Scatterbrain. Henning Beck
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a door), they will not incorporate this false information into their memories.17 The reason is presumably due to the fact that female sex hormones decrease one’s receptivity to minor details (especially when they are spoken about rather than seen). To put it another way: a woman on hormonal birth control leaves you not with a poem but with a photographic impression. Dear male readers, please keep this in mind when you decide to offer a gift to the woman of your heart or think that she won’t mind if you offer a lyrical description of yourself in place of a dashing photo. And one more warning, before you dope up your next testimony witness with oral contraceptives: whether the same outcome is true for men has never been studied. This is most likely due to a lack of willing male test subjects.
Possibility 3: Be aware of your memory’s weaknesses—preferably in the very moment that you are experiencing a new bit of information for the first time and then committing it to memory. Do not underestimate the fact that you often tinker with your memory and constantly distort it. When it comes to recalling something as precisely as possible, it may be harmful to try imagining it so intensely. Often the first (and the most likely unfalsified) memory is the best and most objective one, and witness testimonies can benefit from allowing witnesses to assess their level of certainty right off the bat. If your goal is to retain the original memory, less feedback is more.18 The more often we compare our memory with the comments, assessments, and perspectives of others, the more we distort it. This may sound awful, but there is an important underlying principle to it.
Why false is sometimes better
AT THIS POINT in the chapter you have learned—if nothing else—just how shoddy your memory is, at least, from the perspective of accuracy. At the same time, our brain has always been capable of saving information with exact precision. But it doesn’t. The reason is because a smidgen of false memory can have enormous advantages.
One advantage of this particular memory weakness is obvious: it saves time and mental effort if we don’t have to remember all of the details from a list of words or an event but only remember the corresponding context. If you see fifteen words that fit the category “car,” you might easily add an extra word from the same car-related category, but you will not add a word having to do with hobby gardening. In other words, it’s generally much more important for the brain to recognize the big picture than to hone in on the details. We don’t draw detailed information from our surroundings in order to piece it back together again like a puzzle. Instead, we tend to use individual bits of information (words, images, objects) as cues to which we then invent a matching framework of meaning. This allows us to navigate very quickly instead of getting bogged down processing a gigantic pile of details and information from our surroundings. This is why we are able to locate objects much more quickly if they seem to fit their setting19 (i.e., a pan in the kitchen instead of in the bathroom). It’s a mental shortcut of sorts that saves us energy, though unfortunately with a little less precision.
Imagine that you are tasked with understanding a situation by quickly and intuitively piecing together words or objects. For example, cross out two words that don’t fit into the following list:
House, tree, bush, cabin, apartment
What has to happen in order for you to be able to extract “tree” and “bush” from the other words? Concentrating on the particulars of each word is not as important as seeing their semantic characteristics (their meaning) in relation to the other objects. It doesn’t matter if, three days later, you can’t remember whether it was house, cabin, and apartment, or home, cabin, and apartment. The main point is that you still have the concept of “shelter” in mind. Interestingly, the brain region that processes meaning is identical for both true and false memories (the lateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the frontal cortex that is also involved in processing the meaning of words). This may be one reason why people who are particularly prone to forming fake memories tend to perform very well on association tests.20
Seen from this angle, it’s possible to interpret such over-exuberant false memories somewhat differently, as an especially creative strength of the brain. If our brain were to always function with precision and perfect replicability, like a computer that is able to open up a saved photo with the same quality, we would never have the opportunity to use our memory for new thoughts. Astonishingly, the formation of false memories goes hand in hand with the formation of new ideas and problem solving.21 Test subjects were particularly spontaneous and intuitive in coming up with umbrella terms for groups of words if they had first been stimulated to create false memories. The ability to think associatively, to draw correlations, or invent them is only possible if we free ourselves from rigid forms of memory and recollection. Errant memories are a necessary by-product of the way in which we think—namely, that we are not so much fixated on data or details as on meaning and stories.
It’s not true, but it sure rings true
MEMORIES HAVE TWO main functions for us. We use them to construct an identity with our past and to learn from our experiences in order to improve going forward. For both of these functions, our memories need to be flexible, not static. The caveat is that flexibility also implies vulnerability.
The more we remember, the more we embellish our recollections and thereby distort our memories. However, in order to plan for future events, this is precisely the trait that we need. A what-would-happen-if thought experiment only works if we aren’t clinging too fiercely to specific details of the past but, instead, let ourselves go a teensy bit mad. This madness occurs spread across a collection of about half a dozen brain regions that are predominantly concentrated in the frontal and parietal lobes (and in the hippocampus network). It doesn’t matter too much which specific regions these are. What matters is that these regions are as much involved in simulating future events as in “recalling” things that already happened.22 In other words, in order to be able to imagine something happening later on, we have to deconstruct that which has already taken place and to creatively glue it back together again, like a collage. Of course, this pushes against our desire for a dependable memory and—admittedly—can possibly lead to a mismatched or falsified memory in the end. However, the advantage is much greater; namely, we are able to imagine virtually any possible future (even one that is impossible). It is only by accepting our memory failures that we are able to have and entertain new ideas.
And if you’re worried that we forget a lot of things or remember them falsely, please don’t forget that memories are not obligated to explain the world as it is. We use memories much more to help us feel comfortable in the here and now. Studies have shown that people very deliberately (though not necessarily consciously) falsify memories of their past in order to generate a harmonious state in the present. For example, if one asks a group of students to recall their abilities “only a short time ago” at the beginning of the semester, they evaluate themselves as having been similarly capable and experienced as in the present moment when they are being questioned. But if a second group of students is asked to remember how they began their semester “back then, quite a while ago,” they estimate their earlier selves as being more naive and immature—even when the start of the semester is no further in the past than it was with the first group of students.23 The more you were a blithering idiot in the past, the better you appear today. Our past self is a fabulous scapegoat because it can’t defend itself. This is how we can excuse the negative and persuade ourselves of the positive, twisting the past in order to construct a consistent image of ourselves.
In general, every one of our memories is false and, each time we recall one, it becomes even more false. But if this wasn’t the case, and if our memories were imprinted once and for all at the moment when they occur, we would never be able to go in afterwards to “update” and expand these memories later on. This kind of unmodifiable, static memory prison is not a very nice state to imagine, especially because you would then be too inflexible to imagine much of anything anymore. It is thus a good thing that we often make so many mistakes when we are remembering things. Maybe our memories are not quite as true, but they certainly ring true.
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