Remember to Not Remember
Remember to Not Remember
I love thoughts. Honestly, who doesn’t? The one thing that bothers me is that I have too many, too fast to record them all. My mind works faster than my typing speed. Please note that the previous sentence is more of a callout to my abysmally low typing speed than a flex of the former. So, one of the first things I wanted to invent as a kid was a device that somehow records all our thoughts. Knowing the dystopian landscape today, notions like intrusive thoughts that shouldn’t ever be public plus some concerns about data privacy if such a device existed come to mind. Reflecting on this thought did make me want to learn more about how exactly I record stuff in my mind subconsciously. Basically, how memories work and why we keep some while forgetting others. I didn’t find answers, but I did find something I would have been better off without knowing, but since I know it now, you must too.
TL;DR: Our memory is pretty unreliable.
First off, almost all human interactions are about storytelling. Stories are recited from memory. In fact, even our identity as people depends on the things we remember and choose to associate with as a consequence. So you should be pretty worried about this. The best way I found to explain this on the internet is the telephone game, also known as Chinese whispers where I come from. The basic idea is that a single sentence is recited to a person who relays it to the next one. Once everyone’s communicated, the last person in the circle recites what they heard. The game is just a good way to show how details can get messed up in the process of relaying information. A practical example of this is the retelling of history through biased lenses, showing how unreliable second- and third-hand sources are.
Life is just a large-scale model of the telephone game, where people relay each others’ stories to other people. It gets even more interesting when the same person narrates the same story differently every time depending on the context. There’s nothing wrong with it per se, except for the fact that the tiny details they keep changing have a long-term effect on the way they remember the particular story as a memory. To grossly oversimplify, if you lie to yourself enough, it might as well be recorded and recollected as truth in the future. (I was screaming with joy seeing my life’s motto “fake it till you make it” be academically validated.) Formally, the difference in narration of stories depending on context causing long-term effects on memories is called “the audience-tuning effect”.
It gets worse. Recollection of memories alters them as well. The context under which you try to recollect a specific memory adds a new layer of blurriness to said memory. Depending on how, when and why you’re accessing what memory, it changes. Not all at once of course, it changes bit by bit. This is formally called “retrieval-enhanced suggestibility”. I was reading about the controlled experiments conducted to reach the above conclusion, and something weird came up. People who took practice memory tests before receiving false information were more likely to bring the false information up in the final test. Too much to wrap your head around? Honestly, me too. However, as a good journalist, allow me to sum up everything in decipherable analogies in the following paragraph.
Storing memories is like storing ice cream in the refrigerator. You can take it out to eat some, but remember that even if you don’t, the ice cream you keep will never be the same. Some parts of it melted away and refroze differently, and there’s essentially nothing you can do about it except maybe never take it out? But let’s be honest, it’s impossible to live without ice cream. Memories, I mean. Of course I meant memories.
Recollecting memories is equivalent to recording things on a cassette. When you access an old memory, there’s a new recording created of you playing an old recording. The noise will always find its way in, eventually. The next time you access the same one, you’d involuntarily be accessing a tape of you accessing it, not the original recording.
So in conclusion, the only way to keep your memories safe and authentic is to never speak or think of them. Or if you’re feeling optimistic, go create as many memories as it takes to make sure the altered details of your narration would be true anyway.
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https://theconversation.com/are-memories-reliable-expert-explains-how-they-change-more-than-
we-realise-106461
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2wf33UFl56o0sh6FAnGDvv?si=_wD2eQR5SpCV553yM1TXC
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