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.
The traditional view of memories is that of a “box-and-archive” model–the memory is created and stored for future use. 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........