Memory Key Newsletter

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T h e M e m o r y K e y
<http://www.memory-key.com>

Your resource for information about memory and memory improvement

September 2006

http://www.memory-key.com/newsletters/issue_89.htm

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THIS MONTH ON MEMORY-KEY.COM:

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY

URGENTLY WANTED

BLOG

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The e-book on "Remembering intentions" is now $9.95!
Check it out at:
http://www.memory-key.com/shop/intention_ebook.htm

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Find out about my YA novel at:
http://www.fmmcpherson.com/

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AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY

This month I want to talk about the part of your memory that holds your self — autobiographical memory. Autobiographical memory is, unsurprisingly, a complex, interwoven network of several domains, including what is termed ‘self-description’ (information about your personal likes and dislikes, opinions, prejudices, etc), memories of emotional experiences, and memories of events.

It’s worth emphasizing that these are all connected. Not only do events create your personal opinions and affect your emotions, but your emotions and prejudices affect your memory of events. We’ll come back to this point in more detail in a minute.

Your memory for events is, also unsurprisingly, the largest component of autobiographical memory, containing three separate but related domains:

memory for specific events
memory for general events, which tells you the broad sequence of actions in events such as going to the dentist
a potted summary of your life, which enables you to answer such questions as, “Where did you go to school?”, “Where were you working last year?”.

This is also worth emphasizing, because these different types of memory all interact as well. Thus, our memory for specific events not only goes into creating our ‘scripts’ for general events, but our scripts affect our memory for specific events — what we think should have happened influences our memory of what did happen.

All of this is why our memories of what has happened to us are notoriously unreliable. But even knowing this, it’s hard to escape the certainty that we’re right! This is, I think, the hardest thing to truly absorb about memory — the certainty that our memory is accurate is no reliable guide to its actual accuracy.

This is because we judge the accuracy of our memory by how ‘well’ we seem to remember it:

How vivid it is
How detailed it is
How easily it comes to mind

Unfortunately, while these are all good rules of thumb, they are no guarantees of accuracy.

It’s important to realize that our ‘feelings of knowing’ derive solely from calculations based on such heuristics (rules of thumb). The strength of such feelings is simply based on how high the ‘score’ is.

We might also judge a memory by how consistent it is with other memories — which is supremely rational — but this (reflecting no doubt the fact that it is a rational process) seems to be a conscious process, not one that affects the strength of our feelings.

In cases of traumatic experiences, we are also likely to believe in the truthfulness of a memory if we (or someone else) have a strong physical reaction to that memory. Even this, however, cannot be taken as ‘proof’ of a memory — an interesting study involving people who believe they have been abducted by aliens revealed that their physical reactions to such ‘memories’ were identical to their reactions to stressful events that really happened. (Yes, the researchers are assuming that the alien abductions never happened; those who believe such an assumption is unwarranted might like to read my blog entry about sleep paralysis, at http://www.memory-key.com/blog_archive/2005_07_10_archive.html ).

All this perhaps explains why hypnosis doesn't appear to help people recall events more accurately, but does tend to make people more confident of their inaccurate memories.

The point is that our event memories and our emotions are tied up together and interact in ways that are not always helpful. For example, the strength of an emotion apparently evoked by a particular memory doesn’t mean the original experience evoked the emotion that strongly. Never forget, memories are not cast in stone at the moment they are created — we work on them over time, changing them, fitting them into our experience and our prejudices, letting them be distorted by later experiences and thoughts.

Even those memories we regard as most certain — memories of highly significant, dramatic events — are no more reliable than any other. You may believe that you remember exactly where you were when [the plane crashed into the twin towers / John F. Kennedy was assassinated / the Challenger shuttle went down — pick your event], but research has found these memories are no more likely to be accurate than our memory for any other event. In a particularly telling study of this phenomenon, over 60% of subjects said they had seen the crashing of an El Al Boeing 747 in Amsterdam on television, although no television film exists!

And this lack of accuracy will be just as true of significant private events — just think of all those times you and a friend or family member have argued over exactly what happened.

But some people are better at remembering events than others.

Your ability to vividly visualize seems to affect how well you remember events, but there also appears to be a gene that affects how well we recall events. Around a third of people apparently inherit at least one copy of a variant of this gene; possession of two copies of this variant makes them significantly poorer at remembering events. The gene doesn’t appear to affect other types of memory.

There is also evidence that people whose brains' hemispheres work together more actively (people with left-handedness in their families; not necessarily left-handed themselves) remember events better than they remember facts. This is probably because event memories are widely distributed throughout the brain, while memory for facts is more localized to one hemisphere.

The findings may also help explain so-called ‘childhood amnesia’ — our poor memory for early childhood experiences. The fibers connecting the hemispheres don’t fully develop until about age 4.

But there is another theory about childhood amnesia (and there’s no reason both can’t be true), and that is that children can only describe memories of events using words they knew when the experience occurred. Another study has found cultural differences between Americans and Chinese in how personal experiences are remembered, and these differences in remembering appear to reflect different conversational styles between mother and child found in these two cultures.

In other words, how we remember an event depends on how we verbally frame it.

We can also manipulate our memory for events by controlling our emotional reactions to the event — if we make a conscious effort to suppress our emotions, we’ll remember the event less well (which is sometimes a good thing!). On the other hand, we can deliberate try to ‘up’ our feelings, to remember the event better (making ourselves more ‘down’ would also work, but who wants to remember something depressing?).

If this sounds a little manipulative, note that we do this all the time, unconsciously.

And that, I guess, is today’s message: always be aware that our memories are not exact replications of original events — that not only our perceptions at the time, but also our later manipulations alter the memories; but that we can also choose to take more control of this process. Keeping a diary is one way of doing this — but you have to emphasize the positive! If you choose to emphasize the negative, you’ll make this a strategy for reconstructing an unhappy past (a study of diary keepers found those that regularly kept a diary were more likely than non-diarists to suffer from headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and social awkwardness).

I’ll leave you with some quotes about memory:

“…the art of forgetting … is a high and delicate enterprise, demanding astute judgment about what to keep and what to let go, to salvage or to shred or shelve, to memorialise or to anathematise.”
Forty, Adrian & Kuchler, Susanne (eds) 1999. The art of forgetting. Oxford: Berg. p.xi

“Memories are the transmuted re-creations of our own childhood and dead parents, our continued efforts to make coherence of our own lives, to synthesize past and present so as to face the future.”
Rose, Steven: The making of memory. p.307

“…our understanding of who we are and who we will become depends on memories that may fade, change, or even strengthen as time inexorably passes. And it is from this ongoing dynamic between time and memory that our autobiographies — the stories we tell about our lives — are born. We cannot hope too understand memory’s fragile power without examining what happens to memory as time passes, and considering how we translate the residues of experience that persist across time into tales of who we are.”
Schacter, Daniel: Searching for memory. p.73

“… our stories are built from many different ingredients: snippets of what actually happened, thoughts about what might have happened, and beliefs that guide us as we attempt to remember. Our memories are the fragile but powerful products of what we recall from the past, believe from the present, and imagine about the future.”
Schacter, Daniel: Searching for memory. p.308

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URGENTLY WANTED

Last month I talked about forgetting to do things, which is a part of prospective memory. I’m currently involved in expanding my e-book on remembering intentions for a print edition, and would really like to hear from anyone who has any personal experiences of this kind of memory failure that they would be willing to share publicly (individuals will only be identified by personal name, age and occupation). I’m not expecting dramatic tales! Just some real-life stories to illustrate various points. So if you have any clearly-remembered experiences of times you forgot to do something, to be somewhere, do email me. I would love to hear from you.

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BLOG
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Latest posts:

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* the reality of 'hysteria'
* auditory mirror neurons and empathy
* a gene for extreme 'larks'

* Empathy undeveloped in adolescent brains
* Sedative revives persistent vegetative state patients
* Climate change and civilization
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