The other day someone asked me if I had a copy of an email, and before I could respond someone else chimed in, “oh, he’s got it…he saves everything.” Personally, I’m surprised I’m in the minority in this — in fact I often worry about all the stuff that I’m not saving.
Part of the reaction I get is along the lines of “why bother?” The answer is simple — your brain is lying to you. Most of us have intuitions that we are able to accurately remember the past in great detail. My wife and I can have a disagreement about some event that had 10 years ago, and my memory of the event is rock solid. She is just misremembering it.
Except the times I’ve gone back to verify that, my memory is only right about half the time, and often my memory of an event is wildly off on what really happened. And that’s not something peculiar to my memory, but rather a hallmark of how our brains work.
As Jonah Lehrer (from whom I swiped the title of this post) notes , the upshot of research into the fallibility of memory is that the more we remember something the less likely we are to remember it accurately.
After all, we like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them. But they aren’t. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes. The larger moral of the experiment is that memory is a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information. It shows us that every time we remember anything, the neuronal structure of the memory is delicately transformed, or reconsolidated.
So when it comes to memory, distrust and verify is the best approach. Fortunately, we have the tools now not only to easily preserve everything, but also to quickly search through that record when it becomes necessary to determine what really happened that one time when…