The fiction of memory

What Beth's research really shows is that our—not just what we see and what we hear—but our memories can actually be distorted. They're plastic and malleable. There's misinformation everywhere. We're getting a constant flow of this misinformation, so it can be from a stop sign or a yield sign or from other people. Think about how this would work. The media could give you information that might bias you in a particular way and create a false memory or an impression of something. But it's only a false memory because it never happened. It's a real memory. You really experienced it—just like you see the Dalmatian dog and you hear those sounds. It's not like this memory is inferior to others. Beth's work, for me, really demonstrates that what we remember is shaped by the sum of our experiences. So if memory is not working like a video camera, it's hard to even recognize that you've made an interpretation at all. All of this stuff is coming at you, and it's just like a visual illusion: you remember it vividly and it's actually happening to you.

Let's use and example to make that a bit more concrete: with a visual illusion. Now this is an illusion that you and I as—well, as one of my honor students discovered a couple of years ago, and I think we can use it to really highlight the fact that we really have no control. We're completely unaware of having made, an interpretation and the illusion happens to us in the same way that these memory illusions are just as real as actual memories. Now we're going to present you with some faces on the screen, and I want you to keep your eyes on the center of the cross in the middle of the screen. Don't look directly at the faces. Keep your eyes on the cross. Okay, are you ready? Here they are. By this point in the video, the faces should look a little bit strange. They might look a little bit alien-like. Some of the eyes might be a little larger than you'd expect, and they might look a little bit paler. But if you replay this section of the video and look at the faces again, you'll see that they're completely normal. We're not playing any tricks on you. There's no Photoshopping going on. What's happening is that the previous face is distorting the face that follows it. For example, if one of the faces has small, beady, little eyes and it's followed by a face with regular-sized eyes, then these regular-sized eyes look huge. Again, you can't help but to see these faces as distorted. That's the nature of the illusion. There's nothing that you can do about it. You're not even aware that your visual system is doing any sort of comparison. It's just happening to you. So think about what's happening here. With this visual illusion, when the faces are flashing up and they look alien-like, it's nothing that you're doing. It's just happening to you. This is across our senses, so, yes, it's happening in vision but it also happens in hearing and could even be happening in smell and taste. We haven't tested these things. But it's definitely happening in memory. We're unaware that we've made and interpretation, and the sum of our perception is shaped by the sum of our experiences.