Perfect Memory? Forget About It
Perfect Memory? Forget About It
March 15, 2001 -- "Ah, yes! I remember it well." You may think you remember it well, but as the old Jay Lerner song so aptly points out, you may be fooling yourself. Two people may have totally different recall of the same event, even if they are lovers reminiscing about their first meeting.
Which is not such a bad thing, according to recent research.
"It is often not necessary for us to be able to remember everything we said, thought, or experienced," psychologist Ulrich Hoffrage, PhD, tells WebMD. "It is often even good to forget in order not to overload our memories with garbage that we will never need any more."
With his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, Hoffrage studied hindsight bias -- that phenomenon that makes us so good at Monday morning quarterbacking. The results were published last year by the American Psychological Association.
Hoffrage's group gave students nutrition information about different foods, asked them questions about that information, and asked them to recall their previous answers a day or a week later. Those students receiving no additional feedback had no change in their memory of their previous answers. But those students reminded of the nutritional information changed the memory of their earlier answers, correcting them to reflect the additional feedback.
Accurate memory of yesterday's beliefs is less important than updating beliefs to reflect new information, Hoffrage explains. "A gap in memory is often not a bad thing, since it often can be compensated for by reconstruction," he says.
How can the brain "reconstruct" old memories?
In research published last August in the journal Science, Karim Nader, PhD, and colleagues at New York University (NYU) in New York City found that stored memories are not all carved in stone. Frightening memories, at least, can be scattered like dust in the wind.
"Memories being remembered go back into a transient, unstable state," he tells WebMD. "From there, the memory can be stored again, or it can be inactivated." Nader is an assistant professor at NYU.
Perfect Memory? Forget About It
March 15, 2001 -- "Ah, yes! I remember it well." You may think you remember it well, but as the old Jay Lerner song so aptly points out, you may be fooling yourself. Two people may have totally different recall of the same event, even if they are lovers reminiscing about their first meeting.
Which is not such a bad thing, according to recent research.
"It is often not necessary for us to be able to remember everything we said, thought, or experienced," psychologist Ulrich Hoffrage, PhD, tells WebMD. "It is often even good to forget in order not to overload our memories with garbage that we will never need any more."
With his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, Hoffrage studied hindsight bias -- that phenomenon that makes us so good at Monday morning quarterbacking. The results were published last year by the American Psychological Association.
Hoffrage's group gave students nutrition information about different foods, asked them questions about that information, and asked them to recall their previous answers a day or a week later. Those students receiving no additional feedback had no change in their memory of their previous answers. But those students reminded of the nutritional information changed the memory of their earlier answers, correcting them to reflect the additional feedback.
Accurate memory of yesterday's beliefs is less important than updating beliefs to reflect new information, Hoffrage explains. "A gap in memory is often not a bad thing, since it often can be compensated for by reconstruction," he says.
How can the brain "reconstruct" old memories?
In research published last August in the journal Science, Karim Nader, PhD, and colleagues at New York University (NYU) in New York City found that stored memories are not all carved in stone. Frightening memories, at least, can be scattered like dust in the wind.
"Memories being remembered go back into a transient, unstable state," he tells WebMD. "From there, the memory can be stored again, or it can be inactivated." Nader is an assistant professor at NYU.
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