Memory Reconstruction and False Memories: Exploring the Fragility of Recollections

Lilienfeld states that our memories are not like a video of an event: press play and there it is, they are reconstructed, that is we piece together bits and pieces of information and use cues to fill in any blanks so our recollection of an event is a whole story. In year seven, I broke my arm. My mother’s and my recount of how it happened are reasonably similar: I was running through the kitchen area when I slipped on water and landed heavily on my arm. However, our memories of what happened next are substantially different. One of our memories is false, that is, one is an inaccurate recollection of the event. I distinctly remember mum taking myself and my siblings off to school, conversely my mother says I didn’t go to school, we dropped my siblings at school and then went to the hospital.

On a scale from one to ten, with ten being completely accurate, I would rank my memory at six. It is possible my memory was influenced by a schema, my mental model for what happens in the mornings. Monday to Friday, I was taken to school, this was the set order of events, so this is the way I remember the day progressing. Another explanation could be an encoding error. Lilienfeld suggests that even though we may encode an event it is rare that all the details are encoded. This could explain why I remember the details of breaking my arm and not the trip to the hospital. Perhaps because of the pain I was in, I didn’t pay attention to what was happening, therefore going to the hospital was not encoded – no encoding results in no memory.

Though my false memory of going to school and not the hospital had no serious consequences, some may. False memories resulting from encoding errors or schema could, for example, lead you to think you have locked your car (because this is what you always do), when you haven’t, resulting in your car getting stolen or thinking you have dropped your child at day care (this being the routine), when in fact you dropped your friend at work, leaving your child unattended. False memories can, however, be advantageous for example remembering an event such as a holiday being better than it was.

In future I could attempt to alleviate or reduce false memories, such as going to the hospital, if I keep a journal as it would be a record of the events before my memory fades. I could also adopt the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness is practicing conscious awareness of what is happening around us, essentially paying full attention. Studies have shown there is a positive correlation between mindfulness and memory. By consciously paying full attention to the events, such as what happened at the hospital, I could encode more information assisting in a more accurate retrieval of the events from my long-term memory.