Who are eidetics, how false memories work, and three popular myths about memory

    Memory is an amazing ability of the brain , and despite the fact that it has been studied for a long time, there are many false - or at least not quite accurate ideas about it.

    We’ll talk about the most popular of them, plus why it’s not so easy to forget everything, what makes us “steal” someone else’s memory and how fictitious memories affect our lives. Photo Ben White - Unsplash




    Photographic memory is the ability to “remember everything”


    Photographic memory is the idea that a person at any moment can make a kind of instant “snapshot” of the surrounding reality and after a while “extract” it from the halls of the mind intact. In essence, this myth is based on the (also false) notion that the human memory continuously records everything that a person sees around him. This myth is quite stable and tenacious in modern culture - for example, just such a process of “mnemonic recording” led to the emergence of the famous damned video cassette from the Koji Suzuki novel series “The Call”.

    In the “Call” universe, this may be real - however, in our reality, the presence of a “100%” photographic memory has not yet been confirmed in practice. Memory is closely related to the creative processing and comprehension of information, self-awareness and self-identification have a strong impact on our memories.

    Therefore, scientists are skeptical of claims that a person can mechanically “record” or “photograph” reality. Often behind them are many hours of training and the use of mnemonic techniques. Moreover, the first case of “photographic” memory described in science is sharply criticized .

    It's about the work of Charles Stromeyer III (Charles Stromeyer III). In 1970, he published in the journal Nature a story about a certain Elizabeth, a Harvard student who could at one glance memorize pages of poems in an unknown language. And even more - with one eye looking at the image of 10,000 random points, and the next day with the other eye - at the second such image, she was able in her imagination to combine both drawings and “see” the volume autostereogram.

    True, other owners of exceptional memory could not repeat its successes. Elizabeth herself also did not begin to pass the tests - and after a while she married Stromeyer, which reinforced the skepticism of scientists about his "discovery" and motives.

    Closest to the myth of photographic memory eidetism- the ability to hold and reproduce in detail visual (and sometimes taste, tactile, auditory and olfactory) images for a long time. According to some accounts, Tesla, Reagan and Aivazovsky possessed an exceptional eidetic memory, and eidetic images from Lisbeth Salander to Dr. Strange are also popular in popular culture. Nevertheless, the memory of eidetics is also not mechanical - even they cannot “rewind the recording” at any arbitrary moment and review everything from scratch, in full detail. Eidetic people, like other people, need emotional involvement, an understanding of the subject, an interest in what is happening - in this case, their memory may miss or correct certain details.

    Amnesia is a complete loss of memory


    This myth is also fueled by stories from pop culture - the hero-victim of amnesia usually as a result of an incident completely loses all memory of his past, but at the same time communicates freely with others and generally thinks well. In fact, amnesia can manifest itself in many ways, and the one described above is far from the most common.


    Photo by Stefano Pollio - Unsplash

    For example, with retrograde amnesia, the patient may not remember the events that preceded the injury or illness, but usually retains a memory of autobiographical information, especially about childhood and adolescence. In the case of anterograde amnesia, the victim, on the contrary, loses the ability to remember new events, but, on the other hand, remembers what happened to him before the injury.

    A situation in which a character cannot remember anything about his past at all may relate to a dissociative disorder, for example, the state of a dissociative fugue . In this case, a person really does not remember anything about himself and his past life, moreover, he can come up with a new biography and name. The cause of this type of amnesia is usually not a disease or accidental injury, but violent events or severe stress - it’s good that this happens less frequently in life than in a movie.

    The outside world does not affect our memory


    This is another misconception, which also originates from the idea that our memory accurately and consistently captures the events that happen to us. At first glance it seems that this is the case: some kind of incident happened to us. We remember him. Now, if necessary, we can “extract” this episode from our memory - and “play” it as a video clip.

    Maybe this analogy is appropriate, but there is one “but”: unlike a real film, this clip will change during “playback” - depending on our new experience, environment, psychological mood, and the nature of the interlocutors. At the same time, this is not a deliberate lie - it may seem to the recaller that each time he tells the same story - the way it really was.

    The fact is that memory is not only a physiological, but also a social construct. Remembering and telling some episodes from our lives, we often unconsciously correct them, taking into account the interests of the interlocutors. Moreover, we can “borrow” or “steal” other people's memories - and have done quite well in this.

    The issue of borrowing memory is being dealt with, in particular, by scientists from the Southern Methodist University in the United States. In one of their studies, it was found that this phenomenon is quite widespread - more than half of the respondents (college students) noted that they faced a situation where one of their friends retold their own stories in the first person. At the same time, part of the respondents were sure that the retold events really happened to them, and were not “overheard”.

    Memories can not only be borrowed, but also invented - this is the so-called false memory. In this case, the person is absolutely sure that he has correctly remembered this or that event - usually this concerns small details, nuances or individual facts. For example, you can confidently “recall” how your new acquaintance introduced himself as Sergei, while in fact his name is Stas. Or “remember exactly” how they put the umbrella in the bag (but actually they wanted to put it, but were distracted).

    Sometimes a false memory may not be so harmless: it is one thing to “remember” that you forgot to feed the cat, and another is to convince yourself that you committed a crime and construct detailed “memories” of what happened. A study of these kinds of memories is carried out by a group of scientists from Bedfordshire University in England.


    Photo by Josh Hild - Unsplash

    In one of their studies, they showed that false memories of an allegedly committed crime do not just exist - they can be created in a controlled experiment. Following the results of three interview sessions, 70% of the study participants “admitted” that they had committed the attack or theft when they were teenagers, and “remembered” the details of their “crimes”.

    False memories are a relatively new area of ​​interest for scientists; not only neuroscientists and psychologists turn to it, but also forensic scientists. This feature of our memory can shed light on how and why people give false testimonies and stipulate themselves - this is far from always an evil intention.

    Memory is associated with imagination and social interactions, it can be lost, recreated, stolen and invented - perhaps the real facts associated with our memory turn out to be no less, and sometimes more interesting, than myths and misconceptions about it.



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