Memory is a liar. It feels when you’re accessing it like it is reliable. It is not. Eyewitness testimony frequently has people who adamantly remember stuff that didn’t happen. They tried it with those famous events where people always remember where they were when so-and-so happened. They got a population of people, found out where they were when the shocking world event had happened, and then they asked them a long time later and a lot of people’s vivid memories of where they were, were just bullshit their brain made up for them.
You can actually create false memories in people that will feel completely real, if you know how to do it, and they’ll remember both the process of you implanting the false memory, and then this fake memory that they 100% remember as if it had happened.
The brain just stores hints and mostly-important stuff, and for the rest it just makes shit up as it goes along so you can get on with your day and won’t become upset because you don’t remember. But it’s like an LLM. It just makes up nonsense if it doesn’t know the answer, and to you it feels 100% real.
Yep. Memory is really silly. It’s why journaling is important. But journaling itself can be deceiving if one isn’t recording truths or is leaving out critical components.
I often wonder what the world would become if we had technology that auto journaled and was immutable. Would we be still so easily be led astray or would we contort ourselves in some other way to cling to our biases and cognitive distortions.
There was a whole “satanic panic” and a slew of “ritual child abuse” a few decades ago that was (almost?) entirely based on false memories caused by poor questioning.
People who vividly remember being taken to non-existent places and abused, while they were demonstrably elsewhere. And other people going to jail for it.
All correct, lots of interesting psychology articles on this and even a documentary about it iirc (like implanting getting lost in a mall as a child.) I teach confirmation bias in one of my classes and some of it is also just misremembering things to fit a narrative you want to believe.
What’s funny to me while I learned about it is that I don’t seem to do this fill-in-the-gaps misremembering stuff. I just don’t remember shit. What I do remember is vague and undetailed, though, and kind of easy to prove in the sense that vague memories could be all sorts of things (like crying but not remembering why). It’s like all a blur until college, lol.
My guess is my shitty childhood was traumatic, or I’m neurologically atypical (and given how weird I am, probably both). It doesn’t help I get conflicting stories from parents though.
now that you mention it, i am similar to you; i cannot remember shit. i remember singular moments that are burned in, and the rest is like i watched a movie at 10x speed, like a smear. my childhood was traumatic too. my memories get clearer at about 21, but it’s still just singular moments and the rest is mud.
Memory is a liar. It feels when you’re accessing it like it is reliable. It is not. Eyewitness testimony frequently has people who adamantly remember stuff that didn’t happen. They tried it with those famous events where people always remember where they were when so-and-so happened. They got a population of people, found out where they were when the shocking world event had happened, and then they asked them a long time later and a lot of people’s vivid memories of where they were, were just bullshit their brain made up for them.
You can actually create false memories in people that will feel completely real, if you know how to do it, and they’ll remember both the process of you implanting the false memory, and then this fake memory that they 100% remember as if it had happened.
The brain just stores hints and mostly-important stuff, and for the rest it just makes shit up as it goes along so you can get on with your day and won’t become upset because you don’t remember. But it’s like an LLM. It just makes up nonsense if it doesn’t know the answer, and to you it feels 100% real.
Yep. Memory is really silly. It’s why journaling is important. But journaling itself can be deceiving if one isn’t recording truths or is leaving out critical components.
I often wonder what the world would become if we had technology that auto journaled and was immutable. Would we be still so easily be led astray or would we contort ourselves in some other way to cling to our biases and cognitive distortions.
There was a whole “satanic panic” and a slew of “ritual child abuse” a few decades ago that was (almost?) entirely based on false memories caused by poor questioning.
People who vividly remember being taken to non-existent places and abused, while they were demonstrably elsewhere. And other people going to jail for it.
What if they only have false memories of being imprisoned due to the Satanic Panic though?
All correct, lots of interesting psychology articles on this and even a documentary about it iirc (like implanting getting lost in a mall as a child.) I teach confirmation bias in one of my classes and some of it is also just misremembering things to fit a narrative you want to believe.
What’s funny to me while I learned about it is that I don’t seem to do this fill-in-the-gaps misremembering stuff. I just don’t remember shit. What I do remember is vague and undetailed, though, and kind of easy to prove in the sense that vague memories could be all sorts of things (like crying but not remembering why). It’s like all a blur until college, lol.
My guess is my shitty childhood was traumatic, or I’m neurologically atypical (and given how weird I am, probably both). It doesn’t help I get conflicting stories from parents though.
now that you mention it, i am similar to you; i cannot remember shit. i remember singular moments that are burned in, and the rest is like i watched a movie at 10x speed, like a smear. my childhood was traumatic too. my memories get clearer at about 21, but it’s still just singular moments and the rest is mud.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNxTGqluur8