Our recollection of Incidents, people, places..all are found to be distorted and false, a Study reports.
Our memories, the report adds, are influenced by people around us.
In some cases the incidents may be imagined by us , with no factual evidence.
I have often suspected that the incidents being narrated by Celebrities in Books, TV Shows are lies .
Worse still is that they seem to believe these narrations!
In most cases they make it up to lend effectiveness to their Legend.
It reaches such a stage that they start believing these incidents themselves, and are convinced them to be true and they mess up their lives, especially marriages for they believe what is written about them or what they make up by themselves.
There are many instances of film celebrities whose marriages were ruined by this and many a Career cut short.
In some cases it ended up in suicides.
What exactly is Memory?
Memory is the retention of images, Actions, Impressions of events, images from Life.
These are conditioned by what we Perceive.
Perception is conditioned by what we are.
In effect we Perceive what we want to Perceive.
Please read my post on Perception , under Indian Philosophy.
So when the Perception is self-made, what one needs to say of Memory?
Now read the article in The Atlantic.
One may remark even this Study is influenced by external factors as the Scientists have proved themselves!
Story:
When people with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory—those who can remember what they ate for breakfast on a specific day 10 years ago—are tested for accuracy, researchers find what goes into false memories….
“memory distortions are basic and widespread in humans, and it may be unlikely that anyone is immune,” according to the authors of the study published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
UC Irvine’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning, where professor James McGaugh discovered the first person proved to have Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, is just a short walk from the building where I teach as part of the Literary Journalism Program, where students read some of the most notable nonfiction works of our time, including Hiroshima, In Cold Blood, andSeabiscuit, all of which rely on exhaustive documentation and probing of memories.
In another office nearby on campus, you can find Professor Elizabeth Loftus, who has spent decades researching how memories can become contaminated with people remembering—sometimes quite vividly and confidently—events thatnever happened. Loftus has found that memories can be planted in someone’s mind if they are exposed to misinformation after an event, or if they are asked suggestive questions about the past. One famous case was that of Gary Ramona, who sued his daughter’s therapist for allegedly planting false memories in her mind that Gary had raped her.
Loftus’s research has already rattled our justice system, which relies so heavily on eyewitness testimonies. Now, the findings showing that even seemingly impeccable memories are also susceptible to manipulation could have “important implications in the legal and clinical psychology fields where contamination of memory has had particularly important consequences,” the PNAS study authors wrote.
We who write and read nonfiction might find all of this unnerving as well. As our memories become more penetrable how much can we trust the stories that we have come to believe, however certainly, about our lives? The nonfiction list ofNew York Times bestsellers is heavy with reported narratives like Lauren Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, and memoirs like Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, Elizabeth Smart’s My Story, and Piper Kerman’s Orange is the New Black. What becomes of the truth behind accounts of childhood hardships that propelled some to persevere? The merit behind meaningful moments that caused life pivots? The emotional experiences that shaped personalities and belief systems?
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.”
Source:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/how-many-of-your-memories-are-fake/281558/