I was intrigued when I first read about this study a couple of years ago (IIRC ). What most fascinated me was that the people in the study, when confronted with the stories they’d written immediately following the crash and the fact that their remembered versions differed significantly, adamantly refused to believe their own words. They believed the remembered version over the original version, even though the original version was clearly more likely to be accurate. They continued to insist the remembered version was true, even though they could read their own words, in their own handwriting, that they had written the day after the crash.
robby:
Yes. In fact, it has been proven that hypnosis is an extremely unreliable memory aid. People under hypnosis are more likely to “recall” details, etc., but they are just as likely to be wrong as people who just make up stuff. Furthermore, they are more likely to believe their false memories are true.
JamesCarroll:
The belief that the soul remembers everything is an article of faith and can neither be proven nor disproven: this is religion, not science. The belief that souls even exist is an article of faith, too.
Ahhh, the famed DR. MÖEBUS strikes again !!! Is it a memory of a memory, or a memory? How can one cogitate such a thing? Zut alors.
When I was less than 6 months old, my mother put me in an old fashioned buggy and walked me down the shared driveway behind our home. I saw a garage door painted pale pink. No reason for my parents ever to have created such a memory FOR me, the home was unremarkable. Except that… it was sold to someone else when I was about 6 months old, and THEY painted the door black. So I do indeed have a memory from the age of before 6 months.
Is this a memory, or the impression of such? How do you discriminate between a memory, or a memory of a memory? Can you? Can I? When I draw on my collective memories, am I in fact re-generating a NEW memory of a memory? I know the song that was playing the morning after I made love the first time. Is the memory of where I stood, how she looked ( rather slaked, and fetching ) fundamentally different NOW than it was when I was 16??? Has it altered somehow simply because I have remembered it repeatedly in the intervening 22 years?
So many questions, so many ganglia. So, Qadgop my fine feathered friend…is it real or is it Memorex?
Cartooniverse, in my thinking your memories of the pink garage door and your love song are very close to your actual experience. I would assume that any memory that is tied with either a novel experience or a significant emotional experience would be more accurate than, say, the memory of the last time you purchased groceries.
Those unique memories are probably closer to reality than the more mundane ones, but as previous posters have noted, our memories tend to get edited, and re-remembered as time passes. I’ve remembered some things quite firmly, only to have it irrefutably demonstrated that they couldn’t have happened the way I remember them. Perception, cognition, and memory are slippery things, influenced by emotional states, biases, and subsequent events, to name only a few modifiers. A lot of details get invented on the spot, when the memory is called for, sort of a ‘default’ background setting.
Don’t know if that answers anything, and I’m not really an expert, but I did study these phenomena for a time.
I believe that you are correct here; the firing patterns, interconnectivity, and timing also encode information to some extent. Even so, the efficiency would have to be orders of magnitude greater than digital storage just to store a low quality audiovisual record of 70 years, assuming that virtually all dreams are forgotten (which may not be a good assumption, as others have pointed out). My numerical handwaves were just to provide a sense of just how much data we’re talking about.
There’s really no reason to remember it all, either. Consider this scenario:
You spent last Friday hanging out at your favorite bar with your best friend of 10 years. Nobody was there but the regulars. While you were there, you received a phone call of special significance (a relative in the hospital/won the lottery/whatever).
How much of this really needs to be stored? Well, you know what your friend looks like. Same goes for the bar and the regulars–after all, if it’s your favorite dive, you’ve probably been there a lot. All you really need to remember is the scenario description above, which can be encoded in under 300 bytes. Of course, you’ll probably remember considerably more–bits of conversation (topics and particularly stiking or funny comments), divergence from routine (e.g. your buddy, a beer drinker, orders a shot of sambuca), things like that. Your brain can and will fill in the rest with “stock footage” of the people and place. I haven’t been able to think of any evolutionary advantage in retaining all the extra detail.
As to memories recovered through hypnosis…you might visit the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. This foundation seems to express the consensus of the majority of the professional associations dealing with psychotherapy (with the exception of one dedicated to “Recovered Memory Therapy”). (Be warned that the FMSF has an axe to grind, and some awful stories to tell.) The OCRT website includes a page of quotes from organizations as the American Psychiatric Association on RMT (note that RMT is generally therapy aimed at recovering memories of abuse). This doesn’t bode well for the reliability of memories recovered or reconstructed through hypnosis.
). What most fascinated me was that the people in the study, when confronted with the stories they’d written immediately following the crash and the fact that their remembered versions differed significantly, adamantly refused to believe their own words. They believed the remembered version over the original version, even though the original version was clearly more likely to be accurate. They continued to insist the remembered version was true, even though they could read their own words, in their own handwriting, that they had written the day after the crash.
) fundamentally different NOW than it was when I was 16??? Has it altered somehow simply because I have remembered it repeatedly in the intervening 22 years?