Where would the human race be without our memories. The ability to collect information and methodically access these stored thoughts is astounding, but how accurate are memories? We tend to assign a great deal of significance to these easily malleable perceptions. Memories are relative, molded by our opinions and thoughts. We think that memories are similar to camera, constantly and accurately observing events for future review, but memories are constantly changing and not as accurate as people think.
Earlier in the year, I learned about the experiment that Elizabeth Loftus conducted and found it pretty intriguing. Loftus was concerned about the accuracy of an eyewitness, she wanted to see if she could somehow manipulate memories of multiple eyewitnesses that experienced the same event. To prove her hypothesis Loftus showed a group of volunteers a video documenting a car crash. She then asked people to record how fast they thought the cars were traveling. Specifically, she asked the question “how fast were the cars going when they hit,” but she phrased the question differently for each individual. She substituted the word hit for more severe words such as collided and smashed as well as less severe words like bumped.
The participants that saw the crash described less severely tended to says that the cars were going fairly slow and that the accident was not substantial. Whereas those who were shown the more sever language described the cars as traveling faster.
The information is pretty mind boggling, it supports the idea that memories are mostly based on perception. Two people that experienced the same event could have two completely different interpretations. This fact has its benefits and drawbacks. It shows us that we shouldn’t rely on memories too much. Now this can be debilitating in life or death situations where one party has to recall memories in incriminating situations. However, on an everyday level this fact seems more comforting.
Humans tend to dwell on uncomfortable and awkward memories that they have personally experienced. We constantly shame ourselves for not living up to our own standards and care too much about the opinions of others. As a collective group we should focus on the positive memories and not dwell on the negatives. Our memories are what we make of them.
