NEW YORK TIMES COLUMN: ..To complicate matters further, the content of our memories can easily change over time. Nearly a century ago, the psychologist Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett conducted a series of experiments that mimicked the “telephone” game, in which you whisper a message to the person next to you, who then passes it along to the person next to them, and so on. Over repeated tellings, the story becomes distorted, with some elements remaining, others vanishing, and entirely new details appearing.
When we recall our own memories, we are not extracting a perfect record of our experiences and playing it back verbatim. Most people believe that memory works this way, but it doesn’t. Instead, we are effectively whispering a message from our past to our present, reconstructing it on the fly each time. We get a lot of details right, but when our memories change, we only “hear” the most recent version of the message, and we may assume that what we believe now is what we always believed. Studies find that even our “flashbulb memories” of emotionally charged events can be distorted and inaccurate, but we cling to them with the greatest of confidence.
With each retrieval our memories can morph, and so can our confidence in them. This is why the National Academy of Sciences report strongly advised courts to rely on initial statements rather than courtroom proclamations: A witness who only tentatively identifies a suspect in a police station lineup can later claim — sincerely — to be absolutely certain that the defendant in the courtroom committed the crime. In fact, the mere act of describing a person’s appearance can change how likely you are to pick him out of a lineup later. This finding, known as “verbal overshadowing,” had been controversial, but was recently verified in a collective effort by more than 30 separate research labs… (more)
EDITOR: One of the worse things about divorce is you no longer have someone to share and correct your memories.
