Tag Archives: Memory Construction

Oreo O’s and Stingrays

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When I was four, my family took a trip to the exotic Cayman Islands. I remember eating Oreo O’s and applesauce at the kitchen table. I remember trying to feed the birds with white bread just to come home in the evening and see the slices crawling with ants. Most vividly, I can remember the day that my dad took me swimming with stingrays. My grandparents waited with my mom and brother on the open deck of a boat as my dad and I entered the crystal clear blue water teaming with slithery creatures. I remember gripping my dad with all my might so that he wouldn’t drop me. I can almost hear myself let out a scream to wake the dead when I had decided I had had enough.

I remember it all so clearly. But do I really?

In class we discussed how people are completely capable of making up their memories without even knowing it, and how the accuracy of our own memories is usually very faulty. After conducting a little more research on the matter, I came across this article, which highlighted the phenomena of false memory even in those with superior memory stores. Even in those with exceptional memories (I’m taking about those who can remember everything that happened on any date you ask them about), people frequently confused events and ideas that they had heard in passing with things that had actually happened to them. The conclusion to the study conducted in the article claimed that all people construct memories in the same way, so that even those with exceptional recall are prone to making errors.

While it is possible that my memories from the vacation are true, I actually assume that my memories have been lost due to infantile amnesia. While you are young, you experience changes in brain structure. Your encoding (getting information into your memory system), storage (retaining information), and retrieval (getting information out of memory) processes also develop. This makes it extremely difficult for people to recall information from when they are younger, especially under the age of 4.

And if my original memories have indeed been lost, I’m going to bet that I have reconstructed and falsely imagined many of the memories that I have based on what I have been told by others. This is called “source amnesia,” where we don’t know where our memory is coming from yet can imagine an instance perfectly. It could also be due to “misinformation and imagination effects,” where people’s memories can be influenced by misinformation, such as stories and images that people see and hear after the occurrence.

In this interesting article, memory construction is detailed. It explains how that even if you are certain that something has occurred, you should be as skeptical with yourself as you should be with someone else because of the faulty tendencies of the brain. If a memory was encoded improperly and then recalled incorrectly later on, that memory will stick with you incorrectly and be more likely to influence false memories in the future.

So can I actually remember Oreo O’s and swimming with the stingrays? There is no way of telling if a memory is true or false. I’m going to bet that my brain is playing tricks on me—but as the memories are pretty sweet, I don’t mind fooling myself.

Filling in the missing pieces

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Memory is a process in psychology that involves the steps of encoding, storing, and retrieving.  It is impossible for our brains to store every single piece of information that enters it.  This leads to people forgetting different memories, or pieces of information.  There are different types of interferences that can contribute to the forgetting of information.  Forgetting is when we filter, alter, or loose information at any stage of the memory process.  However, people will revise their memories without being aware of doing so.  Memory construction is when a person will fill in any missing pieces of information to make our recall more clear.

I have used memory construction when my parents told me a story about when we went to Vermont. I was four and was learning how to ski for the first time.  My whole family was there too.  I have no detail or recollection of what I actually was doing or what it was like.  I completely have forgotten that memory.  Instead, after my parents explained to me the story, I then started to fill in the missing pieces of information to make the memory more coherent.  I pictured myself in my pink, puffy jacket that I always had on in pictures when it was winter time.  I could vision myself following ski instructors on the snow and could see my cousins, aunts, and uncles standing there cheering me on.  I visioned my brother, who would be five at the time, next to me on his little skis and wearing a blue helmet.  I created this memory by filling in what was missing.

Human memory is a very complex, brain-wide process that makes up who we are.

Long-Term Memory and Memory Construction

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I have most likely been asked the question before “What is your first memory?”  I can think of a few memories from my childhood, but to be honest, I have no idea what my first memory is.  When I was a toddler, I remember being brought to the hospital because my parents suspected I had been eating my sister’s medicine.  In the hospital they gave me charcoal and sprite to drink, so incase I had taken the medicine they could get it out of my system.  A few years later, when I was about 5, I remember getting Lyme disease.  I can’t remember what happened while I had the disease or how long I had it, but I remember getting a bulls eye rash on my body and I remember I was sitting on the bottom step of my old house where my grandma came up to me and gave me a green beanie baby lizard to make me feel better.  Another few years later, when I was maybe 7 or 8 I remember I was bouncing a blowup beach ball in the air in the foyer of my old house, when I slipped on a towel and fell into the corner of the wall.  My mom brought me to the ER, and before we left, I grabbed my stuffed animal snake.  I fractured my collarbone.  I can remember that day pretty well from the time I was bouncing the beach ball in the air, to slipping on the towel and hitting my collarbone on the wall, to grabbing my snake before leaving the house, and to sitting in the ER waiting to go get checked out.  Even if I can’t remember every piece of the event, the parts that I do remember always felt so accurate and real to me.  Now, those memories are in question after learning about the reconstructive nature of long-term memory.

Although those memories, regardless of how much I can remember, feel almost like an instant replay, that is not at all the case.  Memory construction is very common with memories we claim to have from a young age.  What happens is called constructive processing, which is the retrieval of memories in which those memories are altered, revised, or influenced by newer information.  Because of constructive processing, there really is no way of knowing what part of your memory, if any part of it, is the exact truth.  Up until learning this, I could have told people that I vividly remember slipping on that towel in my foyer, or sitting on my staircase while my mom and my aunt debated on what to do when they thought I ate my sisters medicine, or getting that beanie baby from my grandma while sitting at the bottom of my staircase.  Since these memories are from so long ago, I know now that they probably have been altered some way in my mind, most likely from my parents or someone else telling me how they remember it.  With memory reconstruction, we filter or fill in missing pieces of information to make our recall more coherent.

After learning about this, I felt weird about every memory I could remember.  I felt like there was no way I could really know how certain events and memories in my past actually happened.  What do I really remember?  How did those things actually happen?  It is strange to think that something I can see so vividly in my mind, might not be what actually happened, but its just how our memory works.

Memory Construction: Misinformation Effect

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          When I was younger, my sister and I were very close with each other.  With her only being two years older than me, we would always play games outside and in our basement.  Occasionally we would even get into fights about something, and even take out our anger by playfully wrestling each other.  From everything I remember about the childish fights, I never recalled either of us ever actually getting seriously hurt.  However, a few years ago while my sister and I were reminiscing about all of the funny games we used to play and how we used to fight, my sister brought up a memory I had no recollection of.  She said: “Remember that time when we were playing in the driveway in the front yard and you threw a rock at my face? You knocked both of my two front teeth out.”  Obviously I was shocked to hear that I did such a thing, and I questioned whether or not she was making that story up.  There was no doubt that it actually happened because she remembered the incident vividly, and it became her own episodic memory of how she lost her two front teeth. 

            From then on, the story of me throwing a rock at my sister’s face was a story that I kept bringing up very often whenever talking with friends, or whenever asked to tell a funny childhood story.  Since I now knew all of the details from my sister filling me in, it felt as if I had remembered exactly what happened and that I had known about the story all along.  This is an example of a type of memory construction called misinformation effect.  This idea is when there is a “tendency of misleading information presented after an event to alter the memories of the event itself.”  This occurred when my sister told me about something she had experienced and seen, and I “remembered” the same details…even though I did not actually see it or remember experiencing it at the time.  We “filter or fill in missing pieces of information to make our recall more coherent.” We will use all different kinds of sources to build up representations of a specific memory or story.  Although I had no recollection of throwing a rock at my sister’s face, she had implanted that memory into my mind very well.  In fact, she implanted the memory in my mind so well that now I tell the story as if it were my own memory and I remember doing the action, when really all I honestly know about the memory is only what she told me.