Our brains sometimes form or blend memories similar to the way we imagine the future, and about half of humans are prone to remembering things that didn’t really happen, researchers have found.
It probably happens more than you realize, said study co-author D. Stephen Lindsay, professor of psychology at the University of Victoria.
READ MORE: Remember where you were on 9/11? Study suggests memories may be distorted
“Did I see that movie or did I read that book? Did this happen to me or was that my sister? We’re not all that often consciously aware of those ambiguities but they do occur,” said Lindsay.
Your friends are telling a story about some crazy night and you nod your head and play along like you were there, but were you?
“It seems that really, memory is intimately tied up with our ability to imagine, and that what we’re doing when we imagine the future is very similar to what we do when we remember the past.
“It sometimes leads to errors — we can be reconstructing a past that’s very different from the real past.”
WATCH: Healthy lifestyle can prevent memory loss
Lindsay and his fellow researchers used information from eight previous studies on memory, with more than 400 people, to draw their conclusions.
In some cases, subjects were told their mother or another influential figure had recalled an event from their lives; the subject would be encouraged to remember details.
READ MORE: Dogs have a better memory than you think, new study says
Such suggestive influence resulted in false memories for about half the subjects, with 30 per cent “remembering” the event and offering their own descriptions, and another 23 per cent accepting to some degree that the incident had occurred.
“It tells us something about the nature and the purpose of memory. People often have the mistaken idea that memory is a special device that records the past so we can call it back into the present.”
But our memories are far from iron clad.
READ MORE: Groundhog Day? Man’s severe memory loss after visiting dentist baffles scientists
One very public — and damaging — example is NBC News anchor Brian Williams’ personal tale of riding in a helicopter that was hit by a grenade while on assignment in Iraq. Williams did report from Iraq and ride in helicopters, but he never came under enemy fire.
WATCH: NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams apologizes for Iraq helicopter fiasco
Williams later speculated that constant viewing of video showing him inspecting a damaged helicopter “and the fog of memory over 12 years, made me conflate the two, and I apologize.”
The news veteran’s credibility came into question, and he was suspended six months without pay for the memory lapse.
“It’s impossible to know with Brian Williams, whether he was in fact experiencing that kind of illusory blending of what really happened with what might have happened,” said Lindsay.
Learning more about these memory quirks could lead to breakthroughs in tools to help differentiate between accurate and inacurate memory reports, Lindsay said.
— With a file from the Asssociated Press
Comments