dr. Schacter. “We think that a key function of memory is to allow us to use stored information to think ahead to what might happen in the future and construct plans to deal with the future based on our past experiences.”
So, maybe humans weren’t meant to have a perfect autobiographical memory in the first place. Maybe, instead, they were supposed to use their own versions of the past to craft a better future.
Your first memory is like a cognitive birthday. It’s the first day that you exist on your own, as your own entity, and it is entirely yours. As D. Ewen Cameron once said, “Intelligence may be the pride-towering distinction of man; emotion gives color and force to his actions; but memory is the bastion of his being. Without memory, there is no personal identity, there is no continuity to the days of his life. Memory provides the raw materials for designs both small and great. Thus, governed and enriched by memory, all the enterprises of man go forward.”
And, true, your memory may not be perfect. In fact, some of your memories may not even be “real.” However, the lessons you learned from them and the emotions they triggered in you are real…and they can be real secret weapons to helping you plan – and experience – a better future, one (new) memory at a time.
