Memory With Editing Rights

A memory is not a video recording.

Frederic Bartlett had British participants read a Native American story, “The War of the Ghosts”, and then asked them to reproduce it after various intervals. Unfamiliar details changed, disappeared, or became more familiar to the teller’s own culture. Memory was not retrieving an unchanged recording; it was assembling the story anew out of surviving fragments and comprehensible schemas.

In 1974 Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer showed that even the verb used in a question after watching a crash affects the later estimate of speed and the recollection of details. This does not mean that all memory is false. It is reliable enough for living and not fixed enough for confidence to serve as a measure of authenticity.

We store separate details, an emotional tone and a general plot, and on each retrieval we assemble a new version out of them. The edit is shaped by the present: our current attitude to the person, later events, stories we have heard, and who we take ourselves to be today.

That is why two participants in the same conversation can sincerely remember different conversations. It does not necessarily mean one of them is lying. Sometimes both are using a reconstruction that is confident of its own documentary status.

Over time the details go first. What remains is the conclusion:

the trip was wonderful;

the job was awful;

childhood was happy;

that person always treated me badly.

The general conclusion may well be correct. But it no longer contains the material it came from.

So important things are worth writing down while they still have a shape:

• what happened;
• what was said;
• what we felt;
• what we expected;
• what we decided;
• which circumstances seemed material.

Such notes do not become absolute truth. The person writing them is also wrong about things. But they preserve the version held by someone who was closer to the events and did not yet know how they would end.

It is particularly useful to record the reasons for decisions. A few years later a past choice can look absurd. The note will remind you of the risks, constraints and unknowns that later dropped out of memory along with their persuasive force.

The past cannot be changed. What can be stopped is rewriting it daily, purely in the interests of today’s plot.

A familiar scene: two adults arguing about whether one promised to pick the other up from the station. Both remember the conversation, both remember it differently, and both are right in the sense that they really do remember. Over six months another three occasions of not being picked up have been built into the memory, plus one row that had nothing to do with stations. So the argument is not about the station but about who in this family usually lets people down. Every new small grievance edits the old record slightly, and a year later almost nothing of the original conversation is left in it.

An unpleasant corollary: confidence in a memory tells you nothing about its accuracy. The brightest and most detailed pictures are, as a rule, the ones retold most often, and every retelling was one more cut in the edit.