Stories from our childhoods, traumatic events and lessons we have learned are people’s go-to tales when gathering a crowd. It may be a party story an event or our aunts and uncles reminding us of a haunting memory. Memory is often and mostly flawed, but these are the narratives that make us, us.
Most of us have heard the same three tales our parents have told about crazy college life, dumb decisions and what they thought was horrible then is hilarious now. While memorizing every turn their story takes, we know there is always one aspect of the tale that changes.
Old age, the recurrence of the memory and the emotional ties connected to them make the stories change over time. There is psychology behind the way we remember long term events and how our memory changes with time.
As a psychology major who studies cognition and memory, I can say a few things about humanity’s faulty memory.
This can be explained by a couple of things, mostly that people are terrible at retaining memory.
Long term memory can be broken up into two categories: explicit memory and implicit memory. Explicit memory is the conscious recall of memories. This can be either episodic, which is events and semantic. Semantic memories are general facts behind specific memories. Implicit memory is the nonconscious recall of memories. This is muscle memory or procedural memories that don’t have to be thought of to do. This can be riding a bike, being conditioned (Pavlov style).
The stories we tell are explicit memories that are encoded by gist and verbatim information. Verbatim information is the tiny details we often forget. This is the color of shirt we were wearing and if the sign we passed while driving was a stop or yield sign. Gist information is the gist of what happened. When remembering long term memories, it is unlikely we will remember verbatim information.
It is easy to remember our stories differently because of verbatim and gist information. Gist information supports false memories, verbatim information suppresses false memories. The more often we bring up these memories, the more likely we will mix up who said the punchline, if that stop sign was a yield sign or if we did look both ways before crossing the street.
This takes us to flashbulb memories, the reason why we won’t remember the COVID-19 pandemic correctly.
Flashbulb memories are memories with an emotional tie. We have high confidence in emotional accuracy, but it is no more accurate than normal explicit memories. These memories have a lot of errors because of that emotional tie.
Ten or 20 years from now when we are telling stories about what self-isolation was like, we may find ourselves with a different story – and that’s okay.
Next time we find ourselves corrected when telling a story, don’t get upset because it happens to everyone. At the end of the story, chances are we both told it wrong.
Emily Pearce can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @Emily_A_Pearce