Summary: This episode explores how our memories change over time, using the example of the “War of the Ghosts” story. Participants recalled the story differently, making it more coherent and altering details based on their perceptions. Ultimately, memories are not just accurate recordings; they are reconstructed narratives that can drift and transform.
real
human memory in the brain is nothing like a movie but much more like the operator game where in the message becomes increasingly distorted (View Highlight)
people morph the story to make it consistent with what’s going on in their heads (View Highlight)
your culture plays a massive role in shaping the way that you interpret and remember information so as you recall a story you unconsciously mold it to align with your cultural background and your beliefs and your expectations (View Highlight)
New highlights added August 23, 2024 at 6:52 PM
the enemy of memory isn’t time it’s other memories each new (View Highlight)
New highlights added August 30, 2024 at 1:14 PM
if the memory is emotional you have a much higher confidence in its accuracy but it turns out that doesn’t necessarily improve the accuracy itself (View Highlight)
consistency was only 63% after 1 year and 57% after 3 years people’s memories about their emotions were particularly inaccurate with only about 40% consistency after one year despite all this confidence in these
memories remained high (View Highlight)
most of that data about our personal lives never gets correction from the outside (View Highlight)
we are built of
cells which have a totally different algorithmic scheme than our computers and as a result the past can only leave a record by modifying the details of neurons and their genetic expression which is a mind-blowingly ingenious property of these particular cells but it ain’t a hard drive or a video recorder that records things accurately and that’s why memory always drifts (View Highlight)