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[Title from article]

Memory recollection and people's belief in their memory recollection fascinates me beyond words...

When the psychologists rated the accuracy of the students’ recollections for things like where they were and what they were doing, the average student scored less than three on a scale of seven. A quarter scored zero. But when the students were asked about their confidence levels, with five being the highest, they averaged 4.17. Their memories were vivid, clear—and wrong. There was no relationship at all between confidence and accuracy.

The strength of the central memory seems to make us confident of all of the details when we should only be confident of a few. Because the shock or other negative emotion helps us to remember the animal (or the explosion), we think we also remember the color (or the call to our parents). “You just feel you know it better,” Phelps says. “And even when we tell them they’re mistaken people still don’t buy it.”

Our misplaced confidence in recalling dramatic events is troubling when we need to rely on a memory for something important—evidence in court, for instance. For now, juries tend to trust the confident witness: she knows what she saw. But that may be changing. Phelps was recently asked to sit on a committee for the National Academy of Sciences to make recommendations about eyewitness testimony in trials. After reviewing the evidence, the committee made several concrete suggestions to changes in current procedures, including “blinded” eyewitness identification (that is, the person showing potential suspects to the witness shouldn’t know which suspect the witness is looking at at any given moment, to avoid giving subconscious cues), standardized instructions to witnesses, along with extensive police training in vision and memory research as it relates to eyewitness testimony, videotaped identification, expert testimony early on in trials about the issues surrounding eyewitness reliability, and early and clear jury instruction on any prior identifications (when and how prior suspects were identified, how confident the witness was at first, and the like). If the committee’s conclusions are taken up, the way memory is treated may, over time, change from something unshakeable to something much less valuable to a case. “Something that is incredibly adaptive normally may not be adaptive somewhere like the courtroom,” Davachi says. “The goal of memory isn’t to keep the details. It’s to be able to generalize from what you know so that you are more confident in acting on it.” You run away from the dog that looks like the one that bit you, rather than standing around questioning how accurate your recall is.

“The implications for trusting our memories, and getting others to trust them, are huge,” Phelps says. “The more we learn about emotional memory, the more we realize that we can never say what someone will or won’t remember given a particular set of circumstances.” The best we can do, she says, is to err on the side of caution: unless we are talking about the most central part of the recollection, assume that our confidence is misplaced. More often than not, it is.

Lovely long article worth reading: http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria- ... collection





I accept that my memory is skewed by my emotions and my experiences!! I would doubt my abilities to be a good juror and I would cringe to be called as a witness... :/


How's your memory? Are you confident in your ability to recall memories accurately?

My memory for key events is fine, otherwise foggy. My emotions don't tie into my factual memories at all but obviously if I am recalling something like a favorite game or something then I may look back upon a broken, glitched, or otherwise bad game (or game with bad aspects) more fondly (biased, I guess?) than I should.

Whenever I try to explain to people that their memories can be wrong, and they don't understand how that could be, I quote the movie Memento.

"Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts."

I really only remember abstracts well. I remember locations. I don't necessarily remember exact things.

People tend to think of memory as a mental tape recorder, but it's not. Memory is a huge, complex and unfortunately fallible process of reconstructing the past based on a small amount of recollected details.

That being said, I have a pretty foggy short-term memory, though apparently I'm pretty good at remembering details related to certain important people in my life.

Never thought of memory as completely infallible, but I'm not one to bend if I saw one thing and someone says something else happened. I think it's reliable.

I tend to know when I've forgotten something. Like, if you asked me what I had for dinner 2 weeks ago, or what street I parked on last month, I forgot. I don't make up details that I don't have a reason to be sure of.

And remember, "I'm-a Luigi, number one!"

If I care about something, I almost never forget it. If I don't, I retain vague memories at best.

It's great for my own purposes (especially school), but I don't know how I'd be as a witness since a lot of background details fall into the "don't care" category. I had jury duty a year ago and can still recall most of what was said in the trial and during recesses, but I wouldn't bet a penny on being able to pick anyone who was there out of a lineup.

There are some people who have the unique ability to recall every single event of their lives - much like a continuous movie reel that you're able to rewind at any moment. They can do crazy stuff like draw everything they saw down to the teeth or recall a combination of numbers from like 1990 or whatever. Some of us normal people are all like "That's so cool!" It's kind of not. We're not meant to do that. A lot of these people get depressed from remembering EVERYTHING. Or it just bothers them and tasks their brain. I mean, can you imagine remembering everything? That'd be a serious emotional overload. Emotion is so tightly wound to memory. Memory works in fragments - we remember what we care about and what's important. It doesn't act like a movie reel but more like a filing cabinet. We may not recall things off the top of our heads but when we see a movie ticket stub or hear a song we snap our fingers and go, "Oh, right! I remember that night now!"

Memory is also very scary. It's so impressionable. I work with older people at my job and their memory sucks balls. I can mess with them anyway I can. It's sad but scary. I've been told for years that I have a fantastic memory, so at least I have some comfort in objective evidence that what I remember is true (possibly). I started writing down my dreams and writing down a lot of stuff every day so I could test my memory by going back. I also LOVE to exercise my short term memory. I do this by trying to recall random license plate numbers when I drive. When I go to the gym I run first on the treadmill but don't enter my time and distance in my account until I leave. So I'm walking around working out thinking like "30 minutes 45 seconds, 3.15 miles. 30 minutes 45 seconds, 3.15 miles". It's interesting to be aware of the difference between short term and long term memory. I've recalled hundreds of those numbers and yet I cannot tell you a single exact time and distance I performed once. Once I entered them in my account I was like "Okay, done. Don't need to remember this anymore." And poof. Like magic, I could never remember them anymore.

You know the whole Superman/Clark Kent thing? We're all like "That's so dumb. How can you not see that Clark Kent is Superman?" Well, er, actually, that can very much happen. Lois Lane at least should be able to realize it but everyone else? A lot of us can walk by famous people and never make a connection until it has to be read out loud to us. We might just vaguely say "Oh, he looks like so-and-so" but that's about it. I unexpectedly tested this one day with an unsavory character I know. I unfortunately had to keep a connection with him becuase it was one of those I-owe-you-and-you-owe-me-or-else-we'll-send-people-after-one-another kind of things. But this guy was pretty crazy. One day I went to a fair with my mom and I saw this unsavory fellow in the crowd waiting with us for the fair to open. I was immediately like "Oh, God. Oh, God." I'm here with my mom and this guy is really unpredictable and my mom has no idea I know this guy and the stuff we've done. So I just stood idly, completely ignoring him. He noticed me and said my name a couple times but I just poker-faced and didn't respond. I was clean shaven and had sunglasses then. The other thing is we hadn't seen each other in a year. I betted that his memory would make him doubt. And it worked. Just because I was clean shaven, had sunglasses and didn't respond to him he eventually left (and was actually patted down by the cops because he looked like a really creepy hobo who had stuff on him I guess). Fast-forward a couple months later, I had to see him again. I didn't wear sunglasses and had only some light scruff. He was completely unaware of any connection. And trust me, he would have FLIPPED if he realized I ignored him.

But moral of the story is - stooopid disguises totally work. All it takes is a little behavioral change and you can make someone totally believe you are someone else. Granted, you can't fool your good friends and this wasn't a guy I hung out with on a regular basis, but you know - acquaintences and starngers at least. It's not a huge plot hole in movies where people don't recognize others just because of a couple changes and a lenghtly amount of time. Would Obi-wan really remember R2-D2? Maybe, but most likely not. After 20 freaking years, he'd mix it up with a dozen other astromech droid serial numbers, and R2 wasn't a big part of his life unlike Anakin. He had more important things to remember.

The really scary thing is that you, in reality, can just go on a killing spree, flee and hide, and just make some minor adjustments to how you look and walk out in public again acting different - and nobody would know. Even security camera footage wouldn't make it obvious - as video is something very tasking to archive and so the quality is practically crap anyway. Eye-witness accounts can be really sketchy. I took a couple psychology courses and we went over an experience at a college where an actor burst into a classroom pretending to be a thief and stole the teacher's purse or whatever. The police then asked all the students to describe the thief and everyone was scattered on details. Blond hair. No, black hair. He had a jacket. No, he didn't have a jacket. That's another thing too though - the enviornment. We're much less likely to remember things under stressful situations.