Memory : the truth about the lies you tell yourself

"Your memory is unreliable even though you think it isn’t, and it will lead you astray even though you think it won’t."

It just means that your memory allocation is not high enough to accomplish the specific task

Your life has unfolded much differently than you remember it now. Does that surprise you?

All of the good times you look back on now didn't really happen the way you think they did. Many of the bad times weren’t nearly as terrible as you remember. And all the stories you hear about the “good old days” from your parents and grandparents? Mostly fabrications.

This is what it means to be a human being.We’re the most advanced and intelligent creatures on Earth, yet we’re still riddled with flaws—most of them unrecognizable to us. One of the biggest is our inability to accurately remember the things that happen to us. This is our lot in life, and we’ve learned to deal with it quite effectively but, from time to time, it wreaks considerable havoc.

For all of the beautiful and terrifying experiences we capture through the synapses in our brains—the snapshots that form our lives—it turns out that relying on memories to inform our future decision-making may be a bigger risk than we once thought.Perhaps this is why we developed the written language—a less than conscious realization that we’re not to be trusted with our own thoughts for longer than it takes to write them down.

We have a very strange relationship with stories, especially stories that are supposed to reveal important evidence to us. The oddity is that we tend to believe stories—especially eyewitness accounts—over any other form of evidence even though we’ve proven that first-hand accounts are often completely unreliable and the least worthy of our trust.

No doubt you’ve participated in some type of gossip involving the bizarre actions of a friend or relative. Lacking an explanation from the source, everyone, including you, had a theory that was “more right” than everyone else’s. Our brains don’t cope well with missing information. We can’t accept incomplete stories, so in place of confusion we create our own connections, regardless of their accuracy.When it comes to uncovering the truth, our unique gift of imagination may actually be more of a curse. 

You may remember only what you subconsciously want to, whether it’s accurate or not.Your memory is highly susceptible to contamination. Another strike.

Getting Better at Remembering :

The memories you create of the events in your life are suspect, highly susceptible to contamination, and there’s no way to predict with any regularity what, in fact, you’ll actually remember.It’s a grim outlook, but all hope is not lost for memory. Despite its unreliability, there is one way that you can carefully and accurately control your mind: intentional memory.When you set out to learn something, learn it, and then remember it, you’re creating what will be referred to as an intentional memory. Schools and education programs across the world rely on intentional memory to teach the skills we need to survive together in society but, on the whole, they do it very poorly.

If you need proof, just try to remember anything important that you learned on purpose in your least favorite high school class. Perhaps the vague concepts remain, but chances are you’ll struggle to pull any truly useful information from them.What most schools fail to implement is a good system for remembering to remember. Where they fail, though, you can excel.

The useful information that you learn, remember and, most importantly, how long you remember it, is governed by a scientific phenomenon called the forgetting curve. It’s an equation discovered in the late 1800s by Hermann Ebbinghaus through a series of exhaustive self-studies.

Lately, I’ve been keeping a daily journal and, rather than focusing on the story of my day or how I felt, I’ve been recording only the cold, hard facts, much like a policeman would take notes at the scene of a crime. It’s noticeably distant and not very fun—sometimes even embarrassing—but perhaps it will help me someday remember my world as it really was. Of course, there’s no evidence to suggest that it actually will.Maybe our delicate and ever-changing memories serve a purpose. We probably shouldn’t be using them to accurately recall facts or decide the fates of the accused, but maybe we can still use them for our own enjoyment and amusement. Maybe we can still use them to understand what it is to be human—what it feels like to be inconsistent and occasionally irrational.