Memory and Mistakes

"Honore:
We met at nine
Grandmama:
We met at eight
Honore:
I was on time
Grandmama:
No, you were late
Honore:
Ah yes, I remember it well"

In the 1958 film, Gigi, there is an endearing song between Honore, played by Maurice Chevalier, and Grandmama, played by Hermione Gingold.  Recalling the love affair of their youth, they trade memories, which starkly contrast.  They are not alone.  In life, we encounter memory difficulties and mistakes frequently.   We forget details of events and sometimes the events themselves. More often, we disagree with people about the details of an event or something we both previously heard or read.  Our memories differ on who said and did what to whom or what led to an argument we are having.  Children, co-workers, and friends remember things differently.  In national and international affairs, memories of events, their causes and effects sometimes differ dramatically enough to cause tense if not dangerous situations.  Just ask people in the North and South today, over 150 years after it ended, whether the Civil War was about states' rights or slavery, when statues to Southern generals were constructed, and why.

What - and how - we remember is a physical and psychological process fraught with difficulty.

Theoretically, our brains could store the details of every encounter.  University of Virginia psychologist Tim Wilson estimates that we can take in 11 million pieces of information at a given moment.  But remembering all of it would take huge amounts of energy.  It would clog our neural circuits, interfering with the ability to do other essential tasks.  Instead, we retain only about 40 of those pieces of information.  That may be one reason faulty eyewitness  identification is the leading cause of the reversal of convictions.

Indeed, our brains actively forget. Some researchers posit that new neurons overwrite old ones, weakening the connections that form memories.  Others suggest we may even have "forgetting cells" that remove less useful information. 

Much forgetting happens during sleep, where memories initially stored in the hippocampus get stored for long-term use in the prefrontal cortex, clearing out the former to store new memories when we awaken.  Yet those in the prefrontal cortex are often the "gist" of the initial memories, not exact reproductions.  The gist may even contain information not in the initial memory.  For example, subjects asked to look at a drawing of a bathroom report objects on recall - such as a scale and a sink - that were never in the drawing but fit the gist of "bathroom" that they carry in their brains.

Research suggests that memories of traumatic events may be better because of the strong emotion associated with forming them.  But even here, error enters.  In a classic experiment by Eric Neisser and Nicole Harsch, participants were asked to describe their recollection of the loss of the Challenger space shuttle in January 1986.  Their account the day of the explosion was compared to their account two-and-a-half years later. Twenty-five percent were wrong in every detail when the later "memory" was compared to the initial one.  Fifty percent were wrong in two-thirds of the details. Yet their confidence that the two-and-a-half year-old memory was correct was 4.17 on a five-point scale.  Not only was their memory faulty, but they could not accept that it was. 

Psychology drives memory too.  We may not want to remember - or admit that we forgot.  Research by Francesco Gino at Harvard suggests forgetting can be motivated by a desire to maintain our self-image, such as when we forget ethical lapses in ourselves but not others. Such "motivated forgetting" can also be caused by cognitive dissonance, our tendency to forget things that would force us to see the disconnect between what we think and what was actually the case.

Thankfully, our faulty memory does not always matter.  But when it does, there are ways to compensate.  Openness to error is a big first step, though a step not always taken.  Humility rather than hubris helps, as is a candid acknowledgement of one's motives in remembering correctly or forgetting.  The search for diverse and corroborating (or disconfirming) data and memories of the same events can help lessen certainty and correct error.   When accuracy of later recollection may be important (admittedly, this is often hard to forecast), writing or recording the details of an event immediately after it occurs is useful.

Forgetting  is not a bad thing.  Indeed, it is human and necessary.  Yet acting as if we always remember accurately is self-delusional and dangerous to our ability to form trusting and healthy relationships and to the decisions we make.  When we fail to appreciate the mistakes memory can make in national and international affairs, the stakes of overconfidence in our memory escalate.

Photo Credit: Tara Schmidt