Memory and Its Fallacies
Memory is absolutely crucial both
to our inquiry into the nature of the human mind in general and cognition in
particular. Information floods into the human senses from many sources. Memory
acts as a highly selective method of recording and retaining this information
(sometimes only briefly). It is memory that gives a human a sense of their
personal past, something that grounds them in the world of reality. It is
memory that is central to the formation of a life narrative. And it is the
incomplete, sketchy nature of memory, its omissions, and the errors endemic to
it, that have helped distort our understanding not only of ourselves, but of
other people and the world around us.
Formal Definitions of the Term
Memory
The American Psychological
Association defines memory as:
1. the
ability to retain information or a representation of past experience, based on
the mental processes of learning or encoding, retention across some
interval of time, and retrieval or reactivation of the memory.
2. specific
information or a specific past experience that is recalled.
3. the
hypothesized part of the brain where traces of information and past experiences
are stored.1
Two researchers writing in 2019
emphasized an important point. They argued that if memory was only understood
as information storage and retrieval, then the term could cover a great many
different phenomena, perhaps an unlimited number. True memory, they contend, is
physical. Memories are incorporated in brains, not cloud servers.2
Another source, summarizing the
subject of memory, stresses that memory is a “diverse set of cognitive
capacities” we use to keep information and past experiences for purposes in the
present. Memory is a key element in personal identity. It differs from both
perception and imagination, but “in
practice, there can be close interactions between remembering, perceiving, and
imagining”. It is often filled with emotion, and yet it is essential for
rational thinking. It has an association with dreams. It affects our perception
of ourselves as beings living in time. And it can go wrong, sometimes
catastrophically so.3
So we can say that memory is yet
another epiphenomenon of the brain’s physical evolution. Memory is a form of representation,
a way the brain represents the outside world to us and our role in it. What
brought about its emergence?
The Evolution of Human Memory
What we call memory is actually a
collection of different kinds of remembering, with different features,
functions, and processes. These varieties of memory evolved along different
paths and at different times. Researchers study the non-human animals to gain
insight into how humans acquired these capabilities.
A team of researchers studying
the evolution of human memory has listed the steps which they believe to be the
general sequence in which this faculty developed. First, all animals
have reinforcement learning systems, one of the first things animals
evolved. [This of course refers to the way animals learn to avoid negative
stimuli and gravitate to positive stimuli.] Second, vertebrates developed the navigation
system which gave them, at first, the ability to represent novel routes in
their brains as maps, and which later became adapted to a variety of behaviors.
Third, as the neocortex evolved, there emerged what is called a biased-competition
system. This allowed early mammals to regulate the older systems that
competed with each other to guide behavior.
In early primates there evolved
the manual-foraging system. This capability arose in newer cortical
areas. It allowed primates to make choices that facilitated their ability to
reach for and handle desirable things on tree branches (such as fruit or
insects). The feature system first appeared in anthropoid primates, both
in older brain areas and in the newer parts of the parietal and temporal lobes.
In the words of the researchers, “It improved the
perception and memory of both the qualitative and quantitative features of
their world, which guided long-distance foraging as they became larger, farther
ranging animals.” As the newer regions
of the frontal lobe evolved, there emerged the goal system:
It generated goals—the targets
of action—from representations of goal-related events, as well as from abstract
strategies. Yet later, during human evolution, the feature and goal systems
began to perform more-general functions, resulting in sophisticated reasoning,
symbolic communication, and mathematics, along with the generalizations,
concepts, and categories that underlie semantic memories.
Finally, early humans developed
representations of themselves and others—the social-subjective system.
In interaction with the older systems, this gave humans the sense of participating
in events and gathering in facts. This is the basis of autobiographical memory
and cultural knowledge.4
Psychologist James S. Nairne
emphasizes a crucial point: the capacity to remember aided survival, and if had
not done so, it would have ultimately faded in importance. He contends that the
evidence supports the view that memory evolved to enhance fitness. The
implication here is obvious: memory evolved to emphasize survival
information and to pay less attention to the non-essential.5
This was the memory that evolved to help our ancestors survive in a dangerous,
challenging environment. This was the memory that helped Homo sapiens
sapiens gain dominance over the rest of the animal kingdom. It is not—is
not—a comprehensive record of everything we experience. Realistically, if a
person registered every single thing their senses gathered in, they would be
overwhelmed by trivia and virtually unable to function. Memory evolved to be selective,
for a reason.
Psychologist Merlin Donald, in
the early 1990s, proposed an overarching theory of memory evolution. Donald
sought to establish a chronology of memory evolution that corresponded to the
evolution of an increasingly more sophisticated brain in the members of the
genus Homo. First, he pointed out that the chief areas of brain
expansion in Homo erectus appear to have occurred in the hippocampus,
cerebellum, and association cortex. The tool-making skills and extensive
migrations of erectus appear to support this, he contends. Secondly,
early Homo sapiens had a brain size in the modern range and is thought
to have had a descended larynx. Early Homo sapiens was therefore
probably capable of speech. Donald argued that a third great cognitive
development was the beginning of the use of symbols in the Upper Paleolithic
era, which established the external memory as a feature of human life.6
Donald emphasizes the
significance of voluntary access to memory representations, the ability of a
human to remember things at will, what other researchers have called explicit
memory retrieval. The foundation for
this, he argues, emerged as the human brain evolved the capacity for mimesis,
which he defines as “a supramodal, motor-modeling capacity…which created
representations that had the critical property of voluntary retrievability.”
[Emphasis in the original.] Mimesis had what he called a self-triggered
rehearsal loop that “could voluntarily access and retrieve its own outputs”.7
And as Donald says elsewhere,
The evolution of voluntary
conscious access to memory may account for many, if not most, of the
distinguishing characteristics of human memory. The unique human capacity for
accessing our memory banks provided a platform on which the spiraling
co-evolution of human cognition and culture could be constructed.8
We can gain insight into the
evolution of memory itself by examining some of the hypotheses surrounding the
evolution of particular forms of memory. (We will briefly survey these forms
below.) Episodic memory, the ability to remember specific experiences, appears
to have evolved in more than just our species. Significant evidence indicates
there are non-human animals who possess what researchers call its “core
properties”. It appears to be widespread in mammals and it can be found in
certain bird species. The brain structures that comprise the system that
supports episodic memory are the hippocampus, the parahippocampal region (a
structure which surrounds much of the medial temporal lobe), and the prefrontal
cortex. Such a system appears to exist among many non-human species, and there
are even structures in reptiles and certain fish that are similar to the
hippocampus. This implies that episodic memory was reproductively advantageous
for many species. (However it cannot be said that simply because an animal has
a hippocampus that the animal possesses episodic memory, since the hippocampus
is involved in spatial memory, a type of memory that seems more fundamental.)
The origins of episodic memory might conceivably stretch back to the period
before the divergence of the mammalian and reptilian lines, although solid
evidence for this has not yet emerged.9
Working memory also may have very
deep evolutionary roots. Working
memory is that memory system used to keep immediately useful information about
the outside world in the conscious mind for a limited period of time. As one
researcher puts it, its mechanism is “executively controlled attention”.
It is also widely accepted that WM is quite limited in span,
restricted to three or four chunks of information at any one time. Moreover,
there are significant and stable individual differences in WM abilities between
people, and these have been found to predict comparative performance in many
other cognitive domains. Indeed, they account for most (if not all) of the
variance in fluid general intelligence, or g.10
Do any non-human animals possess
this capacity? Studies indicate that many primate species appear to have
working memory abilities analogous to those of humans. Other primate species
may even share the human ability for using WM in planning. Where humans differ,
of course, is the sophistication and flexibility of their working memories, and
in their ability to maintain their focus and attention. It should be added that
there is a great deal still to learn about how our abilities compare to the
non-human primates.11
As we have seen, generally
speaking, the more widespread a trait is in the animal kingdom, the older it
is. We can see glimmerings of memory-related abilities going back tens of
millions of years, originating in the ability of animals to learn which stimuli
were pleasant or unpleasant and retaining that information. Brain
structures implicated in memory are found across many species. As the human
brain evolved, these structures were elaborated on and added to until there
emerged the complex, varied phenomenon we call memory. The evolution of human
memory continues to be elucidated, but there are certainly aspects of this
evolution that will never be fully explained.
The Varieties of Memory
The different forms of memory
evolved to facilitate the performance of specific tasks. They also have a
variety of neural correlates, although the hippocampus plays a central role.
How do scientists classify these forms, and why is there disagreement about the
exact number? Constructing a taxonomy of memory is challenging because of these
disagreements. Some prefer to explain the varieties of memory by breaking
memory into broad categories. A 1998 taxonomy, cited by neuroscientist David
Linden, divides memory into two basic types, Declarative, labeled explicit, and
Nondeclarative, labeled implicit. Under Declarative there are only two
categories: facts and events. Under Nondeclarative are only four: Procedural,
which encompasses skills and habits, Priming (when a stimulus affects how one
reacts to a subsequent stimulus), Simple classical conditioning, and
Nonassociative learning.12 (In many taxonomies, Declarative and
Nondeclarative memory are described as aspects of Long-Term Memory.)
To elaborate on this, Declarative
Memory encompasses episodic memory, to which we referred above, and semantic
memory, which basically means information and concepts that are retained in the
long term and the cognitive processes which facilitate this retention.13,
14 Nondeclarative memory has been characterized by two specialists as “a
heterogeneous collection of nonconscious learning capacities…that are expressed
through performance and that do not afford access to any conscious memory
content.”15
Other researchers break memory
into a variety of subcategories, some of them quite specialized. We will try to
make sense of all this by beginning with some basic distinctions.
A. General Categories
Working Memory and Short-Term Memory
Working memory and short-term
memory are usually conflated, but there are researchers who see them as
distinct entities. Working memory, as we saw above, has been defined as “the
small amount of information that can be held in mind and used in the execution
of cognitive tasks”.16 When a human is doing something that requires
information that does not need to be stored for future reference, they are
using working memory. Some researchers maintain that working memory is simply
that aspect of short-term memory that has the shortest duration. It should also
be noted that memory researchers refer to the fading of memories as decay.
Sensory Memory
Sensory memory, as the name implies, is the perception of
sensory input. It is of extremely short duration and usually is not registered
consciously.17 When someone speaks to us it allows us to recall that
fact, and it has a significant capacity.18
Long-Term Memory
When a human brain stores
memories for more than the brief time in which a task is being performed, we
say that the memory has become long term. Long-term memories can stretch across
an entire lifetime. As we saw above, many researchers consider Declarative
(explicit and conscious) and Nondeclarative (implicit and non-conscious) memory
to be the major categories of Long-Term Memory.19
B. Major Subcategories
Episodic Memory
Declarative Memory’s first great
division is episodic memory, to which we have already referred. An academic
journal defines it as follows:
Episodic memory involves the
ability to learn, store, and retrieve information about unique personal
experiences that occur in daily life. These memories typically include
information about the time and place of an event, as well as detailed
information about the event itself. The ability to describe the details of a
recent holiday gathering or office meeting that took place in the previous
weeks or months, for example, depends heavily on intact episodic memory
function.20
One the major investigators of
episodic memory has described what he believes to be the mental processes
associated with the retrieval of such memories. He says that episodic memories
depend on a sense of self, a human’s understanding that they exist.
Episodic memories are also associated with autonoetic awareness, the
realization that personal experiences happened to one’s self, that they
happened in the past and are not still happening, and that they are now a part
of one’s life story. He further contends that humans possess a sense of
subjective time that allows them to differentiate between representations
of the self in the past or present and possible representations in the future.
Another specialist adds that episodic memory in essence answers certain
questions: What happened, when did it happen, and where
did it happen.21
An aspect of episodic memory,
according to a number of researchers, is called Relational Memory.
Relational Memory is defined by one pair of experts as, “representations of
arbitrary or accidentally occurring relations among the constituent elements of
experience.”22 Somewhat more prosaically, another source simply says
“Relational memory is the ability to remember arbitrary or indirect
associations between objects, places, people or events -- such as names and
faces.”23
Semantic Memory
The other great division of Declarative
Memory is semantic memory. Semantic memory consists of everything a human has
learned (or think they have learned) about the world around them. This includes
not only knowledge itself but the concepts necessary to gather and process that
knowledge, such as the use of language. Two specialists investigating the
neurobiology of semantic memory explain the subjects it contains:
A short list of examples includes the names and physical
attributes of all objects, the origin and history of objects, the names and
attributes of actions, all abstract concepts and their names, knowledge of how
people behave and why, opinions and beliefs, knowledge of historical events,
knowledge of causes and effects, associations between concepts, categories and
their bases, and on and on.24
Semantic memory is crucial in the
development of human culture, inasmuch as it is a storehouse of information
that can be conveyed to others. Semantic memory’s ability to form concepts from
the information it holds (an emergent phenomenon, in my view) is of the highest
significance in human life.
C. Additional Subcategories
Motor Memory
Motor memory is concerned with
physical skills and abilities. Three experts on the subject have stated, “Motor
memory is the process by which humans can adopt both persistent and flexible
motor behaviours.”25 Put more directly, motor memory allows people
to improve their physical skills through training and repetition and helps them
deal with rapidly changing physical situations. This is often referred to as
muscle memory. It is the basis of all physical skills that can improve with
repetition, and is considered to be a nondeclarative category of memory.
Spatial Memory
Spatial memory allows a human to
recall the position and location of objects or places. It gives humans the
ability to orientate themselves and to estimate direction and distance. Spatial
memory is how humans learns to navigate and remember routes. It has
representations in both short-term and log-term memory.26
Involuntary Memory
Involuntary memories come into
our conscious awareness without us having summoned them. Images or audio
memories that pop into our heads spontaneously are of this variety. As we will
see later, the brain’s ability to associate particular stimuli with specific
memories is a major source of involuntary recollections. Specific smells or
visual cues or pieces of music can cause such memories to emerge. Involuntary
memories are an extremely normal part of our mental life, and can even be
useful in emergency situations that demand fast action. More darkly, however, those
suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder can find disturbing, terrible
memories of this kind very difficult to suppress. Drug flashbacks and partial
epileptic seizures can also cause them to emerge.27
Adaptive Memory
As we noted above, memory evolved
because it was adaptively useful. There are researchers who give this adaptive
trait its own category. A team of specialists describes its salient features:
Memory has been described as
“adaptive” from at least two perspectives. One perspective suggests that the
memory system has evolved to preferentially encode and retrieve information
potentially relevant to survival in ancestral conditions. Indeed, information
encoded while imagining such conditions is better remembered, an advantage
known as the survival processing effect. The other perspective
points out that our memory system is biased towards information associated with
the anticipation or obtainment of reward.
[Citations removed.]28
Researchers also examine autobiographical memory (as
an aspect of episodic memory), emotional memories (as distinct from
memories about emotion) which are considered implicit, and object
recognition memories (as an aspect of semantic memory).
There is, in addition, a somewhat controversial category:
Eidetic Memory. Sometimes known as photographic memory, those in possession of
eidetic memory are said to be able to remember things with startling accuracy
because they can take a “mental picture” of them. A researcher of this subject
emphasizes the fact that the photographic images in the memories of those
claiming this ability are often sketchy and incomplete, or even contain
elements which were not present in the original. It appears that the vast
majority of those with abilities that could be called eidetic are children.29
However, it should also be noted that autistic savants demonstrate
extraordinary memory abilities. As one researcher put it, “Whatever the
particular savant skill, it is always linked to massive memory.”30
The Physiology of Memory
Storage and Memory Formation
How are memories stored in the
brain? Research has indicated that memories reside in the hippocampus and other
structures of the medial temporal lobe, and in the frontal cortex, but how are
they stored at the deepest level, that of neurons and synapses, and how are
they formed? The full story has yet to be completely elucidated, but much has
been discovered.
A prominent psychologist explains
that protein building is a fundamental part of the process of memory formation,
inasmuch as proteins are key components of synaptic receptors and disrupting
these proteins harms memory.31 Neuroscientists have traditionally
contended that memories are stored in synapses, but some recent research
has revealed that memories may actually be stored inside of brain cells.32
In fact, memory formation may be a distributed brain process.
Researchers at Cornell explain it this way:
A new study now reveals that
in the brain, a complex memory similarly consists of a whole and its parts. The
researchers found that while the overall experience is stored in the
hippocampus, the brain structure long considered the seat of memory, the
individual details are parsed and stored elsewhere, in the prefrontal cortex.
This separation ensures that, in the future, exposure to any individual cue is
sufficient to activate the prefrontal cortex, which then accesses the
hippocampus for recall of the whole memory.33
Regarding the issue of cellular
storage, a team of researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has
determined that the stimulation of a small, very specific set of brain cells
can cause the expression of a specific memory. It’s as if Wilder Penfield’s
experiments with the electrical stimulation of the brain, which helped
establish the fact that the mind is a matter-based phenomenon, are being
recapitulated with 21st century technology. In this instance light
was used to stimulate light-activated proteins in the brain.34
Recent research finds that
although conscious experience is continuous, memories seem to be stored as
discrete, individual moments. There appears to be evidence of what some
researchers call cognitive boundaries in the storing of these moments. A
“soft boundary” is a transition from one scene in memory to another very
similar to it, or a memory congruent with the first one. A “hard boundary” in
this hypothesis represents two scenes that are significantly different. Hard
boundary memories are distinct, closed pictures, to which nothing more will be
added. The greater the difference between two memories, the harder the
boundary.
The researchers…noticed two
distinct groups of cells that responded to different types of boundaries by
increasing their activity. One group, called “boundary cells” became more
active in response to either a soft or hard boundary. A second group, referred
to as “event cells” responded only to hard boundaries. This led to the theory
that the creation of a new memory occurs when there is a peak in the activity
of both boundary and event cells, which is something that only occurs following
a hard boundary.35
Research in the early decades of
the 21st century has reinforced the concept of distributed memory.
Groups of neurons known as neural ensembles (sometimes called engram cells)
handle the storage and processing tasks. Such ensembles now appear to maintain
the same memories in different areas of the brain, forming what is called an engram
complex. Synapses form pathways connecting these complexes.36
The ability of the brain to form
memories is yet another example of the brain’s plasticity. Events in the
environment, conveyed by the sensory and perceptual pathways, cause excitatory
synapses to react. These excitatory connections are altered by what is known as
the Hebbian mechanism, a process that is now widely believed to be the
chief means by which memories are formed.37 A team of researchers
has explained this mechanism by saying, “A long-standing hypothesis termed ‘Hebbian
plasticity’ suggests that memories are formed through strengthening of synaptic
connections between neurons with correlated activity.” Their research shows,
however, that the Hebbian mechanism alone does not form memories, and that
certain neuromodulators are necessary to this task.38
The Content of Memory
Long-term memories materialize at
various speeds, are experienced, and then evanesce. Their relative vividness is
a product of the frequency with which they emerge and the significance (to the
person having them) of the event that caused their formation. And if we were to
carefully and objectively examine the pictures of remembered events we see in
our heads, we would admit that the images are sketchy, indistinct around the
edges, almost as if they were semi-transparent at times. This is something
shared with imagined images, which have the same kind of low resolution. Audio
memories can emerge as if someone were playing a sound file. These audio
memories can be startlingly clear at times, but at others they are almost
(internally) inaudible or transient. However, greater amounts of detail can be
recalled when the subject of the memory is particularly intense. This is
especially true for traumatic memories or the memory of major historical
events.
The term Flashbulb Memory
is used to describe memories of events which are so stunning, dramatic,
unexpected, and/or unprecedented that a multitude of small details surrounding
these events are remembered. Moreover, many people can experience flashbulb
memories almost simultaneously if an event is public and particularly
impactful, although each person will have a unique perception of these events.
Although people tend to swear they are recalling flashbulb events with complete
accuracy, extensive research proves this is not the case. Even traumatic
memories can be marked by significant errors and omissions. Errors can arise in
the weeks and months after the event, and these can become permanent components
of the memory. Errors associated with public events can be changed by exposure
to new information. But errors in traumatic memories can persist for many
years, even for life.39
Incomplete Memories, Polluted
Memories, False Memories, and Confabulation
No one remembers every detail of
events or every detail of what they see (with the exception of savants who can
draw an entire cityscape from memory). There are innumerable gaps in our
recollection of experiences. Moreover, memory is “polluted” by the human
tendency to fill in missing parts with what is actually conjecture, not true
recall. By its very nature, such conjecture is unconscious. There is also the
phenomenon many of us experience when attempting to remember events from very
early in our lives. How much are we actually remembering, and how much of what
we recall about events that took place when we were children is actually
information we have been told? Sorting this out is often virtually impossible.
Memory is colored further by our emotional state at the time of the memory’s
formation, especially if the event being remembered elicited a powerful
emotional response in us, or if we were already in an emotionally vulnerable or
psychologically fluid state at the time. Neurological problems which are still
not well-understood are also a factor.
The result of these various
memory-related issues can be false memories, memories of events that we
did not actually experience. One writer puts it this way:
It is startling to realize
that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened—or may have
happened to someone else. I suspect that many of my enthusiasms and impulses,
which seem entirely my own, have arisen from others’ suggestions, which have
powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been
forgotten.40
False memories are often
spoken of in the same breath as confabulation. Despite certain
similarities, they are not the same thing. Confabulation means a “memory” that
is completely made up by a person, an account of something which did not happen
to anyone, and which is not based on stories a person has been told. This made-up
memory is sincerely believed, many times only temporarily, and researchers have
found that confabulations are often the product of injury or psychosis.
Confabulations can be spoken spontaneously or result from being asked
questions.
Some researchers believe that
both false memories and confabulations are created by the human need for a
coherent narrative of events, the influence of autobiographical knowledge, and
the processes of imagination, among other elements. A dysfunctional ventromedial
prefrontal cortex, in the frontal lobe of the brain, has been identified as a
neurological cause in both. However, false memories and confabulations differ
from each other in important ways. False memories, unlike confabulations, tend
to have a strong emotional component, often connected with sexual content.
False memories are also connected to suggestibility.41
Other Aspects of Memory
Learned information can also
interfere with memory. When new information is learned it can hamper the
ability of a person to recall previous memories. Scientists refer to this as retroactive
interference. The inverse of this is proactive interference, which
is when previously learned information impairs the ability to recall new
information. Retroactive interference is now generally believed to be the cause
of most ordinary forgetting.42
Memory reconsolidation
occurs when new information alters or otherwise modifies an existing long-term
memory. Two neuroscientists explain it like this:
…when memories are retrieved
they are susceptible to change, such that future retrievals call upon the
changed information. This is called reconsolidation. That reconsolidation
exists is not at issue, but what really reconsolidation is, how it occurs, and
what it means are heavily investigated and debated topics.43
There are researchers who contend that reconsolidation is not
universal, and that many times it occurs only under specific circumstances.44
There is much still to be learned about this subject, but enough is known for
many researchers to now see memory, both its formation and storage, as a dynamic
process, one which is in a continuous state of change.45
Social conformity memory,
or as it is often referred to, memory conformity, has a major impact on
individual memories. Memory conformity occurs when people discuss an event they
have experienced with other people. This can have the effect of altering an
individual’s memory of the event. This
effect is particularly pronounced when people discuss something they have all
witnessed. Research shows that eyewitnesses to crimes (or alleged crimes) often
“remember” details they didn’t actually see after discussing the event with
those who actually did see the detail.46
Research has consistently shown
that emotion can have a profound effect on memory. One team of psychologists
put it this way: “Substantial evidence has established that emotional events
are remembered more clearly, accurately and for longer periods of time than are
neutral events.” It appears that emotional memories are stronger than neutral
ones because emotional memories involve the integration of numerous brain
regions, including both the amygdala and hippocampus, among others.47
We noted above that when
remembering our early childhood that it is difficult for us to be sure what we
are actually remembering and what we were told. And no one remembers being a
baby. Freud called this infantile amnesia, and for many years researchers
thought that this was tied to the acquisition of language, since it appears
that the earliest memories children have go back to the time they start to
speak. But recent research (which is still being pursued) attributes the memory
deficit of early childhood to the creation of new neurons, which may act to
disrupt existing circuits in the infant brain. The hippocampus, which is one of
the few brain regions that generates neurons, may actually be unconsciously
clearing out early child memories. As production of new neurons levels off, the
long-term memory may begin to be established. These conclusions, it should be
noted, are not yet the consensus of scientific opinion.48 (See the
discussion on synaptic pruning in infants on pages 555 and 557 of this volume.)
Cryptomnesia is the
phenomenon of believing that an idea one has is new when, in fact, it is a
memory. Cryptomnesia is also at work when someone believes an artistic
inspiration is their own when in fact they are remembering someone else’s
artistic expression. For example, writers, immersed in the world of books, may
unconsciously “borrow” someone else’s idea or phrasing. As people are exposed
to more and more information, the tendency toward confusing new ideas and
memory may be becoming more widespread.49
The Mandela Effect is a
false memory of an event that is held by a large number of people. Its name
derives from a widely-held belief that South African leader Nelson Mandela had
died in prison in the 1980s, when in fact no such thing had occurred, even
though many people “remembered” it happening. There are many examples of this
phenomenon, and some neurologists suspect that confabulation, reconsolidation,
and memory conformity are all at work in such situations.50
Neuroscientist Eric Kandel, in
his examination of memory (which also acts as an autobiography), describes the
significance of memory to humans:
…memory provides our lives
with continuity. It gives us a coherent picture of the past that puts current
experience in perspective. The picture may not be rational or accurate, but it
persists. Without the binding force of memory, experience would be splintered
into as many fragments as there are moments in life. Without the mental time
travel provided by memory, we would have no awareness of our personal history,
no way of remembering the joys that serve as the luminous milestones of our
life. We are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember.51
Memory evolved as a survival
strategy, and it has become intertwined with every aspect of cognition. Memory
is absolutely essential to us, and its loss, whether through injury or disease,
is a tragedy for the human who has suffered this loss. Without memory, a human
is completely unmoored from their own past, with no understanding of who they
are, the people they have known, the road that has brought them to the point in
life to which they have come, and no knowledge of what they have experienced.
However, there is a great paradox at work here. Memory, which is so vital to
us, can also mislead us disastrously. Traumatic memories can even destroy us if
not properly dealt with. Memories are not analogous to video recording
devices. They do not give us a fully accurate picture of our experience.
When this is understood, we come be more selective and more judicious in our
use of them. The external memory—the keeping of written and visual
records—emerged out of the need to preserve experiences which even the extraordinary
feats of the oral history tradition could not preserve. It is the existence of
this external memory which makes the study of human history possible, and which
maintains the record upon which the arts, sciences, mathematics, literature,
and all other areas of human learning depend. Learning itself relies on memory,
and memory and learning are intimately connected. It is to the study of human
learning to which we will now turn.
1.
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