In the movie musical Gigi, Maurice Chevalier and Hermoinie Gingold sing “I Remember it Well.” The song could have, for good reason, been titled “I Misremember it Well.” In fact there’s even an academic study with that title.
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/6478926_I_misremember_it_well_why_older_adults_are_unreliabl
e_eyewitnesses
The New Yorker published a piece a few days ago on flash-bulb memory, no doubt sparked by Brian Williams misremembered event from Iraq. Those are memories formed during periods of or situations that cause heightened emotions. It’s a good read.
http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/idea-happened-memory-recollection
Another excellent piece on memory is on the Australian Radio National website. When the show was broadcast in Dec. of 2012, my 90 year-old mother was less than a year away from death due to dementia/Alzheimer’s (We don’t know; we didn’t have an autopsy performed.) We’d been watching her memory fail for several years so anything that had to do with memory caught my attention. I was glad when it showed up in my podcast feed back then.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/memory—the-thread-of-life/4409988
The full transcript of the half hour audio version is available at the link.
And then there’s this problem with memory that may be an outgrowth of the same neroplascicity that allows stroke victims to recover function. Every time we remember something, we change the memory.
http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2012/09/your-memory-is-like-the-telephone-game.html
I saw this in my mother in the way events in stories would tell would morph and conflate with other events. Sometimes things that couldn’t have possibly happen would appear in a well known family event. Sometimes things would seeming appear out of whole cloth.
Example:
One evening I got a phone call from Mom.
Mom: Jimmy, do you remember when you and Andi took me to France.
Me: (involuntary laugh – WRONG THING TO DO!) No, Mom we never took you to France. (the wrong thing to say)
Mom: You’re lying. (phone slams down)
Mom never went to France at anytime in her life. Until the last year or two, Mom was a lifelong avid reader, devourer of books is more accurate. I’m sure that some of her “memories” of that trip were based on books she’d read or TV shows she’d watched, or possibly my dad’s recollections of his time in France during WW2. Somehow her brain put those pieces together in some way and pulled us in as the vehicle to make the story make sense.
lifehacker has an especially good article that covers many of the problems of our memory and ways we can improve it.
http://lifehacker.com/why-your-memory-sucks-and-what-you-can-do-about-it-596782066
Thanks for the memories.
