The Surprising Reason Your Past Still Controls You

I really want to blow your mind right now because it turns out that the science of human memory is an unbelievable area of research. It's so great. How do we actually construct memories of the past? When I'm thinking about Lincoln City, or for that matter, when I'm thinking about something really negative, when I'm thinking about something that actually happened, the way that I do that, and this is where the neuroscience gets really tricky, it's that it's not about retrieving that memory. You might think to yourself that like there's a little film a little snippet of video someplace in your brain and you go get that out of the, out of the, you know, it's like out of the archive and you throw it into the projector and watch it again and again and again. But it turns out that's not right. What it's really about when you're, when you're dredging up memories, good or bad, is reconstruction, not retrieval. Every time you conjure up the past, there's a part of the parietal lobe in your brain. It's called the angular gyrus. And what it does is it, it, it reconstructs every episodic memory, which is a whole bunch of different things. There's a whole bunch of different elements to it and they're stored in physically different locations. And so what your brain has to do every time you come up with a scene, like you tell a story or you remember a particular day, that's in a whole bunch of different locations and you put it together new every single time. That's a biological marvel, but it's prone to error. As you can imagine, if you have to reassemble it and reassemble it and reconstruct it and reconstruct it every single time, there's an opportunity as time goes by for glitches to get into that algorithm. And that's That's one of the reasons that tons of research shows that the farther away a very distinct memory is from you, the more likely you are to screw it up as you recount it, to get it actually wrong. And for you to believe absolutely photographically in something that absolutely did not happen. Now here's how the studies actually kind of work. This is a 1992 study. This is an article called Phantom Flashbulbs: False Recollections of Hearing the News About Challenger. That's the Challenger space shuttle. It exploded in 1986. Um, you probably heard about it. I remember this as a young adult when one of the space shuttles that went up into space and blew up before it got into orbit is really, really traumatic because, you know, half the country was watching it and it exploded. It was horrible. What researchers were doing, what they wanted to know was how did people actually remember it compared to what they had said had happened? And so right after the Challenger explosion, these researchers, they asked people to recount their experience right afterward when it was most faithfully recounted, a bunch of students who did that. And then 30 months later, right? Okay. So 2 and a half years later, they, they went through and recounted the experience again. So they followed the same people for 2 and a half years. That's one of the reasons they didn't publish the article for almost 4 years after, after the Challenger exploded. And in 93% of the cases, the accounts were completely inconsistent. with each other. And in every one of the cases, they said, no, that's the way it happened. And it wasn't the way that it happened. And they had evidence, videotaped evidence that the same people were telling different stories. Now, this is really interesting, right? That's one of the reasons that I can tell you what happened on 9/11. And it's probably the case that if I went back and saw my own recounting of it, had there been a videotape of me telling the story, that what I was, what I'm telling today, I'm not trying to lie. I think it's accurate, but what was going on is the angular gyrus is reassembling the memories and getting glitches and getting, you know, leaving off little pieces of video and information is being added or information is being lost because of what I'm actually living through today. I'm inadvertently editing that. Now, one thing to keep in mind, you will see in popular culture a lot and in modern media and in journalism a lot where people will be telling about the crimes and terrible things that happened to them a long time in the past. And even in the court of law and our legal system will ask people to testify in congressional testimony or in legal testimony. People will be asked to testify to things that happened to them a long time ago by memory, sometimes decades ago. When, when we see this, those of us in the behavioral science community, we always just slap our foreheads because we're like, you know, journalists are so credulous about these testimonies. Or when people write in books exactly a conversation they had when they were children or something, as if it were photographic. Or when in the therapy industrial complex in this country, professionals, counselors, social workers, psychologists, people in my line of work will ask young people, to recount, to dredge up old memories so they can actually find some evidence of trauma in their past. Those of us who, who have studied memory, we say, that's not, that's not credible. And it's not because people lie. It's because that's not, my friends, how memories work. Now that's interesting enough, but that's actually really useful when you think about it, because reconstructing memories based on current experience gives us an opportunity, but we're not quite There yet. The reason our memories change is because the reconstruction of the stories of our past, it's, we do that in accordance with current narratives and current events and current needs. In other words, you, you contaminate your memories based on what you're thinking about right now. That's one of the things that we think about. And I'll give you an example of this. Let's say that you have an old friend, somebody you hung out with in college and somebody you really, really, really liked, but it was a different time in your life. And let's say that your consciousness has been raised and you're a little bit ashamed about how you behaved when you were in college. And if there's nothing you're ashamed of that happened when you were in college, well, you've just edited your memories. Your angular gyrus is going to town here. And so what typically will happen when people have great memories, but troubled memories, because you're not happy about the way that you behaved, you're sort of, you have regret, or you have a sense of shame about great old times. What that will do is that will torque the way that you think about the people that were in those memories. You'll start to think more negatively about the people that you wouldn't have had a negative thought about at all. Another example of this is that, you know, college students will come home from college weirdly convinced that they suffered all sorts of trauma because their parents are so horrible in their political views. This is one of the things that we find. Now, this is actually a form of predation by, by people who are counseling young people sometimes to say, oh, really? Tell me about your dad. Tell me about your mom. Tell me about their political views. And when they hear it, they'll say, boy, who hurt you? Who hurt you? And all that's doing is inducing people to negatively valence memories that would not have had a negative valence otherwise, as the angular gyrus is reconstructing episodic memory in their And their post-adolescent brains. And it has nothing to do with post-adolescence. It has to do with brains more than anything else, which is one of the reasons that people will come back and say, I didn't realize how screwed up my family life was until I went to college. And the reason is because somebody who does not have your interests at heart was editing your memories by inducing you to think about a different way to dredge up these pictures and, and to valence them with a current way of thinking that they're trying to give to you. That's not great, but it's not even great when we do it to ourselves. Now, the shifting memories, in a way, they're not entirely inaccurate because they're assembled from a pretty partial set of details. And the exact set that we remember changes every time as we dust the memory off. And by the way, your new politics might be right. You know, the way, the new way that you live and your new morals, they might be right, but it can ruin perfectly good experiences and turn them into bitterness along the way. It's interesting in the studies on this that we see, I'll put one in that. There's a, there's a really nice paper in Social Cognition called Emotion and Memory Research, a Grumpy Overview that shows that when people are afraid, if you, when they, when you induce them to be fearful in laboratory settings, you show them scary movies, for example, and then you ask them to remember scenes from their own youth. They'll think about the threats from those times. They'll think of scary, scary parts of those particular memories. But the same is true also when you make people really, really, really happy. And when people are full of love and they're laughing a lot and you induce them to think about kind of negative things in their past, they'll find them really funny at the end of the day. And you know, you've had this experience. I promise you, you've had this experience. If you think about this a little bit where you think about something awful that happened and you're with your friends and you're having a good time and you're telling the story and you, it's like for the very first time you recount the story and you're cracking up while you're telling the story. That's because you provided a positive valence to what had been a negative memory. You're filling in the gaps as you reconstruct it with positivity.