Is What We Remember True?

"While working with a patient whose spouse had committed infidelity, the patient told me that many of her memories had been "tarnished." "I look back at what I used to think were happy memories with a different lens," she said. "Now, knowing what was going on at the time, those memories all seem fake to me. They were based on a shared experience that wasn't real. They no longer make me smile.""

"The new information today has changed her memories of the past-today she remembers them differently. We cherish our memories-our history is so much of what gives our lives meaning and forms our identity. We think of them as existing in a storehouse we can visit whenever we need or want to. However, it turns out memories are not, in fact, immutable records. Instead, they are dynamic reconstructions, revised each time we retrieve them."

"But in 2013, researchers Alberini and LeDoux discovered that our memories actually change every time we retrieve them. They found that the very act of recalling a memory destabilizes it and thus makes it vulnerable to revision. This revision can happen because of our current perspectives, feelings, and influences, such as a therapist, friend, or something we read, hear or watch."

Personal history shapes meaning and identity, and memories are commonly treated as stable records. Memory retrieval destabilizes stored memories and makes them vulnerable to alteration. New information, shifting perspectives, emotions, and other people's interpretations can reshape recollections so that former memories feel changed or tarnished. The traditional box-and-archive model mischaracterizes memory as fixed and retrievable unchanged. Research in 2013 showed that each act of recall can modify a memory as it is re-stored. Psychologists also classify common memory errors into basic categories that help explain frequent distortions of past events.

Read at Psychology Today