Why Your Memory is Unreliable Research Paper

“What was the colour of the hat that the robber was wearing?” asks a police officer. “Red- no black, definitely black,” the witness responds. As a matter of fact, the robber wasn’t wearing a hat in the first place. By bringing up the question of a hat, the eyewitness makes an assumption that the robber was wearing a hat. Humans were built to trust their memories. After all, our memories are what make up our personality. We learn from our past mistakes and our memories are undoubtedly very important. All the same, as time goes by, our memory starts to weaken. Studies have shown that memories aren’t as consistent and precise as we are expected to believe, revealing the fact that our memories can’t always be trusted. As more events come up in our lives, our memories begin to turn foggy and blurred. You might recall something happening one way, when in reality, it happened another. Your memory is unreliable because the brain can create false memories, it can merge memories together, and memories can be manipulated.

To begin with, your brain isn’t flawless. A study regulated at Carnegie Mellon University showed that the brain can apply incorrect inner beliefs and internal models about how the world works. When information isn’t encoded correctly in the first place, the brain usually takes a glimpse of the information, turning it into a short-term memory. Approximately 20 seconds later, this memory is forgotten. When remembering this specific memory years later, your head often creates false memories. They are usually made by combining true memories with other factors in one’s surroundings. Then, individuals may forget the source of information, thus causing a false memory. For instance, unlike the popular belief, eyewitnesses are commonly very inaccurate. If a witness doesn’t get a complete view of a crime, he/she might recall something that never happened. This is also known as confabulation, when the “gaps” in someone’s memories are filled with fabricated and misinterpreted information. 

Furthermore, our brains can make accidental errors too. Sometimes, your brain merely skims through the details of its surroundings, forming an indistinct memory. In the future, when the brain tries to recall the memory, it may not remember all the details. In order to fill in the details which were not fully captured by the brain, it uses details from another similar memory to complete the event. In essence, the brain tries to combine one memory with another to form a complete memory. For example, let’s say that you are trying to remember your first day of Grade 1. Maybe on the first day of fifth grade, you remember seeing banners all around the school. So you might think that there were banners surrounding your school on the first day, even though there might not have been. Your brain does this in order to fill in the spaces of information that were not caught on at the time of the memory. It combines these two memories together due to the similarities between them; both the first days of school. This causes incorrect memories, causing a memory to be unreliable.

Finally, others can manipulate your memory. When the behavior of the people around you contradicts your memories, your brain unconsciously updates to match your current reality. Additionally, thoughts are often infectious, so sometimes when someone thinks one way, another individual can convince his/her memory to alter and think the same way as well. Namely, after the murder of Anna Lindh in 2003, over half of the witnesses agreed that the murderer was wearing a baggy green army jacket. However, the murderer was actually wearing a gray sweater. The cause of this chain of inaccurate information was later revealed to be due to the way the eyewitnesses presented their opinions. The police had let the eyewitnesses sit in the same room, causing a false memory to be spread from witness to witness as more discussion occurred. It is alarmingly simple to plant false information into someone else’s mind, manipulating your memory.

Overall, our memories are flawed and should not always be trusted. Memory can easily be compared to the game of broken telephone; a game where one player whispers a message to another, repeating this procedure until the last player receives the message he/she hears. Oftentimes, the message from the start and the message heard at the end are very different. This is identical to our memory. From remembering false information, to combining two events into one, to manipulating memories, there are countless mistakes that can occur when recalling an event. Researchers are starting to find increased evidence that our memories are notoriously unreliable. Hence, we see that memories aren’t as reliable as humans have always believed. Don’t trust everything you remember; anything could be completely fabricated.

Works Cited

Barclay, Rachel. “Your Memory is Unreliable, and Science Could Make It More So.” Healthline, 13 Sept. 2013,

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/mental-memory-is-unreliable-and-it-could-be-worse-091313 

Cherry, Kendra. “False Memories and How They Form.” Verywell Mind, 28 Feb. 2020, 

https://www.verywellmind.com/how-do-false-memories-form-2795349#:~:text=In%20many%20cases%2C%20false%20memories,view%20of%20everything%20that%20happened.&text=A%20person's%20mind%20might%20fill,that%20did%20not%20actually%20occur

Golub, Matthew. “Why the Brain Makes Mistakes.” Neuroscience News, 8 Dec. 2015, 

https://neurosciencenews.com/mistakes-neural-networks-3235/#:~:text=A%20study%20conducted%20at%20Carnegie,about%20how%20the%20world%20works

Nash, Robert. “Are Memories Reliable? Experts Explain How They Change More Than We Realise.” The Conversation, 17 Dec. 2018,

https://theconversation.com/are-memories-reliable-expert-explains-how-they-change-more-than-we-realise-106461 

Reber, Paul. “What is the Memory Capacity of the Human Brain?” Scientific American, 1 May 2010,          

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memory-capacity/ 

Robson, David. “Four Ways That Other People Can Warp Your Memory.” BBC Future, 20 Sept. 2016,

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160920-four-ways-that-other-people-can-warp-your-memory.