Study: Memory Cannot Be Trusted To Recall Past Events

A study determined that new versions of events cause emotions that modify what we remember.

Human memory has an editor that does not rest: every time we revisit an experience from the past, we add fragments of the present. “We change the film,” has concluded a study published Wednesday in the Journal of Neuroscience.

New versions of the events edited by our memory cause new emotions that modify what we thought had happened, so that, as far as what we recollect is concerned, there is no “original story”.

One example is what is remembered as love at first sight, researchers say.

“When someone remembers the moment when they met their partners, for example, the memory may be full of love and euphoria,” said the study’s lead author, Donna Jo Bridge, from the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University.

“But it may well be that the person is projecting current feelings about what he/she remembers of such encounter as opposed to being what is recalled,” she added.

This is the first study to show specifically how memory is a weak witness and how you can insert elements from the present in the memories of the past when you revisit them.

The study shows the exact point in time when the information retrieved incorrectly is implanted into an existing memory.

It is a survival mechanism, according to Bridge. Memories adapt to a constantly changing context and that helps us deal with what is important at this time.

“Memory is not like a video camera ,” she added. “No one can go back and see what happened as it happened, but what observation has found is that memory is reconstituted and that a story is edited so that it fits the present reality.”

According to researchers, this issue occurs in the hippocampus of the brain, which works as an editor and “special effects guy”.

For their study the scientists took seventeen men and women who found 168 images of objects in different parts of the computer screen with varied backgrounds such as an underwater scene or an aerial view of farmland.

Then participants were asked to place the object in the original location but on a new background. The participants placed objects always in the wrong place.

For the final part of the study, participants were shown the object in three sites of the original screen and were asked to choose the correct one. Their choices were: the location where they originally saw the object, the location where they placed it in the second part of the study, or an entirely new location.

“People always chose the site that they had chosen in the second part of the experiment,” Bridge said.

“This shows that the original memory location has changed to reflect the location they remembered about the new background screen. Their memory information was updated by inserting new information into the old memory.”

The other study author Joel Voss added that the notion of a perfect memory is a myth.

“We all want to believe that memory is what allows us to remember vividly our childhood or what we did last week,” he said.

“But memory is designed to help us make good decisions in the present moment and, therefore, it has to be updated,” he added . “The information that is relevant can now dismiss what was there before.”

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Luis R. Miranda is the Founder and Editor of The Real Agenda. His 16 years of experience in Journalism include television, radio, print and Internet news. Luis obtained his Journalism degree from Universidad Latina de Costa Rica, where he graduated in Mass Media Communication in 1998. He also holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Broadcasting from Montclair State University in New Jersey. Among his most distinguished interviews are: Costa Rican President Jose Maria Figueres and James Hansen from NASA Space Goddard Institute. Read more about Luis.

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