The illusion of remembering: The inaccuracies of human memory

Do you have vivid recollections of getting lost in a supermarket as a child? Or sledging down a hill in the snow? But can you be certain that you actually experienced this? Think about it carefully. Do you actually have a memory of this, or did you merely see it in a photograph, or did someone tell you that? Human memory is, in reality, incredibly fallible, capable of being influenced by external forces to such an extent that false memories are created.

False memories are recollections of events that did not happen; they are not mere mix-ups of existing memories, but entirely new fabrications. These memories can be created in a multitude of ways, but Mazzoni and Kirsch believe that the most effective is the combination of belief and recollection.

Belief is identified as the “truth value attributed to the occurrence of an event”, while recollection is the “ensemble of perceptual and emotional characteristics that people may perceive as reminiscent of the original experience”. In essence, to most effectively create a false memory, the individual must believe that the event could have feasibly happened and can imagine the collection of images, sounds, and emotions that would be expected to accompany that event. For example, you could be told that as a child that you got lost in the park. Can you believe that it might have happened? And can you visualise the playground, the laughter or talking of other people, and the fear that you might have felt? Combine those together, and a false memory could easily be created.

This susceptibility of human memory does not merely have an impact on our own, individual lives, perhaps confusing the perceptions of ourselves and our past, but it can also have a genuine and life-altering impact on others

Alternatively, as Loftus and Palmer identified, false memories can also be suggestion-induced. The researchers picked 150 students, who were shown a video of a car accident. They were then asked a series of questions, including how fast the vehicle was going when the accident occurred. 50 subjects were asked how fast the cars were going when they hit each other, 50 were asked using the keyword smashed, and 50 were not asked at all. One week later, the subjects were then asked whether they recalled seeing any broken glass. It was found that those who had been asked the smashed question were significantly more likely to answer ‘yes’, with 16 answering yes compared to the seven who were given the hit question. As such, they concluded that external forces could influence memory, with suggestive or leading questions being capable of creating expectations of an event. These expectations ultimately can shift perceptions and beliefs to such an extent that they supplant the true memory and create a false one in its place.

This susceptibility of human memory does not merely have an impact on our own individual lives, perhaps confusing the perceptions of ourselves and our past, but it can also have a genuine and life-altering impact on others. Eyewitness testimony is perhaps the most obvious and important instance of false memories having vast consequences. You would think that eyewitnesses are highly accurate sources of information since they directly saw the event. But the suggestion that false memories can be created suddenly casts doubt on the reliability of witnesses, particularly when time has elapsed, or if they have had the opportunity to talk to others. The Innocence Project asserts: “eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions in [the USA],” and so, it is vital that techniques are created to try and minimise the margin of error in human memory.

Human memory is exactly the same, an extraordinary organ that has the capacity to hold millions of memories, but equally as capable of being manipulated into something that does not resemble reality at all

Geiselman and Fisher developed the cognitive interview, designed to gather information from eyewitnesses in a way that minimises the influence of external factors. There are five key aspects to this process. The first is that it must be conducted as soon as possible after the incident, reducing the chance of multiple witnesses describing their perceptions to each other, which could then be imposed on others. During the interview, witnesses are encouraged to report everything, reverse the narrative order, explain it from an alternative perspective, and reinstate the context of the event. This technique means that witnesses are not exposed to leading questions and should be unable to guess what should have logically followed next, instead describing the events only as they remember. Therefore, the ‘belief’ and ‘recollection’ that is required to create false memories should be eliminated in their entirety. It is a far more effective means of increasing the accuracy of human memory; of course, the unpredictability of human memory can never be truly controlled.

Despite these attempts to minimise errors, humanity is a decidedly fickle species, capable of fluctuating perceptions in a remarkably short amount of time. Human memory is exactly the same, with the brain being an extraordinary organ that has the capacity to hold millions of memories, but equally as capable of being manipulated into something that does not resemble reality at all. So, the question that must be asked is whether you can rely on and control the one thing that is thought to be a guarantee, yourself?