I’m wondering if there is a name for when you’ve manufactured a memory, have learned that your memory is incorrect but maintain it just the same.
My example. When my dad was in the hospital with COVID, I got to talk to him one last time over the phone. Having never been in that particular hospital, I drew a mental image of him and his surroundings. A few days later, I went to the hospital to visit (he was unresponsive) and I got to see what he and the room actually looked like. But when I think about the call, I still picture it as I did originally even though I now know with 100% certainty that my memory is incorrect. I can’t replace it with the “correct” image. It feels kind of like the opposite of recency bias.
Dunno, but I’m wondering if an inaccurate memory of mine is a similar phenomenon.
I am STILL certain that the first time I saw Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones, I was watching with my father. That TV movie aired for the first time three weeks AFTER my father died.
These things that are described are very common and why eyewitness testimony, for example, while historically thought to be the gold standard of evidence, has been called into question.
I think the short, unscientific answer is that your mind takes shortcuts and makes “memories” based on known things. So if you remember calling your mother ten years ago, you picture her sitting on her sofa. But she got rid of that sofa 20 years prior to today? You realize that the first time you think of it, but the memory has now been implanted in your brain. The next time you think of it, you forget the qualifier.
I wouldn’t classify this as a false memory. When people say false memory they ususally mean people remembering things differently from the way they actually happened because they have been altered in some way by intervening experience.
You are actually accurately remembering what you experienced at the time of the call, namely an incorrect visualization of the room. The fact that you still remember it that way and haven’t altered it based on what you eventually saw that the room looked like is what prevents it from being a false memory.
Seanette’s post is a more classic example, where she (he? they?) has a memory of an event that she couldn’t possibly have experienced. More likely she has a memory of watching a different movie with her dad, that shared some characteristics with the Jim Jones movie, or saw the Jones movie with someone who shared characteristics with her dad and conflated the memories.
As to the persistence of the memory even when its proven false, I believe that that is more often the rule than the exception. So it would just be called a false memory. As UltraVires says, this is very common. Memories are much more fluid and unreliable than people like to think.
This is similar to what I noticed as a kid. When I was going to go somewhere I’d never been before, and I was excited about it, I’ll always picture what I thought it would be like in my mind. Of course, it was rarely the same or even similar IRL. But I used to play a game with myself where I’d try to remember my “fake” memory later after I’d been to the actual place. It was actually difficult to do! I didn’t confuse the two, but was trying to keep both in my mind as two memories.
On some further research, it’s possible that I am mixing up Guyana Tragedy with Guyana: Crime of the Century. The latter was released in the US in January 1980, so if it was aired on TV between then and late March of that year, quite possibly the one I saw. My memory of this is over 40 years old, of course, and 1980 was NOT a good year in my family, so I wouldn’t necessarily recall minor tweaks like slightly different character names, and of course the lead actor would look very similar playing the same RL person.
I think this is why the police try to interview people as soon as humanly possible after the event, before anyone has had a chance to manufacture new memories. The more time one has had to think about the event, the more likely it is that the brain will find inconsistencies in the story, and manufacture some way to resolve those inconsistencies. Years later, the person will very sincerely believe that this is how it happened, but he could well be mistaken.
Our brains do not have digital memory storage where the same event will be remembered as the same each time you recall the event. In fact, the act of recalling a memory changes that memory. Thinking about event #1 changes the memory, the next time that you recall event #1 it is gone and has now been replaced by memory event version #2.
If you have often recalled a special time or day in your life and thought of it several times, it probably didn’t happed the way you now remember it at all. You are now recalling version #20 or so of the original thing.
Every time you remember an event from the past, your brain networks change in ways that can alter the later recall of the event. Thus, the next time you remember it, you might recall not the original event but what you remembered the previous time. The Northwestern study is the first to show this.
Indeed. I’ve told this story in other threads, but it bears repeating. In 1992, the Pittsburgh Pirates were about to go to the World Series for the first (and still not yet) and only time in my life until Barry Bonds couldn’t throw out Sid Bream at home plate. I was at home watching it with my mother and father and I was 16 years old.
Years later my father told the story about how bad he felt for my cousin and I because he remembered us writhing on the floor in pain trying to jump into the TV and tag out Sid Bream at the plate. I was stunned. My cousin was not there. My cousin was grown, married, and lived three states away. If this was three years earlier, he would have been there because the three of us did watch a lot of sports together.
But my dad insisted that my cousin was there because he said he remembered it vividly. If this had been an issue in a court case, my father would have taken an oath and sworn that my cousin was there on that night, but point of fact he was not. My father’s insistence on that point led me to question my own mind and I called my cousin who verified that he was not there and remembers being at a sports bar in South Carolina when he watched it.
There is no motivation for my father to have lied about this. No money, women, or treasure, but he insisted until he died that he was correct and that I was wrong. That is what eyewitness testimony is.
ETA: My adult life. I was 3 years old in 1979 and don’t remember that Series so I don’t count it.
The eyewitness unreliability is why I used to jot down notes of important conversations or events immediately following said event. Like, within 15 minutes. The act of capturing also brings up more details & it takes a few tries to get a complete narrative.
Thanks. I lost my mom to COVID that same week and both times had to break the news to my mentally disabled brother. It was a bad week. I wish I could just forget it all.
I have memories of discussing the twisted season 2 finale of UnReal with my mom, and having seen Escape Room with Dad which we both enjoyed, and Dad’s startled verbal reaction to a character’s shocking suicide on Chicago Med.
Mom died before season 2 of UnReal even began airing, but we did watch the first season together. Dad died a few weeks before I rented Escape Room, which I know for a fact because I checked my emails about it from RedBox. As for Chicago Med, we watched the show together for several seasons and had discussed for a couple weeks what we thought was going on with the character who would kill herself, but that final episode of that story arch didn’t air for more than a week after he died.
I mentioned these things to my best friend who described a clear memory she had of showing her grandmother her first knitting project for pointers but then finding the receipt for the kit that was dated months after she died.
I think our memories aren’t functioning perfectly when we’re grieving, and maybe there’s a bit of wishing they’d happened the way we remember/believing they should’ve happened that way mixed in.