You Cannot Trust Your Memory

One thing that your memory does is play tricks on you. It takes odd scenes from particular days and builds a narrative around them. I can remember odd things about first times in a variety of situations but I can’t guarantee that those things actually happened in that way or whether they were remotely important at the time. The memories almost certainly reflect what I ended up thinking about the situation. So, I think I remember standing in the playground on my first day at Secondary school and being incredibly nervous. Was I? Who knows? I am almost certainly fixing my memory based on the fact that I ended up hating the place. If I had ended up enjoying it I would no doubt have remembered a much more positive moment from that morning.

We develop a narrative around situations that make sense to us, but if we talk to people who were with us we may find out that either events did not happen in those ways or that no one else even vaguely remembers them. The film Inside Out perfectly reflects this view of memories and was based on what is known about the way that the brain stores memories and how those memories are analysed. I am not saying that the events other bloggers are recounting didn’t happen, but I can guarantee that if there were 10 other people there they would remember 10 other ways that it played out. The way that someone reacts to the event is almost certainly after the fact rather than contemporaneous. So, be careful what you think you remember as it almost certainly very personal and very selective.