Example 1: The 1992 NLCS, Sid Bream slides across the plate destroying the Pirates’ World Series berth.
My father’s recollection: All three of us (me, Dad, cousin) were in ]living room on the couch waiting for the final out. When Bream slid across the plate, me and cousin collapsed on the floor while Dad slumped into the arm of the couch.
My recollection: Cousin had moved to a different state. Me, Mom, and Dad were in the living room. Dad in his chair, Mom and I on the couch. Bream slides. I lie on the floor. Dad slumps in his chair. Mom walks into the kitchen. Cousin calls two hours later.
Example 2: This weekend. Child, my daughter, his mother are playing UNO (not my daughter’s mother). Child says “dammit” when he gets a bad hand. I tell my daughter a story about when she said “dammit” to her mother. Her mother chastised her and then daughter said, “But you always say dammit to [dog].”
Mother’s recollection: That statement was made in the grocery store after daughter pulled her favorite treat off of the shelf and it dropped out of the cart.
My recollection: It was in the kitchen at home.
So…
Why do we have these vastly different recalls of events when in neither event does it advantage a party by lying?
Simple: human memory really isn’t very accurate, especially when it’s the memory of a single incident. There’s been lots of research showing that “important memories” like that differ wildly between people.
Write down what happened immediately after such an incident and check what you wrote years later, you’ll probably find that your memories disagree with your own account.
I see context as the key. You can remember a big event in what seems to be a clear recollection, but if you forget the context of the event, all those other details about where you before it happened, why you were there, who was with you, all the things that tie together to form a clear image then your memory is just a jumble of clip art from your mind.
As your OP shows, you probably don’t. You remember the key factors of an incident - Bream sliding into a base or your daughter saying dammit - and that gets put into your long-term memory. The details get forgotten like most short-term memories are forgotten.
Then, months or years later, you recall the key part of the incident from your long-term memory. But the details are gone. So your brain just constructs a set of secondary details that match the remembered important part. It doesn’t have to be accurate as long as your brain thinks it’s plausible.
Our brains are designed that way. It’s how we can take a few details and construct a meaningful overall pattern out of them.
I’ve always thought the Mandela Effect was overhyped. There’s a pretty obvious explanation; people are getting Nelson Mandela and Stephen Biko confused. Both were Black South Africans who led resistance movements and were imprisoned. If you’re not a South African, it’s easy to miss the details that distinguish them. They’re both blend together into “that South African guy who went to prison”.
It’s worth noting that people “remember” the death occurring in the eighties. Peter Gabriel released the song “Biko” in 1980 and the movie Cry Freedom was released in 1987, which is how most people outside South Africa first became aware of Biko and his death.
Memories are not like a recording; they’re an organic process with lots of opportunities for noise to be introduced. Liz Phelps, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, has done a lot of research into the transient nature of our memories.
All my life, I remembered vividly listening to a game on the radio, in which Robin Roberts pitched a 3-hitter against the Cubs. All three hits were solo homers by Hank Sauer, and the Phils won, 4-3. Now, with baseballreference.com, I can look all those things up. The pitcher was Curt Simmons. With that website, I’ve discovered that my recollections were wrong about lots and lots of things.
It is very strange in that it is equally likely that I am wrong instead of the other person involved, but I can SEE it in my mind. It’s possible you are saying that the brain just made up that image?
What do you remember? Why did your cousin move and where to? Did you help him move? What were you doing that day before the game? What was the weather like? What were you wearing? What did you have for lunch that day?
You don’t really have much context for how you remember it, you’re memory is barely distinguishable from every other time you were watching TV with your parents. If you have a network of events that would have to tie together you could better determine how accurate your memory is. But you are probably retaining very little detailed memory because so much of the setting was so familiar to you and the only discreet detail is Sid Bream sliding home.
I read somewhere that what we’re actually always remembering is the last time we recalled this event. So, when you revisit it, and perhaps misplace one tiny contextual detail, like who was sitting where, that error gets carried forward.
Over time, you can see how each tiny mistake in recall gets added and accumulates. Until what you’re recalling is an accumulation of tiny errors, though the core event remains true. That guy DID hit a homerun!
I am pretty sure that for most of my life I had an exceptional memory for detail and accuracy. After my divorce at 40 years old I started experiencing my own version of a memory to a slight degree which has gotten worse over the past 30 years. I attribute that to my lack of detail in the original experience. We seldom appreciate our good memory skills until we start to loose them.
That’s probably true about what details you recollect. But early on we replace detailed memories with generic images. For instance, most of your recollections of what your mother looked like in your childhood are likely to be pretty much the same, even though she may have changed her hairstyle or even hair color several times and aged along the way. You’ll remember her in the style of clothing she typically wore not exactly what she wore unless it was a special event.
Of course people remember things in different levels of detail as well. Some people remember visual images better than others, some people remember names better than others.
I had a memory of seeing the end of that game at my parents’ house, which would have been very unlikely. I would have seen it either at my house or at work (I was working in a college library, and we had televisions in the AV department). I watched a bazillion playoff games in the house where I grew up in the seventies and early eighties, so it’s easy to see how memories would get mixed up.
