Errors in Memories: 3 Reasons Not to Believe Everything You Remember


Errors in Memories

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You know that your memory also selectively, can be altered? It is suggested that you don’t believe everything you remember.

Do you trust your memories? Maybe you should not, because the truth is that there are arguments, backed by scientific studies, which find that we shouldn’t believe everything we remember, and in fact, we get to keep some memories that never happened. Also keep in mind another curious fact is that we remember what interests us most. If you have doubts about what the brain actually stores as a souvenir, you want to read on to discover what are the errors in the memories and 3 reasons why we shouldn’t believe everything.

Relate memories that have not happened

Julia Shaw, a forensic psychologist at the University of Bedfordshire (UK) specializing in science of memory, defends the theory, observed with one of the largest studies in this field (Constructing Rich False Memories of committing) and published in the journal Psychological Science, that the memory can be altered to the point even lead a person to confess to a crime he did not commit. In the study of young people aged between 18 and 31 they were persuaded that they had committed a crime when they were younger. The results were surprising, because 7 out of 10 said they did not only commit when they were subsequently interviewed, but even came to give details that, in fact, had never happened.

A few years earlier, Elizabeth Loftus, an expert on memory performance, conducted an experiment in which she convinced 25% of participants that they got lost in a mall in childhood. In 2002, a similar test was convincing half of the participants in a new experiment on false memories that can create a memory that had flown in a balloon during their childhood. The process was done through manipulated photographs.

Selective memory

Brains tend to delete negative memories, or at least to enclose them in memory. And it is that another of the peculiarities of memory that it is selective, which can lead to remembering things that interest us.

Invented memories are stronger

The memories of things we imagined but really have not lived, they may become fixed with more intensity in the actual memory. This can even lead to overlap and have difficulty in distinguishing. A study published in Psychological Science put the focus precisely on this aspect, and the ability of the imagination to make us confuse about reality.

So the point is our memory can create a lot of things that never happened. We don’t need to believe everything we remember.


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