When I was young, very young I have a specific memory of going shopping with my great grandmother. We were looking for a Hardy Boys book for my brother for Christmas. We went to the mall and the book was sitting there in the bookstore window.
I often attribute this to my first memory, but the thing is I don’t know if this memory is real. As far as I know there was nothing significant about this event. I have no other recollection of my great grandmother, and for all I know this may have been a vivid dream I had when I was younger. I do; however, have the book. I don’t think I will ever know if this memory is real and until I took this class I thought this was unusual. But, I was surprised to learn that our brain often makes up false memories.
When new memories are made its called construction and when memories are recalled its called reconstruction. Our brains; however, do not always reconstruct memories correctly. We have a tendency to fill in the gaps and details that didn’t actually exist. In class when we did the exercise with the different words on the board “chair” was never posted, but because words similar to “chair” were in our brains we thought we remembered it.
Our memory is not always reliable but the reason it is not reliable can work towards our advantage too. The fact that our brain fills in the gaps and picks up on pattern recognition very well. However, this can result in something called suggestibility where we remember things that did not actually happen. For example, if someone witnesses a dog running by they may say it has brown fur and floppy ears because that’s there view of what dogs look like. In reality though the dog may have been a different color but because we aren’t good at remember details we fill in the gaps. This is important to remember when listening to eyewitness accounts. They are not always reliable and cannot counted on. In conconcussion, our memory is pretty good but its not perfect so we need to be aware when reconstructing previous memories.