Why most of your memories are probably not even real

It is widely accepted that memories play a central role in making us who we are. After all, what could make us who we are on these tracks through space and time that we call our lives, other than the things we have done and the things that have happened to us?

But these belong to the past, and if they are to have any effect on us they now must be retained. It is memory’s job to do this. In short, the past makes us who we are, and memory preserves the past in us. 

The connection between memory and the past is, however, more complicated than this. Most obviously, we have all forgotten far more than we remember. If we were books of memories, almost every page would be dominated by ink-black redaction. Memory is supposed to work by retaining a past that forms us. But it doesn’t seem to do this at all. The vast majority of any person’s past will not be found in their memories, as I explore in The Book of Memory. 

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This is only the beginning. Suppose we switch our attention from what we have lost to what remains. Our memories, we now know, are likely to be inaccurate, often very inaccurate. Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch’s classic study of memories of the Challenger explosion – the space shuttle that blew up on take-off in January 1986 – was the first to show this. Neisser gave his students two questionnaires – one the day after the explosion and the other three years later.

The comparisons were striking. For example, in her 1986 questionnaire, GA reports she was in the cafeteria when she heard the news, and it made her so sick she was unable to finish her lunch. In 1989, however, she reports that she was, “in my dorm room when some girl came running down the hall screaming, ‘The space shuttle just blew up.’”

On a scale of zero to seven – where zero meant that nothing was remembered correctly and seven meant that every aspect of the report was correct – 11 of the 44 subjects scored zero; five of those zeros nevertheless expressed high confidence in the accuracy of their memories. These results have been replicated in so many further studies that it is difficult to doubt them. Memories, in certain respects at least, are endemically inaccurate. 

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We now know why this is: it is a consequence of the way in which memories are retrieved. The creation of a memory is known as encoding. When an event is first experienced, it enters short-term memory. Short-term memories are notably labile – vulnerable to distortion by external factors. Encoding is a biological construction operation in which – through a series of gene activations and resulting protein synthesis – new connections are built between neurons. The result is what’s known as the consolidation of a memory in a more stable, long-term form.  

The biggest discovery in memory science in recent decades is that the process of memory retrieval is very like the original process of encoding. When a memory is recalled, it returns to the unstable, labile state characteristic of short-term memory. It must then undergo a process of reconsolidation – biological reconstruction of the sort that occurred during consolidation. Inaccuracy is a consequence of this. Every time a memory is retrieved, and re-assumes a labile state, there is a danger it will be distorted.

Plato compared memory to a tablet of wax. Impressions (experiences) are initially formed in the soft wax, which is susceptible to smudging. The wax then hardens, forming more robust long-term memories. Put in these terms, whenever we retrieve a memory, the wax must soften again. It is not inevitable that the newly labile memory will be ‘smudged’, but there is always a chance.  

Memories are supposed to make us who we are by connecting us to a past that has formed us. However, not only is almost all this past unaccounted for by memory,  even when we do remember, our memories are likely to be inaccurate, sometimes wildly so, and the more we try to remember the more inaccurate they become. Ironically, every time we retrieve a memory, there is a danger it will take us further from the past it is supposed to capture.

How, then, can our memories make us who we are? They can, I am still convinced of this. But that is only because we are not what we have taken ourselves to be. Created by a past we may be, but we also create ourselves – sometimes bearing an uncanny resemblance to fictional characters. Moreover, some of our memories are not straightforwardly our own – they are as much the memories of others as they are ours.

Rather than being isolated individuals, we overlap with other people. Far from being rigid and impermeable, the boundaries between us are sometimes gossamer thin.

The Book of Memory by Mark Rowlands is out now (Granta, £14.99).

You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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