How Human Memory Works (and How it Deceives Us)

Many people believe that memory is a kind of storage bin where we store our memories Others, more friends of technology, understand that memory is more like a computer on whose hard drive we archive our learning, experiences and life experiences, so that we can resort to them when we need them.

But the truth is that both conceptions are wrong.

So how does human memory work?

We do not have any memories as such stored in our brain. That would be, from a physical and biological point of view, literally impossible.

What the brain consolidates in memory are “patterns of functioning.” ”, that is, the way in which specific groups of neurons activate each time we learn something new.

I don’t want to make a big deal out of this, so I’ll just say that any information that enters the brain is converted into a chemical electrical stimulus.

Neuroscience of memories

What the brain stores is the frequency, amplitude and particular sequence of the neural circuits that participate in learning. A specific fact is not stored, but rather the way in which the system works in the face of that specific fact

Then, when we remember something consciously or without intending to, an image comes to mind, what our brain does is reissue that specific pattern of functioning again. And this has serious implications. Perhaps the most important is that our memory deceives us

We do not recover the memory as it was stored, but rather we put it back together every time we need it by reactivating the corresponding functioning patterns.

The “defects” of memory

The problem is that this evocation mechanism occurs en bloc. The launch of the system can bring other memories that have been leaked as stowaways which belong to another time or another place.

Science and interference

I’m going to tell you about an experiment that shows how vulnerable we are to memory interference, and how we can be subtly induced to remember something wrong, or that it simply never happened.

A group of people were shown a video in which they could see a traffic accident, specifically a collision between two vehicles. They were then divided into two smaller groups and questioned, separately, about what they had seen. Members of the first group were asked to estimate approximately how fast the cars were traveling when they “collid.”

Members of the second group were asked the same thing, but with a seemingly insignificant difference. They were asked how fast they estimated the cars were traveling when one “impeded” into the other.

Members of the latter group, on average, estimated much higher values ​​than those of the first group, where the cars had simply “collided.” Some time later, they were met again in the laboratory and asked for details about the accident in the video.

Double the members of the group in which the cars had been “embedded” in relation to the members of the other group They reported seeing windshield glass shattered and scattered across the sidewalk It should be noted that in the video in question no windshield had been broken.

We barely remember

We Think We Can Remember the Past Accurately, But We Don’t The brain is forced to reconstruct the memory every time we decide to retrieve it; You must put it together as if it were a puzzle of which, to make matters worse, you do not have all the pieces, since much of the information is not available because it was never stored or was filtered by the care systems.

When we remember a certain episode in our life, such as the day we graduated from university, or when we got our first job, the recovery of the memory does not occur in a clean and intact form as when, for example, we open a text document. on our computer, but the brain must make an active effort to track information that is scattered, and then put together all those diverse elements and fragmented to present us with the most solid and elegant version of what happened.

The brain is responsible for “filling in” the gaps in memory

Bumps and blank spaces are filled in in the brain by scraps of other memories, personal conjectures and abundant pre-established beliefs, with the ultimate goal of obtaining a more or less coherent whole that satisfies our expectations.

This basically happens for three reasons:

As we said before, when we experience a certain event, what the brain stores is a pattern of functioning. In the process, much of the original information never enters memory. And if it enters, it is not consolidated in memory effectively. This forms potholes in the process that take away the congruence of history when we want to remember it.

Then we have the problem of false and unrelated memories mixing with the real memory when we bring it to consciousness. Here something similar happens to when we cast a net into the sea, we can catch some small fish, which is what interests us, but many times we also find garbage that at some point was thrown into the ocean: An old shoe, a plastic bag, a bottle empty of soda, etc.

This phenomenon occurs because the brain is constantly receiving new information consolidating learning for which it often resorts to the same neural circuits that are being used for other learning, which can cause some interference.

Thus, the experience that you want to archive in memory can be merged or modified with previous experiences, causing them to end up being stored as an undifferentiated whole.

Giving meaning and logic to the world around us

Finally, The brain is an organ interested in making sense of the world In fact, it even seems that he feels an aberrant hatred for uncertainty and inconsistencies.

And it is in his eagerness to explain everything when, not knowing certain data in particular, he invents them to get out of trouble and thus save appearances. We have here another crack in the system, dear reader. The essence of memory is not reproductive, but reconstructive and as such, vulnerable to multiple forms of interference.