Memories

www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html


You might be wrong, but you are not alone. None of us capture our memories in perfect, strobe-like detail, but almost all of us believe in them with blinding conviction. This conviction is most pronounced with respect of flashbulb memories, but it isn’t limited to them. Even with trivial matters, we believe in our recollections with touching sincerity and defend them with astounding tenacity. …….

How can we square this feeling of rightness with the very real possibility that we are wrong? This is a question that haunts all the ‘wrongology,’ not just errors of memory. The problem is suggested by the very phase “the feeling of knowing.” In life, as in language, we begin with a psychological state (the “feeling” part) and end up with a claim about the truth (the “knowing” part). In other words, we feel that we are right because we feel that we are right: we take our own certainty as an indicator of accuracy. This isn’t completely foolish to us, since studies show that there is some correlation between confidence and correctness. But it isn’t completely foolproof, either. As the case of flashbulb memories makes clear, our certainty reflects the existence of a particularly inner picture. But nothing in life guarantees that this picture reflects the real state of affairs.

This reliance on a vivid inner picture helps explain why memories are particularly apt to trigger the feeling of knowing. Two thousand years ago, Plato proposed a model of how memory works that is both radically out-dated and remarkably timeless. Imagine, he suggested, that you have in your mind a wax table – “a gift of Memory, the mother of the Muses.” Everything you experience, from your own thoughts and sensory impressions to interpretations with others, creates an imprint in that wax, like an insignia pressed into the seal on a letter. In this model, our memories are the marks in the way: an unchanging mental replica of the events of the past, captured at the moment they occurred.

If Plato’s medium has fallen into obsolescence, his metaphor has endured. Every generation’s cutting-edge recording technology has been pressed into service to symbolize the workings of memory. Flashbulb memories are part of this tradition, as are books, gramophones, movies, and most recently, computers. (This last analogy is in many ways the most explicit, not least because it is bidirectional: we speak of our memories as being like computers, but also our computers as having memory – a locution that’s become a natural that we forget it is a metaphor.) within this recording-technology model of memory, the vividness of an inner picture really does vouchsafe its accuracy. We don’t question the integrity of stored data if the photos aren’t faded or missing and the book hasn’t fallen apart at the seams.

The trouble is, this model of memory is simply wrong. Plato knew it was philosophically unsound, and in his inimitable fashion, he proposed it only in order to genially eviscerate it. Later thinkers saw that it was scientifically flawed as well, and suggested successively more sophisticated (if still tentative) descriptions of how the brain remembers and forgets. Most contemporary neuroscientists agree that memory is not a single function but multiple distinct processes: remembering people, facts, particular times and places how to perform physical action, and so on. Similarly, they agree that these tasks are not accomplished by a single structure – the wax tablet or Polaroid or PC in the brain – but rather by many different ones, whose responsibilities range from face recognition to emotional processing. Perhaps most tellingly, they also agree that a memory is not so much stored intact in one part of the brain as reassembled by all these different structures each time we call it to mind. Pages 74 & 75