Is our memory something reliable?

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Our memory

Many people can think that our memory is a kind of storage where we put all the information about the things we remember. We can also understand the concept of memory as a kind of computer on whose hard disk we are saving all our learning, experiences and the life lessons we gather, so that we can use them when we need them later in life.

But the truth is that both points of view are wrong, or more precisely, incomplete.

Memory refers to the processes that are used to acquire, store, retain, and later retrieve information. | Source

Memory is the term given to the structures and processes involved in the storage and subsequent retrieval of information. | Source

What we store as memories are diverse sequences that represent the way in which certain groups of neurons are stimulated when we acquire new information.

What the brain stores is the recurrence, and particular pattern of neural circuits involved in learning. A specific fact is not stored, but the way in which the system works with that specific fact.

Then, when we remember something spontaneously, an image comes to our mind, what our mind does is to recreate this specific sequence again. And this is of great significance because this means that our memory can indeed, deceive us.

The memory is not recovered as it was stored, but rather we put recreate it whenever we need it by triggering the corresponding sequence.

The defects of our memory

People might think that we can remember the past with exactitude, but actually it is not like that. The brain is forced to redo the memory every time we decide to recover it, so it must be assembled again as if it were a puzzle that, to top it all, does not have all the necessary bits of information, since much of the data is not available because it was never stored in the first place or was simply filtered out.

The problem is that when activating this mechanism it works with blocks of information. This is why different memories can sometimes confuse us and we might end up with a mixed memory about 2 things that have nothing to do between each other, whether it is because they happened in different places or different moments.

When we remember a certain episode of our life, such as the day we leave the university, or when we get our first job, the recovery of that memory does not take place in a clean nor perfect way, as when, for example, we open a file in our PC, our brain must make an active effort to find the information that is scattered, and then, gather all those diverse and fragmented elements to present us with a version as solid and elegant as possible of what happened.

But of course, mistakes happen more often than not. So much so, that there is a phenomenon called The Mandela Effect that “occurs whenever a vivid personal memory is found to conflict with the historical record”. | Source

And we probably all have personal examples of being totally convinced about something, only to later discover that whatever we were remembering was wrong, a distortion of what really took place, we were deceived by our own mind.

The “Mandela Effect” is what happens when someone has a clear, personal memory of something that never happened in this reality.

Many people — mostly total strangers — seem to remember several of the exact same events with the exact same details. However, those memories are different from what’s in history books, newspaper archives, and so on. | Source

Just as is the case with our faulty perception of reality, the same, or something similar, happen with our memories of that same reality, the Mandela Effect has gained so much popularity that there are even some conspiracy theorist claiming that its some kind of proof about the existence of parallel realities or time traveling.

What can we learn from this?

The truth is, the mandela effect is nothing more than the proof our brain doesn’t function perfectly, and its memory system works in such a complex way, that its able to make us “remember” things that are actually wrong. There is nothing paranormal in this, the same way there is nothing “magical” when having hallucinations, its just another one of our long list of defects.

Potholes and blank spaces are filled into the brain by scraps of other memories, personal conjectures and abundant previously established beliefs, with the ultimate goal of obtaining a more or less coherent whole that meets our expectations. This happens for reasons.

As we said before, when we live a certain event, what the brain keeps is a sequence of that event. In the process, much of the information never gets into the memory. And if it enters, it is not saved effectively. That causes bumps in the process that take away coherence from the story when we want to remember it.

Then we have the problem of false and unrelated memories that mix with the real memory when we bring it to consciousness. Here something similar happens when we throw a net to the sea, we can catch some small fishes, which is what we are looking for, but many times we also find all sort of junk that was once thrown into the ocean: An old shirt, a piece of plastic, an empty bottle or any other random thing.

This happens because the brain is constantly receiving new information, consolidating the correspondent learning for which it often resorts to the same circuits that are being used for learning other different things, and this can cause interference.

Thus, the information that we wish to store in the memory can be fused or changed with previous experiences, causing them to end up being stored as joined information set.

Conclusion

The brain is an organ tasked with giving meaning to the world. In fact, it even seems that it feels an abhorrent hatred for uncertainty and inconsistencies.

Right now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a conscious experience -- and not just any conscious experience, your experience of the world around you and of yourself within it. | Source

And it is in its eagerness to explain everything that when it ignores certain information in particular, it can end up inventing them simply to get by. Therefore, our memory is about reconstructing past experiences, and as such, its vulnerable to multiple forms of obstructions and inaccuracy.