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It seems like the brain fills in fragments of memories it deems unimportant, can't locate, or that have been otherwise lost. It doesn't make sense for an event

It seems like the brain fills in fragments of memories it deems unimportant, can't locate, or that have been otherwise lost. It doesn't make sense for an event to take place without a location so your brain picks a likely location and injects that into the memory. Knowing that memories are like Flash and subject to being rewritten when recalled is a bit unsettling but the research seems clear that it definitely happens. It also explains why eye-witness testimony is so unreliable: the brain ignores trivial and unimportant details (the boring shirt some random person was wearing) but when pressed to recall the details your brain fills in (I would have remembered him being naked so he must have been wearing something boring). Even tiny hints can produce fake memories. Once this process takes place people will swear that their memory is correct because for them it is the way things happened!

mncharity 10y ago
When I wish to capture everything I can recall about an event, I do what I call a "brain-dump". Turn on a webcam, and spew. I'd call it trace-like, except for having to manage attention and coverage. A memory fragment pops up, and you describe its attributes. Along with extra characterizations like "low confidence" and "feels synthetic". Grab a next fragment and repeat. But with multiple fragments at hand, which one to do first? You may not be able to find the deferred ones again. And for each topic/period, there's diminishing returns, so at what point to you move to the next topic. And for recent events, or memorable longer ones like travel vacations, there are a lot of fragments to wade through. You don't remember a conversation, you remember flashes of visuals and sounds and variously fuzzy "something vaguely like X was said". So locally its trance-like focus, but globally its interview management and triage. Anyway, point is, my experience is the fragments are small and scattered and disorganized. And you can feel them rotting as you handle them. You basically get one pass or few at each fragment. Then they're smoothed over trash. Yesterday's commute? Um, "touched a cold door handle". "Might have been vertical". "That's what I've got". Pausing on the handle might or might not clarify the vertical. And you can probe with "was it a push? was it a pull?". Might get "maybe held the door open for someone? but that feels a bit synthetic". The cold handle starts out with the feel of a crisp, unhandled fragment. Recognizably different then the probes and the maybes. But that difference decays with handling. Revisit it a couple of times, and there's less and less you can say. It all feels suspect. "Whatever I said earlier, because now I have absolutely no idea what's real". Eyewitness testimony seems largely farce. And most memories with temporal order or a storyline seem likely to be synthetic.

mncharity 10y ago

When I wish to capture everything I can recall about an event, I do what I call a "brain-dump". Turn on a webcam, and spew. I'd call it trace-like, except for having to manage attention and coverage. A memory fragment pops up, and you describe its attributes. Along with extra characterizations like "low confidence" and "feels synthetic". Grab a next fragment and repeat. But with multiple fragments at hand, which one to do first? You may not be able to find the deferred ones again. And for each topic/period, there's diminishing returns, so at what point to you move to the next topic. And for recent events, or memorable longer ones like travel vacations, there are a lot of fragments to wade through. You don't remember a conversation, you remember flashes of visuals and sounds and variously fuzzy "something vaguely like X was said". So locally its trance-like focus, but globally its interview management and triage. Anyway, point is, my experience is the fragments are small and scattered and disorganized. And you can feel them rotting as you handle them. You basically get one pass or few at each fragment. Then they're smoothed over trash. Yesterday's commute? Um, "touched a cold door handle". "Might have been vertical". "That's what I've got". Pausing on the handle might or might not clarify the vertical. And you can probe with "was it a push? was it a pull?". Might get "maybe held the door open for someone? but that feels a bit synthetic". The cold handle starts out with the feel of a crisp, unhandled fragment. Recognizably different then the probes and the maybes. But that difference decays with handling. Revisit it a couple of times, and there's less and less you can say. It all feels suspect. "Whatever I said earlier, because now I have absolutely no idea what's real". Eyewitness testimony seems largely farce. And most memories with temporal order or a storyline seem likely to be synthetic.