False Memory : The Frontal Cortex

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Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, the Boston Globe and is a contributor to Radio Lab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.

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False Memory

Posted on: May 14, 2008 10:57 AM, by Jonah Lehrer

One of the delicious ironies of memory is that, even when our recollections are utterly false, they still feel true. Consider this wonderful tale from the upcoming season of This American Life (I've loved the first two episodes, by the way):

Or as Proust put it: "How paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory...The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years." That bleak view of memory jives with lots of recent work looking at the cellular reconsolidation of memory, or how the act of remembering a memory changes the memory itself. (To make a long story short, remembering also requires protein synthesis.) This means, of course, that the more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes.

Find more posts in: Brain & Behavior

Comments (10)

Now you see why the police go over your story, again, and again, and again, and again, until they get a story they like -- and then they have you sign their version, and there is no record of your original story.

Posted by: Grizzled Cynic | May 14, 2008 11:12 AM

Attributed to Benjamin Disraeli is the comment, "Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen." But it is not a phenomenon that requires years of gestation. Experience in front of juries has caused me to borrow from Disraeli's observation to offer the instruction, "A jury sees more than it remembers, and remembers more than it sees. "

Posted by: jay french | May 14, 2008 12:05 PM

Does this mean we should stop studying for exams?

Posted by: Michael Woods | May 14, 2008 2:33 PM

There is some wonderful writing on this topic in "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)," one of my favorite recent pop-psychology books. The phenomenon Jonah is talking about here turns out to explain a lot: the daycare scares of the 1980s, the huge numbers of people who think they've been abducted by aliens, and, as the Grizzled Cynic up there notes, police tactics in getting a confession, even if it's false and coerced. Seriously, the book is well worth reading if this kind of thing interests you. No, I'm not the author.

Posted by: Mary | May 14, 2008 6:08 PM

That bleak view of memory jives with lots of recent work . . .

I think the word you're looking for is "jibe".

Posted by: Mr. Language Person | May 15, 2008 1:17 AM

Grizzled Cynic is onto something. Legal presentation is frequently about fashioning a compelling central narrative. Was it Otto von Bismarck who quipped that the two things you don't want to see being made are sausages and law? But it is also easy to become overly cynical. See Daniel Schachter's book, "The Seven Sins of Memory." No, I'm not the author nor am I acquainted with the author.

Posted by: Alan | May 15, 2008 11:50 AM

Interesting, though I'm left confused.
Also,your last statement 'that the more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes.' sounds very paradoxical, though I'm not sure how one defines 'remembering' . Don't we all try to remember more, what we want to remember better ? Can you throw some light ?

Posted by: Aprameyan | May 16, 2008 9:02 AM

This was a wonderful, concrete example.

Is there any significance (meaning, any known pattern) to the husband's remembering so many essentially irrelevant details -- the leaves on the tree, the stitching on Jackie's clothing?

For me these echo the precise but irrelevant details in urban legends -- e.g., you can never get closer than to the source of the story than "my ex's cousin's next-door neighbor," but you learn that the main character was eating a BLT sandwich from a paper sack on a park bench in Chicago on May 19th.

Posted by: Dave Ferguson | May 20, 2008 2:21 PM

http://www.batteryfast.co.uk/

Posted by: battery | January 1, 2009 11:42 AM

Or as Proust put it: "How paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory...The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses,

Posted by: geciktirici | February 15, 2009 4:13 PM