The Memory Game

From Neurologica, Novella is looking at our memories, the faults in them, and why it can't be a basis for scientific arguments. Memory can be tricky, over the years I have noticed the various gaps and alternations of my own.

For instance, I thought I went to one doctor for a treatment, but I looked back at my records and it was another doctor, in another city. My visual memory says one thing, I can visualize it, but I know I was in another city at the time.

Memory is a funny thing. A tricky thing.

If people sat back and took stock of their memories, they'd be shocked.

The Foibles of Human Memory

To put it bluntly, human memory stinks. Well, everything is relative, so let me clarify – it works fine, even quite well, for the purposes for which it evolved. However, now we humans are trying to survive for 80+ years in a complicated technological civilization with brains that evolved on the savanna and are designed to work for maybe 40 years.

Our memories work well for some things. Memory is largely based on pattern recognition, and this remains our cognitive strong point. We remember patterns well, we can see correlations between different patterns, we can see underlying meaning in patterns. However, this also biases our memory. We tend to anchor our memories to meaningful patterns – and this helps us remember and also we tend to remember the important stuff and forget the not-so-important stuff.

But the flip side of this is that we are not very good at remembering details. The details of our memories tend to fade, even when the big picture remains. Worse, the details change to suit the patterns we think we remember. In other words, we remember well the emotions of an event, the significance it has in our lives, and the meaning we attach to it. The little details then morph over time to enhance the emotion, significance, and meaning of our memory of the event. We even make up new details as necessary.

This is why subjective memory (read anecdotal evidence) is not very useful to science. Science works in a way very opposite to that of human memory. Memory focuses on the meaning and then alters the details to fit. Science endeavors to start with the details (often obsessing over the details with fanatical fidelity) and then derive the meaning from them.