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that memory is not a video recorder [but that] it’s a constructive activity that is in many ways accurate but prone to interesting errors and distortions. It’s the constructive side of memory that is most relevant to historians.

Is it the case then that our memories constantly change every time we access them?

That certainly can happen depending on how you recount a memory. What you emphasize. What you exaggerate. What you don’t talk about. All of those things will shape and sculpt the memory for future use. Certainly the potential is there.

Research on memory shows that the more distant in time the event, the more prone to inaccuracy the memory. There are several experiments when subjects recorded impressions of an event soon afterward, then a year later and then a few years later, and the memory changed.Yes. It’s not that the information is lost but, as the memory weakens, you become more prone to incorporating other kinds of information or mixing up elements of other events. This has been seen, for example, in the study of flashbulb memories. Where were you when Kennedy was shot? Where were you when you heard about 9/11?

Isn’t there a tendency to add details or information that may make the story more convincing or interesting later?Yes. That’s more a social function of memory. It may be that you draw on your general knowledge and probable information from your memory in a social context where there may be social demands that lead you distort the memory.

What are the different memory systems?

What is the difference between working memory and permanent memory?Working memory is really a temporary memory buffer where you hold onto information, manipulate information, use it, and it’s partly a gateway to long-term memory and also a buffer that you use when you’re retrieving information from long-term memory and that information temporarily resides in working memory, so to speak.

Your discussion of the testimony of White House Counsel John Dean about Watergate is illuminating. There was a perception that Dean had a photographic memory and he testified in rich detail about events. Yet later studies of White House tape recordings revealed that he was often inaccurate.

He was perceived because of all the detail with which he reported events and the great confidence to be something analogous to a human tape recorder. Yet there was interesting work done by psychologist Ulric Neisser who went back and analyzed what Dean said at the hearings as compared to available information on the White House taping system and basically found many and significant discrepancies between what Dean remembered and what was actually said. He usually had the gist and the meaning and overall significance right, but the exact details were often quite different in his memory than what actually was said.

That seems to get into the area of false memories and how they present problems in the legal system.We know from DNA exonerations of people wrongfully convicted of crimes that a large majority of those cases -- one of the more recent estimates is that in the first 250 cases of 2011 DNA exonerations, roughly 70 to 75 percent of those individuals were convicted on the basis of faulty eyewitness memory.

One of the interesting recent lines of research that my lab has been involved in over the past few years has been looking at similarities between what goes on between the brain and mind when we remember past events on the one hand and imagine events that might occur in the future or might have occurred in the past. What we have found, particularly with brain scanning studies, is that you get very similar brain networks coming online when you remember past events and imagine future events, for example. Many of the same brain regions or network of structures come online, and this has helped us understand more why, for example, imagining events that might have occurred can be so harmful to memory accuracy because when you imagine, you’re recruiting many of the same brain regions as accessed when you actually remember. So it’s not surprising that some of these imagined events can actually turn into false memories under the right circumstances.

One reasonably well accepted distinction involves episodic memory, the memory for personal experience; semantic memory, the memory for general knowledge; and procedural memory, the memory for skills and unconscious forms of memory.Those are three of the major kinds of memory and they all have different neural substrates.

One of the points from that Ross Perot study is that his supporters often misremembered what they felt like at the time he reported he had dropped out of the race. The nature of that misremembering depended on their state at the time they were remembering and what decisions they had made about Perot in the interim affected how they reconstructed their earlier memories.Again, that makes nicely the point that our current emotions and current appraisals of a situation can feed back into our reconstruction of the past and sometimes lead us to distort our memories so that they better support our current emotions and our current selves. We’re often using memories to justify what we currently know, believe and feel.

memory doesn’t work like a video camera or tape recorder.That is the main point. Our latest thinking on this is the idea that one of the major functions of memory is to support our ability to plan for the future, to imagine the future, and to use our past experiences in a flexible way to simulate different outcomes of events.

flexibility of memory is something that makes it useful to support this very important ability to run simulations of future events. But that very flexibility might be something that contributes to some of the memory distortion we talked about. That has been prominent in the last few years in my thinking about the constructive nature of memory.

The historian Daniel Aaron told his students “we remember what’s important.” What do you think of that comment?I think that generally holds true. Certainly, again, more important memories tend to be more significant with more emotional arousal and may elicit “deeper processing”, as we call it in cognitive psychology

People believe that memory should be effortless, but their expectations for how much they should remember are totally out of whack with how much they’re capable of remembering.1

What is the most common misconception about memory?

Another misconception is that memory is supposed to be an archive of the past. We expect that we should be able to replay the past like a movie in our heads.

we don’t replay the past as it happened; we do it through a lens of interpretation and imagination.

How much are we capable of remembering, from both an episodic2 2 Episodic memory is the term for the memory of life experiences. and a semantic3 3 Semantic memory is the term for the memory of facts and knowledge about the world. standpoint?

I would argue that we’re all everyday-memory experts, because we have this exceptional semantic memory, which is the scaffold for episodic memory.

If what we’re remembering, or the emotional tenor of what we’re remembering, is dictated by how we’re thinking in a present moment, what can we really say about the truth of a memory?

But if memories are malleable, what are the implications for how we understand our “true” selves?

your question gets to a major purpose of memory, which is to give us an illusion of stability in a world that is always changing. Because if we look for memories, we’ll reshape them into our beliefs of what’s happening right now. We’ll be biased in terms of how we sample the past. We have these illusions of stability, but we are always changing

And depending on what memories we draw upon, those life narratives can change.

I know it sounds squirmy to say, “Well, I can’t answer the question of how much we remember,” but I don’t want readers to walk away thinking memory is all made up.

One thing that makes the human brain so sophisticated is that we have a longer timeline in which we can integrate information than many other species. That gives us the ability to say: “Hey, I’m walking up and giving money to the cashier at the cafe. The barista is going to hand me a cup of coffee in about a minute or two.”

There is this illusion that we know exactly what’s going to happen, but the fact is we don’t. Memory can overdo it: Somebody lied to us once, so they are a liar; somebody shoplifted once, they are a thief.

If people have a vivid memory of something that sticks out, that will overshadow all their knowledge about the way things work. So there’s kind of an illus

we have this illusion that much of the world is cause and effect. But the reason, in my opinion, that we have that illusion is that our brain is constantly trying to find the patterns

I think of memory more like a painting than a photograph. There’s often photorealistic aspects of a painting, but there’s also interpretation. As a painter evolves, they could revisit the same subject over and over and paint differently based on who they are now. We’re capable of remembering things in extraordinary detail, but we infuse meaning into what we remember. We’re designed to extract meaning from the past, and that meaning should have truth in it. But it also has knowledge and imagination and, sometimes, wisdom.

memory, often, is educated guesses by the brain about what’s important. So what’s important? Things that are scary, things that get your desire going, things that are surprising. Maybe you were attracted to this person, and your eyes dilated, your pulse went up. Maybe you were working on something in this high state of excitement, and your dopamine was up.

It could be any of those things, but they’re all important in some way, because if you’re a brain, you want to take what’s surprising, you want to take what’s motivationally important for survival, what’s new.

On the more intentional side, are there things that we might be able to do in the moment to make events last in our memories? In some sense, it’s about being mindful. If we want to form a new memory, focus on aspects of the experience you want to take with you.

If you’re with your kid, you’re at a park, focus on the parts of it that are great, not the parts that are kind of annoying. Then you want to focus on the sights, the sounds, the smells, because those will give you rich detail later on

Another part of it, too, is that we kill ourselves by inducing distractions in our world. We have alerts on our phones. We check email habitually.

When we go on trips, I take candid shots. These are the things that bring you back to moments. If you capture the feelings and the sights and the sounds that bring you to the moment, as opposed to the facts of what happened, that is a huge part of getting the best of memory.

this goes back to the question of whether the factual truth of a memory matters to how we interpret it. I think it matters to have some truth, but then again, many of the truths we cling to depend on our own perspective.

There’s a great experiment on this. These researchers had people read this story about a house.8 8 The study was “Recall of Previously Unrecallable Information Following a Shift in Perspective,” by Richard C. Anderson and James W. Pichert. One group of subjects is told, I want you to read this story from the perspective of a prospective home buyer. When they remember it, they remember all the features of the house that are described in the thing. Another group is told, I want you to remember this from the perspective of a burglar. Those people tend to remember the valuables in the house and things that you would want to take. But what was interesting was then they switched the groups around. All of a sudden, people could pull up a number of details that they didn’t pull up before. It was always there, but they just didn’t approach it from that mind-set. So we do have a lot of information that we can get if we change our perspective, and this ability to change our perspective is exceptionally important for being accurate. It’s exceptionally important for being able to grow and modify our beliefs

Experts have managed to turn people off all sorts of foods by convincing them it had made them ill when they were a child

“People have a life story, particularly as they get older and for some people it needs to stretch back to the very early stage of life,”

The prevailing account of how we come to believe and remember things is based around the concept of source monitoring. “Every time a thought comes to mind we have to make a decision – have we experienced it [an event], imagined it or have we talked about it with other people,” says Kimberley Wade

Most of the time we make that decision correctly and can identify where these mental experiences come from, but sometimes we get it wrong.

Wade admits she has spent a lot of time recalling an event that was actually something her brother experienced rather than herself, but despite this, it is rich in detail and provokes emotion

Memory researchers have shown it is possible to induce fictional autobiographical memories in volunteers, including accounts of getting lost in a shopping mall and even having tea with a member of the Royal Family

Based on my research, everybody is capable of forming complex false memories, given the right circumstances – Julia Shaw

In some situations, such as after looking at pictures or a video, children are more susceptible to forming false memories than adults. People with certain personality types are also thought to be more prone.

But carrying around false memories from your childhood could be having a far greater impact on you than you may realise too. The events, emotions and experiences we remember from our early years can help to shape who we are as adults, determining our likes, dislikes, fears and even our behaviour.

Memories before the age of three are more than likely to be false. Any that appear very fluid and detailed, as if you were playing back a home video and experiencing a chronological account of a memory, could well also be made up. It is more likely that fuzzy fragments, or snapshots of moments are real, as long as they are not from too early in your life.

We crave a cohesive narrative of our own existence and will even invent stories to give us a more complete picture

Interestingly, scientists have also found positive suggestions, such as “you loved asparagus the first time you ate it” tend to be more effective than negative suggestions like “you got sick drinking vodka”

“Miscarriage of justice, incarceration, loss of reputation, job and status, and family breakdown occur,

One of the major problems with legal cases involving false memories, is that it is currently impossible to distinguish between true and fictional recollections

Efforts have been made to analyse minor false memories in a brain scanner (fMRI) and detect different neurological patterns, but there is nothing as yet to indicate that this technology can be used to detect whether recollections have become distorted.

the most extreme case of memory implantation involves a controversial technique called “regression therapy”, where patients confront childhood traumas, supposedly buried in their subconscious

“Memories are malleable and tend to change slightly each time we revisit them, in the same way that spoken stories do,”

“Therefore at each recollection, new elements can easily be integrated while existing elements can be altered or lost.”

This is not to say that all evidence that relies on memory should be discarded or regarded as unreliable – they often provide the most compelling testimony in criminal cases. But it has led to rules and guidelines about how witnesses and victims should be questioned to ensure their recollections of an event or perpetrator are not contaminated by investigators or prosecutors.

Any memories that appear very fluid and detailed, as if you were playing back a home video, could well also be made up

While this may seem like a bit of fun, many scientists believe the “false memory diet” could be used to tackle obesity and encourage people to reach for healthier options like asparagus, or even help cut people’s alcohol consumption.

Children are more susceptible to forming false memories than adults, especially after looking at photographs or films

And we may not want to rid ourselves of these memories. Our memories, whether fictional or not, can help to bring us closer together.

A winner of the memory Olympics, for instance, still had to keep sticky notes on the refrigerator to remember what she had to do during the day.

Loftus’s research has already rattled our justice system, which relies so heavily on eyewitness testimonies.

“It’s so powerful when somebody tells you something and they have a lot of detail,” Loftus said. “Especially when they express emotion. To just say, ‘Oh my god it must be true.’ But all those characteristics are also true of false memories, particularly the heavily rehearsed ones that you ruminate over. They can be very detailed. You can be confident. You can be emotional. So you need independent corroboration.”

When later asked about the events, the superior memory subjects indicated the erroneous facts as truth at about the same rate as people with normal memory.

been able to successfully convince ordinary people that they were lost in a mall in their childhood, pointed out that false memory recollections also occur among high profile people.

All memory, as McGaugh explained, is colored with bits of life experiences. When people recall, “they are reconstructing,” he said. “It doesn't mean it’s totally false. It means that they’re telling a story about themselves and they’re integrating things they really do remember in detail, with things that are generally true.”

“puzzling why (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory) individuals remember some trivial details, such as what they had for lunch 10 years ago, but not others, such as words on a word list or photographs in a slideshow,” Patihis and colleagues noted in the PNAS study. “The answer to this may be that they may extract some personally relevant meaning from only some trivial details and weave them into the narrative for a given day.”

For all of us, the stronger the emotion attached to a moment, the more likely those parts of our brains involved in memory will become activated.

“Why did evolution do that?” McGaugh said. “Because it was essential for our survival.

We now know animals are likely susceptible to memory distortions too, as MIT researchers recently were able to successfully plant false memories in mice.

“We’re all creating stories. Our lives are stories in that sense.”

“but you as the writer have the obligation to get as close to the truth as you possibly can,” Meyer said

The mind and its memory do not just record and retrieve information and experiences, but also infer, fill in gaps, and construct, wrote Bryan Boyd wrote in On the Origin of Stories. “Episodic memory’s failure to provide exact replicas of experiences appears to not be a limitation of memory but an adaptive design.”

forgetting seems to be an active mechanism that is constantly at work in the brain.

“To have proper memory function, you have to have forgetting.

Different types of memory are created and stored in varying ways, and in various areas of the brain.

Neurons communicate with each other through synapses — junctions between these cells that include a tiny gap across which chemical messengers can be sent

The more often a memory is recalled, the stronger its neural network becomes. Over time, and through consistent recall, the memory becomes encoded in both the hippocampus and the cortex

Because the hippocampus is not where long-term memories are stored in the brain, its dynamic nature is not a flaw but a feature

Neuroscientists often refer to this physical representation of a memory as an engram. They think that each engram has a number of synaptic connections, sometimes even in several areas of the brain, and that each neuron and synapse can be involved in multiple engrams

The brain is always trying to forget the information it’s already learnt,

Hardt’s lab showed that a dedicated mechanism continuously promotes the expression of AMPA receptors at synapses.

To forget certain things, it seemed that the rat brain had to proactively destroy connections at the synapse. Forgetting, Hardt says, “is not a failure of memory, but a function of it”.

Paul Frankland, a neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, had also found evidence that the brain is wired to forget

Frankland was studying the production of new neurons, or neurogenesis, in adult mice. The process had long been known to occur in the brains of young animals, but had been discovered in the hippocampi of mature animals only about 20 years earlier. Because the hippocampus is involved in memory formation, Frankland and his team wondered whether increasing neurogenesis in adult mice could help the rodents to remember.

Eventually, it exists independently in the cortex, where it is put away for long-term storage.

Researchers think that the human brain might operate in a similar way

Studies of people with exceptional autobiographical memories or with impaired ones seem to bear this out

People with a condition known as highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) remember their lives in such incredible detail that they can describe the outfit that they were wearing on any particular day

Those with severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM), however, are unable to vividly recall specific events in their lives

As a result, they also have trouble imagining what might happen in the future

By better understanding how we forget, through the lenses of both biology and cognitive psychology, Anderson and other researchers might be edging nearer to improving treatments for anxiety, PTSD and even Alzheimer’s disease

Hardt thinks that Alzheimer’s disease might also be better understood as a malfunction of forgetting rather than remembering

But more memory researchers are shifting their focus to examine how the brain forgets, as well as how it remembers

In the past decade, researchers have begun to view forgetting as an important part of a whole

Why do we have memory at all? As humans, we entertain this fantasy that it’s important to have autobiographical details,

Forgetting enables us as individuals, and as a species, to move forwards.

There’s also the problem of verifying someone’s memory in terms of accuracy. If you ask them to remember the dates of major events, then yes, you can easily determine the accuracy of that.

This may seem like needless pedantry; why would anyone lie about such a thing? Except it’s not that they lie, it’s that they could be remembering it wrongly and not realise they’re doing it.

Sadly, what research there is suggests that those people with incredible memories are just as susceptible to forming “false memories” as anyone else.

What good is being able to remember vast amounts of information if you can’t be sure any of it is accurate?

Those with incredible, innate memory prowess describe it as a mixed blessing at best. The increased demand on your thinking capacity, the constant dwelling in the past, the inability to escape painful or damaging experiences? If someone offered you all that, would you accept?

Teddy Roosevelt could recite entire newspaper pages—not just articles—as if they were sitting in front of him.

is reported to have read two or three books a day.

was said to have memorized every word of every book he had ever read, estimated at around 9000. It took him up to just 12 seconds to read one page, and each eye could read a page independently.

"Kim's story tells us that the human brain is far more flexible than we had thought,"

"Like many other savants, he has suffered disability in one area of his brain, but has compensated by acquiring remarkable new abilities in other areas. This shows we all have considerable hidden intellectual potential."

may have had a type of photographic memory that helped him memorize sheet music with astonishing speed.

Russian composer Alexander Siloti would give him complicated and demanding works to learn and Rachmaninov (also spelled Rachmaninoff) would have them completely memorized to perfection a day or two later.

While people can improve their recall through tricks and practice, eidetikers are born, not made, says Searleman. The ability isn't linked to other traits, such as high intelligence. Children are more likely to possess eidetic memory than adults, though they begin losing the ability after age six as they learn to process information more abstractly.

Although psychologists don't know why children lose the ability, the loss of this skill may be functional: Were humans to remember every single image, it would be difficult to make it through the day.

Barrett is a professor of psychology at Northeastern

her research has led her to conclude that each of us constructs them in our own individual ways, from a diversity of sources: our internal sensations, our reactions to the environments we live in, our ever-evolving bodies of experience and learning, our cultures.

if Barrett is correct, we’ll need to rethink how we interpret mental illness, how we understand the mind and self, and even what psychology as a whole should become in the 21st century.

The problem was the options that Ekman had given his subjects when asking them to identify the emotions shown on the faces they were presented with. Those options, Barrett discovered, had limited the ways in which people allowed themselves to think. Barrett explained the problem to me this way: “I can break that experiment really easily, just by removing the words. I can just show you a face and ask how this person feels. Or I can show you two faces, two scowling faces, and I can say, ‘Do these people feel the same thing?’ And agreement drops into the toilet.”

Just as that first picture of the bee actually wasn’t a picture of a bee for me until I taught myself that it was, my emotions aren’t actually emotions until I’ve taught myself to think of them that way. Without that, I have only a meaningless mishmash of information about what I’m feeling.

emotion isn’t a simple reflex or a bodily state that’s hard-wired into our DNA, and it’s certainly not universally expressed. It’s a contingent act of perception that makes sense of the information coming in from the world around you, how your body is feeling in the moment, and everything you’ve ever been taught to understand as emotion. Culture to culture, person to person even, it’s never quite the same. What’s felt as sadness in one person might as easily be felt as weariness in another, or frustration in someone else.

The brain, it turns out, doesn’t consciously process every single piece of information that comes its way. Think of how impossibly distracting the regular act of blinking would be if it did. Instead, it pays attention to what you need to pay attention to, then raids your memory stores to fill in the blanks.

In many quarters, Barrett was angrily attacked for her ideas, and she’s been the subject of criticism ever since. “I think Lisa does a disservice to the actual empirical progress that we’re making,” says Dacher Keltner, a Berkeley psychologist

Keltner told me that he himself has coded thousands of facial expressions using Ekman’s system, and the results are strikingly consistent: Certain face-emotion combinations recur regularly, and others never occur. “That tells me, ‘Wow, this approach to distinct emotions has real power,’” he says.

Ekman reached the peak of his fame in the years following 2001. That’s the year the American Psychological Association named him one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century. The next year, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article about him in the New Yorker, and in 2003 he began working pro bono for the TSA. A year later, riding the updraft of success, he left his university post and started the Paul Ekman Group,

a small research team to visit the isolated Himba tribe in Namibia, in southern Africa. The plan was this: The team, led by Maria Gendron, would do a study similar to Ekman’s original cross-cultural one, but without providing any of the special words or context-heavy stories that Ekman had used to guide his subjects’ answers. Barrett’s researchers would simply hand a jumbled pile of different expressions (happy, sad, fearful, angry, disgusted, and neutral) to their subjects, and would ask them to sort them into six piles. If emotional expressions are indeed universal, they reasoned, then the Himba would put all low-browed, tight-lipped expressions into an anger pile, all wrinkled-nose faces into a disgust pile, and so on.

It didn’t happen that way. The Himba sorted some of the faces in ways that aligned with Ekman’s theory: smiling faces went into one pile, wide-eyed fearful faces went into another, and affectless faces went mostly into a third. But in the other three piles, the Himba mixed up angry scowls, disgusted grimaces, and sad frowns. Without any suggestive context, of the kind that Ekman had originally provided, they simply didn’t recognize the differences that leap out so naturally to Westerners.

“What we’re trying to do,” she told me, “is to just get people to pay attention to the fact that there’s a mountain of evidence that does not support the idea that facial expressions are universally recognized as emotional expressions.” That’s the crucial point, of course, because if we acknowledge that, then the entire edifice that Paul Ekman and others have been constructing for the past half-century comes tumbling down. And all sorts of things that we take for granted today—how we understand ourselves and our relationships with others, how we practice psychology

Barrett’s theory is still only in its infancy. But other researchers are beginning to take up her ideas, sometimes in part, sometimes in full, and where the science will take us as it expands is impossible to predict. It’s even possible that Barrett will turn out to be wrong, as she herself acknowledges. “Every scientist has to face that,” she says. Still, if she is right, then perhaps the most important change we’ll need to make is in our own heads. If our emotions are not universal physiological responses but concepts we’ve constructed from various biological signals and stashed memories, then perhaps we can exercise more control over our emotional lives than we’ve assumed.

“Every experience you have now is seeding your experience for the future,” Barrett told me. “Knowing that, would you choose to do what you’re doing now?” She paused a beat and looked me in the eye. “Well? Would you? You are the architect of your own experience.”