Are any of your memories real?

Today we're going to be talking about your memories, and we're going to be talking about the problem with your memories and the stories that we end up telling, but also that people end up telling to us. There's a lot of scientific and psychological proof showing that maybe even up to half of our memories are not actually accurate. And when we look and we retell a story or we talk about something that happened to us in the past, people tend to do. When we remember something, we tend to do one of three things. We either generalize that memory, we delete information from that memory, or we distort information from that memory. And we're gonna dive into each one of those today. Before we do, though, I wanna make you understand that when someone is telling you a memory and they generalize, delete, or distort information, it's not malicious, it's not their fault. It's not like they're trying to tell you a false memory. Majority of people, and probably you, before hearing this, are not even aware that we actually do this. And. And so we're gonna dive into memory and how memory actually works inside of your brain and realize that some of the stuff that we actually think is true and actually happened to us in our past might not have happened in the way that we actually think that it did. Um, and it's important to remember when you think of your memory, your memory, we like to think kind of like a video recorder. Like you take a. You know, remember when you were a little kid and you had like the Hi8 tapes and you would put it inside of the VCR and you would play the. The Hi8 tape and you would watch back memories from your children, things that your childhood and things that actually, your memory works a lot different from a video recorder, though. It's not perfect playback like a video would be. A video would be perfect playback of exactly what happened in reality. Memories, though, are reconstructed rather than replayed, which is important to understand. They are reconstructed and built piece by piece rather than perfect playback, which, if you think about it, introduces chances of a lot of inaccuracies in a memory. And each time that we recall an event, our brain reconstructs that memory. And that can be influenced by a lot of different things. It could get influenced by our current feelings, our biases, new information that has come into our brain since that memory happened, which ultimately alter the original memory. So if the memory is not perfect playback, that means that the memory and actually changes over time based off of everything that's happened to you since that memory. So it's not perfect. And a lot of times what's crazy about it is because we're reconstructing the memory every single time we recall it. A lot of times the memory becomes less true the more that we recall it over time, because you're recalling the last time that you thought about the memory or the last time you spoke about the memory. You're not recalling the actual event. And it's really important to understand this about yourself because. But also to understand about other people as well. Now, before we dive into the three things that people do with the generalizing, deleting, and the distorting, there's one very important thing to talk about. Everyone is viewing the world differently. I always say we're all viewing the same thing, but we're all seeing something different. And so it's like we're all wearing different colored glasses and perceiving the world through different lenses. And so all of the things that we've been through, all of the things that I've been through, are going to make me see reality a little bit different than the way that you're going to see it. And all of the things that you've been through in your life are going to make you see reality a little bit different than the way I actually see it, and everyone else around you sees it. So we're all seeing the same thing. It's all. We're all seeing the same world, but we're all seeing it differently. And so a lot of things that pop up, like one of the things that can really distort and change your memories are stereotypes. Our memories are significantly shaped by our existing mental structures of the world. The way that we were raised, what we were taught was good and bad, the way that our parents interacted with us, the way that our parents interacted with the world and those existing mental structures are what help us organize information. And sometimes stereotypes can come in there as well. And sometimes with stereotypes, when we remember an event, what happens is we often actually fill in the gaps in our memory with what we believe likely happened based on different schemas that we have, different stereotypes that we have rather than what actually happened. And so if you think back to a memory, a lot of times you're remembering pieces of it, but then you're filling the gaps in based off of where you currently are mentally right now in your life. And that's really important to realize that stereotypes and all of our conditioning gets in the way, but also really strong emotions can impair your memory as well. A really traumatic event. When you have something that's very traumatic happen to you, and very emotionally charged events, you might remember them more vividly. But just because you remember them more vividly doesn't actually mean that you remember it more accurately. And emotionally charged memories can sometimes be a blend of fact and our emotional interpretation of those events. And so you've heard me say it on the podcast many times before, is that when your emotion is high, your logic is low. So when you actually have really, really high emotions, a lot of logic in your brain actually turns off. And so, like, if you're really terrified of something and you're really, like, terrified, and maybe you had a situation where you were really afraid of your safety, like your physical safety, you can remember that very vividly. But because it's so vivid and your emotions are so high in that moment, you're actually not processing the world 100% correctly. Because when your emotion is high, your logic is low, Parts of your brain, actually, your brain actually sends less blood flow to the logical thinking part of your brain. And so, like, I'll give you an example. Let's say me and you are walking down the street, and we're just going for a walk, and we walk by a dog that is on the other side of the fence, and the dog doesn't do anything crazy. It just barks at us, and the dog barks, and that's it. It doesn't try to jump over. It just barks at us if we're walking by that dog. And I love dogs, and I don't have any, you know, crazy memories of the past of dogs attacking me. I might not even recall the dog 20 minutes later, 30 minutes later, we even walked by a dog. But if you were attacked by a dog as a child, you might not just remember the dog, but you also might be in such a heightened state that the dog brought all of your attention and all of your focus to make sure that you were gonna be safe, and you were trying to avoid all of that, you might have gotten to a really heightened state. But let's say at the exact same time we're walking by the dog, there's also some palm trees that are across the street. And the dog barks, and you notice the dog, and all of your attention goes to the dog. But I'm looking across the street, and I see a bunch of palm trees, and I'm like, you know what? I. I've been thinking about getting palm trees installed in my house, and I'm starting to think about the palm trees. And where would the palm trees go? Oh, we put palm trees here. We put them in this place. And here's what's crazy about it. We're both walking down the same street. I might not recall the dog in any sort of way. You might not see the palm trees in any sort of way, but I would recall the palm trees, you would recall the dog. And so you have to think about that. The thing about it is we're both seeing the exact same world, but we're both remembering two completely different things based off of our past, based off of what's going on in our life, based off of our emotional charge. And so what happens is we tend to generalize. We delete or we distort. And so I became aware of this when I was younger and I first started in sales, and I was training sales reps. When I was younger, I had trained over 2000 sales reps in a company that I was at by the time I was 24. And we used to do these things called phone jams, where everyone would come into the office and we make cold calls to try to set up appointments. And it was the funniest thing because we would have some of my sales reps come in, and I'd. An hour after being there, I'd be like, hey, how's everything going? And they're like, oh, everything's okay. And I'd say, okay, well, how many appointments have you set up? Oh, I've set up no appointments. Oh, really? Why not? Oh, well, I mean, no one's home. And I would say, no one's home? No, nobody's home. And I'd say, okay, how many phone calls have you made? Oh, my gosh, I've made so many phone calls. And then I'd be like, okay, let me look at your phone real quick. And I take their phone, and in the past hour, they made, like, three phone calls, and none of those three people answered. But what they said is, no one is home. And so I would say, okay, we're in Broward county. There's, like, 1.2 million people. Broward County. Is it true that no one is home? No, it's not true. It's true that the three people that they called are not home, but what they're doing is they are generalizing everything based off of a couple circumstances that showed them that three people weren't home. And so, like, another example of this, of how we could generalize, is when we're recalling time at school. Let's say that you had a stressful Time when you were in high school, maybe you were bullied, maybe you were an outcast, maybe you were made fun of, whatever it might be. And I would say, hey, what was high school like for you? Oh, my God. High school was so hard. It was so stressful. I was so stressed out every day, right? Like, I was so stressed out every day. So it was so stressful. And even if that's not the case, every single day, we generalize all of it. Oh, my God, it was so hard. And, you know, we might forget about the fun that we had in school, the time that we had success in school, the boredom that we had in school, maybe the excitement to see our friends. And what happens is we generalize the entire memory based off of just one feeling, which was stressful. And the reason why our brains do this is because our brains tend to summarize long periods or complex experiences into more digestible narratives. And this simplification is great, but it can make it easier to retrieve information. But what happens is when we communicate it later on down the road, we generalize the entire thing. Another reason why is because we generalize, because there's the sheer amount of volume of information that's coming into your brain at any point in time, remembering every single detail of every single event is not going to happen. And it's. It's what they call cognitively overwhelming, where your brain just can't take in all the information. And so to be more efficient, what it does is it just recognizes patterns so that therefore they say, oh, yeah, well, you know, it was just really stressful. You know, could you have had a few stressful days? Quite a few stressful days, yeah. Were all of them stressful? No. So we generalize that. Like, one of the ways that we do this, like, if you're not familiar, I train a lot of coaches. I've trained over 1400 coaches, and I have a program called Business Breakthrough where I actually teach this. And one of the funny things about it is that when someone joins Business Breakthrough and we start teaching them how to grow on Instagram and how to grow their business, one of the things they say when they step into being a coach is, oh, my God, everyone on Instagram is a coach. And I'm like, there's over a billion people on Instagram. Is it true that everyone is a coach? Well, no, it's not true that everyone's a coach. But what's true is that now your reticular activating system, because you are a coach, is noticing more coaches the same way that if you buy a truck and you never saw that truck anywhere, well, now you're going to start to notice that truck. Yeah, it's in your reticular activating system. But it's not that everyone drives that truck or that everyone is a coach. And so we just tend to generalize information because the amount of sheer volume, it just becomes easier to throw information into a box and say, all of the things are this way, or all of my high school days were like this. So that's generalization, which is very, very common with people. We do it all of the time. I do it all the time. I notice other people doing it all the time. So start noticing yourself when you're generalizing information, but also notice in other people when they're generalizing information as well. The second thing we do is we delete information. So we basically remove pieces of the story or reality to fit our own narrative. So let's say someone. Let's say you had a tough relationship with your mom, right? And I were to say, hey, tell me about your relationship with your mom. Oh, my gosh, she was so tough. She was so stressful. You know, she was. She was just really hard on me. And you can retrieve so many instances where your mother was difficult. But a lot of times it becomes hard for you to pull up the memories that are great. You know, I'm sure there were. There were some times where she was loving or she was helpful. But we delete that information to fit the narrative that we have in our mind to prove our point based off of the story that we're telling. And a lot of times we don't even recognize that we're doing it. But we delete information also because not everything is noteworthy to remember. So it might not fit your narrative. But also we delete information because we. I mean, do you remember what you wore three days ago? Like, I don't know what I wore three days ago. And it does this. Your brain does this to conserve cognitive resources. There's actually a thing that's called neural pruning that your brain does. It's a process where unused neural connections are eliminated to enhance the efficiency of your nerve transmission in your brain. And so if certain memories or information are not frequently used or recall, the brain might actually prune these connections and leading to you forgetting something that actually happened or fully deleting it from your memory, which is where the deletion comes from. And then the other side of it, and the last one is we distort information. So let's say maybe you remember from your birthday party where there was a clown at your birthday party, and clown, it just scared the hell out of you. And you just remember this time when your parents hired a clown and it was the worst birthday you ever had because you were so terrified of it and you were crying in the corner and. And you know, it was like, let's say it's your sixth birthday party and you're 35 years old and you're talking to your parents. You're like, hey, remember that time you guys hired the clown and ended up being like this terrible birthday party? And your parents are like, what are you talking about? We never hired a clown. And you're like, no, there was that birthday. It was my, like, sixth birthday party where you hired a clown. And it was terrifying. And I remember wanting to leave and not be around the clown. And they're like, no, no, no, that wasn't your birthday party. That was Johnny's birthday party, your friend. And what happens is you distort information and you take a birthday that you went to of your friend where it was a terrible clown that scared you, and you're crying in the corner, and then you take that and you actually think it was your own birthday. But your whole life up until that moment, 29 years, you thought it was your birthday. So you deleted the memory and consolidated them and you didn't even realize that it was completely false. It also shows up when you accidentally alter the sequence of events. There's been many psychological studies that, based off of the questions that somebody is asked, can actually alter their memory of it and they can remember things out of order. There was one study that was done about a car crash where they showed a car crash to people, and then it would say, hey, how did the car crash happen? And they would talk about the car crash, and based off of their questions, it would actually change a person's memory. Like, how fast the car was going would change. You know, when they recalled and were trying to tell the story based off of the questions they asked the person who watched the car crash on video, how fast the car was going was changed based off the questions. They also asked questions about, like, the car crash and the glass all over the place. And people were like, yes, there was glass everywhere. And then they rewatched the video later. There was no glass. And so we change our memories. We distort them based off of the way we're trying to, the way we perceive the world, but also at the same time, the things that are going on in our heads in the moment. And so it's really important to remember this. I'm not telling you this to just try to scare the hell out of you. But mere memories are your past, and a lot of times they're not as true as you think they are, and we're just trying to fit them into a narrative, or different aspects of them have been pruned and we forget about it. So if up to 50% of what you remember could be false, then the real question is, what is true and what is false? And it's really important because so many people, a lot of people listening, think that you are who you are because of your past. But if your past is just a bunch of memories, and many of your memories are not correct, is it true that you actually are who you are based off of what happened to you in your past or based off of what you think happened to you in your past? And this is why it's really important to talk about this, because I always say, like, your past doesn't matter. It really doesn't. Because about 50% of what you're recalling from your past didn't even actually happen. So if you're saying, I am the way that I am because of my mom, I am the way that I am because of my dad, because I was bullied in school and all this stuff, no, not necessarily. So you've got to start thinking about that. So the past doesn't even really matter as much. What matters is now. What matters is what we do now, what actions we take. The problem is, if we live a life based off of a past identity that we have of ourselves and an identity that we've built off of our past, how much of that identity is actually true if 50% of your memories aren't true in the first place? And so it's really important that the past doesn't really necessarily matter, because the past isn't something that's actually true based off of what's going on in your brain. And you're not playing it like you're playing a tape in the vcr. You're playing it based off of a reconstruction of your memory, which could either be generalized, deleted, or distorted. So what matters, what you do now, not what's happened in the past. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please do me a favor. Share it on your Instagram stories and tag me in it. Robdial Jr R O B D I A L J R Also, if you love this podcast, you would probably love my new book that just came out last month. It is on the psychology of taking action and how to understand the brain that you have and how to have the manual to take the action to create the life that you want to. And if you want to get it. It's called level up. How to get focused, stop procrastinating and upgrade your life. So wherever you buy your books, whether it's online or in person, if you just look up, level up and rob dial, which is me, you should be able to buy it there. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission. Makes somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.