Everyday Illusions #2: The Illusion of Memory
Your most vivid memories are probably all wrong
Hello readers,
In the first article of this series, we covered The Illusion of Attention and how it messes our life up in completely unknown ways.
Today, let’s turn our attention to the illusion of memory. But first, here’s a quick test.
Read through the following list of words: bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, wake, snooze, blanket, doze, slumber, snore, nap, peace, yawn drowsy.
Try to remember them, okay? (No pressure, though). We’ll get back to them in a bit, after this amusing story.
There was this guy called Walsch who heard a moving story about something that happened to Chand’s son Nicholas. Now that story was juicy as hell and had a deep impact on our dear protagonist.
So he did what we all do when we hear a good, old story- spread the shit out of it. He noted it down in his personal diary and told his friends and acquaintances about it. He recited it over and over again. It became his hit story- the one that makes you look cool at parties and diverts attention away from your receding hairline.
Walsch became so good (and regular) at reciting this tale that over time, he internalized it as his own memory. Years later, he even published it on a website as his own.
But critics are critics- it was soon pointed out that this was, in fact, based on someone else’s experience and Walsch was blasted for engaging in blatant plagiarism. And when Walsch finally confronted the truth, he was shocked.
Shocked at this dirty little trick played on him by his own mind. He hadn’t intentionally copied it- he genuinely believed that it was based on his own, personal experience!
Now you may dismiss Walsch as a 107-year-old guy who needs to be at a psychiatric hospital but if you do so, even you’re in for a surprise. There was nothing wrong with Walsch. The poor guy just experienced what scientists have found to be the illusion of memory. And he’s not alone- all of our brains are riddled with this defect and careful observation will reveal that we fall for it almost every day!
Okay, back to the task we started with. How many words can you recall from the list mentioned at the beginning? Try writing down the words you can remember. How did you do?
Well, any average person would realize that we can’t even recall a bunch of words we read a moment ago. We may recall some words from the beginning and the end of the list but not much more. But here’s the interesting bit.
Does ‘sleep’ occur in the list of words you could recollect? If yes, you have just observed yourself succumbing to the memory of illusion. In experiments, about 40% of people write down this word and many even have a distinct recollection of seeing it in
the list- but the word isn’t there on the list!
So that’s what the illusion is all about- the way we remember things and create memories. Memory depends both on what happened and how we made sense of it- and the list you read was designed to produce this type of false memory.
When we read such a list, our brain immediately makes a connection and notices that these are all sleep-related words, but it doesn’t notice the fact the word itself is NOT on the list. But then when we recall the words, our brains reconstruct the list as best as they can, based both on our specific memory and our knowledge of the logic/context of the word group- which results in the false recollection.
This is an evolutionary mechanism. Brains have evolved to extract meanings from our sense data and remember them- it’d be a massive drain on energy to remember every exact detail of all sensory inputs. We’re good at remembering the contexts, but not the exact content.
This is the core insight behind the illusion- our memories are not like a camera (or a blockchain) and they don’t record all data points in a permanent, tamper-proof manner. They’re more like a rewritable CD, where newer memories keep writing on top of old ones as our recollections become distorted over time and further from what actually happened.
In fact, this applies even more strongly to our most vivid and clear memories. We feel that even if our everyday memories are distorted, our recollections of some big events (like how we felt during an accident, upon the birth of our child, or during our first kiss) are accurate. But even our most vivid memories are highly distorted.
Here are a bunch of even more fascinating examples to show this illusion in action:
George Bush said he saw the first plane crash of 9/11 on the TV but there was never any video footage of that crash. He actually heard about the second crash from someone and had been watching the news moments before so it’s likely his memory mixed those things up
We can’t even tell if the person standing in front of us has changed within the span of a minute, as illustrated in this eye-opening video demonstration
A day after the Space Shuttle Challenger crashed, participants in an experiment were asked to write down what they were doing when they heard this news. 2 years later, they were asked the same question again and they confidently recalled things that didn’t match with what they had written at all! When they were shown their own writings, they were shocked and continued to believe their (edited) memories!
That’s the power of our memories- they can trick us into believing shit that never happened! While it’s a blessing that we have the power to remember things, we must also be wary of this illusion. So what are some action points based on what we’ve just learned?
Writing is the one of the best ways to create a record of what actually happened instead of naively believing that we’ll ‘recall’ things later. If you want to remember what life was like in 2022, you better start journaling or there’s a good chance that the memories you tell your kids or grandkids about a few decades later will be quite distorted
It’s best to harbor a certain degree of skepticism when it comes to the truth of what you can recollect, especially when you’re basing any of your decisions on the things you remember. This applies to both your own and other people’s memories- they’re all hotbeds of distortion
Let the sobering data inculcate an added sense of humility in our everyday life!
I hope you accurately remember what you’ve learned today!
(This article is based on a nice, little book called ‘The Invisible Gorilla’)
Experiments have also shown that subscribers of this newsletter can remember shit from their previous lives too. So do the right thing.