Replying to a post where I suddenly remembered a bit more of something I was talking about yesterday, I was just thinking about the mysterious way memories work.
Some years back I completed a foundation year in psychology. There was a plan to change careers to actually being a psychologist but life has so far gotten in the way of further studies. We studied memory in some depth with some experiments which demonstrated how memories can change over time.
My recent interest is in how my own mind remembers the tip of a memory when I first recall an event. But hours or days later I suddenly remember more detail or make sense of something that may have not seemed relevant at the time. It’s almost as if the memory triggers the wheels of that part of my brain to churn in the background and dredge up the goods from the archives.
I know most events are committed to long term memory as we sleep via the hippocampus. Obviously as we age this along with everything else in our bodies starts to get less efficient.
So how can we trust our first recall if subsequent recall brings more accuracy into the detail?
Our perception is based on our experience to date. The way we process our memories will be dependent on our own internal filing system which is based on our internal model of how the world works (which is biased to our own understanding and reinforced by us with subsequent events that match that bias). So we decide what is right based on the way we think things are.
This can lead us to remember things in a totally skewed way based on our framework of schemas.. We put things into boxes we have ourselves labelled. The more you study psychology the more you see how imperfect a design we are!
During the course of writing this post I have realised that my question is about the difference between instant recall and subsequent recall studies on witnesses to a mock criminal event have been carried out that substantiate my own anecdotal experience. The interesting thing about such studies is that providing supporting material to a witness in a crime will help the witness build a picture of their own memory.
I’m not sure about others as everyone has slightly different brain wiring, but I find my memory strongly responds to a visual stimulus. Quite often if I walk into a room and see an object it will remind me of a task. This then leads me to wonder - how easy is it to distort memory in a criminal investigation by providing a different scenario? Perhaps this is how false memories are formed.
This is obviously quite a big field with quite a stack of research out there! Please share your experiences of instant vs subsequent recall or just how you find your memory works these days vs when you were younger.