Memory - , and despite the fact that it has been studied for a long time, there are many false - or at least not entirely accurate ideas about it.
Let's talk about the most popular of them, plus why it's not so easy to forget everything, what makes us "steal" someone else's memory and how fictional memories affect our lives.
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Photographic memory is the ability to "remember everything"
Photographic memory is the idea that a person at any moment can take a kind of instant “snapshot” of the surrounding reality and after a while “extract” it from the mind halls intact. Essentially, this myth is based on the (also false) notion that human memory continuously records everything that a person sees around him. This myth is quite stable and tenacious in modern culture - for example, it was this process of "mnemonic recording" that led to the appearance of the famous cursed videotape from Koji Suzuki's cycle of novels "The Ring".
In the universe of The Ring, this may be real - however, in our reality, the presence of a "one hundred percent" photographic memory has not yet been confirmed in practice. Memory is closely related to the creative processing and comprehension of information, self-awareness and self-identification have a strong impact on our memories.
Therefore, scientists are skeptical about claims that this or that person can mechanically “record” or “photograph” reality. Often behind them are many hours of training and the use of mnemonic techniques. Moreover, the first case of "photographic" memory described in science .
We are talking about the work of Charles Stromeyer III (Charles Stromeyer III). In 1970, he published an article in the journal Nature about a certain Elizabeth, a Harvard student who could memorize pages of poems in an unfamiliar language at a glance. And even more - by looking with one eye at the image of 10 random points, and the next day with the other eye at the second similar image, she was able to combine both pictures in her imagination and "see" a volumetric autostereogram.
True, other owners of exceptional memory could not repeat her successes. Elizabeth herself also did not retake the tests - and after a while she married Stromeyer, which increased the skepticism of scientists about his "discovery" and motives.
Closest to the myth of photographic memory eideticism - the ability to retain and reproduce in detail visual (and sometimes gustatory, tactile, auditory and olfactory) images for a long time. According to some reports, Tesla, Reagan and Aivazovsky possessed an exceptional eidetic memory, images of eidetics are also popular in popular culture - from Lisbeth Salander to Doctor Strange. However, the memory of eidetics is also not mechanical - even they cannot “rewind the record” at any arbitrary moment and view everything again, in all details. Eidetics, like other people, require emotional involvement, understanding of the subject, interest in what is happening to remember - and in this case, their memory may miss or correct certain details.
Amnesia is a complete loss of memory
This myth is also fueled by plots from pop culture - the hero-victim of amnesia usually completely loses all memory of his past as a result of an incident, but at the same time he freely communicates with others and, in general, thinks well. In fact, amnesia can manifest itself in many ways, and the one described above is far from the most common.
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For example, in retrograde amnesia, the patient may not remember the events that preceded the injury or illness, but usually retains memory of autobiographical information, especially childhood and adolescence. In the case of anterograde amnesia, the victim, on the contrary, loses the ability to remember new events, but, on the other hand, remembers what happened to him before the injury.
The situation where the character cannot remember anything at all about their past may refer to a dissociative disorder, such as the condition . In this case, a person really does not remember anything about himself and his past life, moreover, he can come up with a new biography and name for himself. The cause of this kind of amnesia is usually not illness or accidental injury, but violent events or severe stress - it's good that in life this happens still less often than in the movies.
The outside world does not affect our memory
This is another misconception that also stems from the idea that our memory accurately and consistently records events that happen to us. At first glance, it seems that it is: some kind of incident happened to us. We remember him. Now, if necessary, we can "retrieve" this episode from our memory - and "play" it as a video clip.
Perhaps this analogy is appropriate, but there is one “but”: unlike a real film, this clip will change when it “plays” - depending on our new experience, the environment, the psychological mood, the nature of the interlocutors. At the same time, we are not talking about deliberate lies - it may seem to the rememberer that he is telling the same story every time - just as everything really happened.
The fact is that memory is not only a physiological, but also a social construct. Remembering and telling some episodes from our lives, we often unconsciously correct them, taking into account the interests of the interlocutors. What’s more, we can “borrow” or “steal” other people’s memories—and we’ve been pretty good at it.
The issue of memory borrowing is dealt with, in particular, by scientists at the Southern Methodist University in the United States. In one of them it was found that this phenomenon is quite widespread - more than half of the respondents (college students) noted that they were faced with a situation where someone they knew recounted their own stories in the first person. At the same time, some of the respondents were sure that the events being narrated really happened to them, and were not “overheard”.
Memories can not only be borrowed, but also invented - this is the so-called false memory. In this case, a person is absolutely sure that he correctly remembered this or that event - usually it concerns small details, nuances or individual facts. For example, you can confidently “remember” how your new acquaintance introduced himself as Sergey, while in fact his name is Stas. Or “absolutely remember” how they put an umbrella in the bag (but actually they wanted to put it, but got distracted).
Sometimes a false memory may not be so harmless: it is one thing to “remember” that you forgot to feed the cat, and another to convince yourself that you committed a crime and construct detailed “memories” of what happened. A group of scientists from the University of Bedfordshire in England is studying this kind of memory.
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In one of his they showed that false memories of supposedly committed crimes not only exist, they can be created in a controlled experiment. At the end of three interview sessions, 70% of the study participants "confessed" to having committed an assault or theft when they were teenagers, and "remembered" the details of their "crimes".
False memories are a relatively new area of interest for scientists; not only neuroscientists and psychologists, but also forensic scientists turn to it. This feature of our memory can shed light on how and why people give false testimony and incriminate themselves - far from always there is malicious intent behind this.
Memory is associated with imagination and social interactions, it can be lost, recreated, stolen and invented - perhaps the real facts associated with our memory are no less, and sometimes more interesting than the myths and misconceptions about it.
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Source: habr.com