After reading Lesson 9, I started thinking back about a few events it brought up. One being was the September 11 attacks, the other would be my childhood home. At first, I thought I had a pretty good recollection on these events. But after reading more into the lesson, I started to wonder if maybe I did recall these events correctly or not.
I will start with my childhood home. I would like to focus more so on my Grandparents’ house. I always felt confident in my memory of this house due to its out-of-date colors. The house for most of my childhood had yellow paint on the outside and on the inside each room was painted in various vibrant shades. I felt that such unusual color choices only helps in aiding this memory rather than my placing other colors in place. Then I realized that when they finally changed paint to grey, I found that simple change blurred the rest of the memory for me. I still, however, remember the basement vividly, or at least so I thought. My Grandmother absolutely loved Frank Sinatra. So much so that she had multiple posters of his portraits all over the basement walls. When I think back to the placement of the posters, I confuse their placement. I remember the posters themselves but don’t recall how exactly they were arranged. I feel that if I overthink it too much, I might form a new memory. A memory in which wherever I decided to place the posters might ruin how I may remember the basement permanently, like it stated in the reading.
The second event would be September 11, 2001. I feel that I can recall this day a bit easier due to the fact that I live in New York, my mother worked in Manhattan during that day, and McDonald’s toys. I will explain all this in a second, let me start with the first one. I woke up around 9:00 AM. This was at the time when beepers were very popular. I sent my mother a page and waited for her to call me from work. She finally called me, to inform me to wake up my father, and put on the news. She stating that the Twin Towers were attacked. I woke my father up and showed him the news, for the rest of the day, I ended up watching the news broadcasts’ and received updates from my mother’s whereabouts throughout the attack. She was close enough to the towers to see the attacks from her office window. Even with the attacks in the city going on, my mother made her way to a McDonalds to purchase me some toys that they were offering. At this time, I was into a Lego toy line known as Bionicle. McDonalds started to include their own spin of this toy with their Kids’ meals. My mother, even with the 9/11 events going on, she still went out of her way to get the toys that I was missing from the collection. I felt that with these factors in mind I should be able to recall everything quite well. I suppose most of the day is blurred out, but I do think the most vivid parts are the essential parts. I suppose you can say this mostly reflects the flashbulb memory.
In conclusion, it’s hard to say if your memories are truly accurate. Sure you have other people who may have been there as well to talk about the memories with you. But what if their memory differs from yours? Who can really be accurate? I think back to times where I reminisce with other people and have that, “Oh yeah!” moment, but now I wonder if that, “Oh yeah!” moment is now a newly formed false memory.
I enjoyed your examples of false memories and how you examined flashbulb memories in your post. Your examples made me think about my own memories from September 11th and reminded me of a strange case of false memories of my own. I have a vivid memory of sitting in the school bus on September 11th, waiting for the school to clear our bus driver to depart. This memory is more of a flashbulb memory because I do not remember many details, I just remember that we had to wait a while because of the attacks. I also have a vivid memory of sitting in that same school bus and watching two kids fighting in another bus nearby.
Since these two events happened at the same place and are two of my most vivid memories of that place, I often associated the two events with one another. As the years went by, thinking of one event would lead me to think of the other event, and I must have formed the memory of those two events happening on the same day. Not long ago, some friends and I were recalling our own experiences from September 11th, and I stated that I remember seeing two kids fighting on a bus that same day. One of my friends who happened to be on that bus corrected me and said that the fight had actually happened a year or two later.
I found it pretty interesting that the two memories could somewhat merge together to form a false memory due to their similarities. It makes me wonder how many other memories of single events may have merged together in my mind to form inaccuracies or further false memories.
I have similar memories of my grandparents house I can remember that the carpet was brown and there was wood panels in the living room. However, I am not sure of where the future was or even what color or kind they had in the living/dining room area. With the example of 9/11 I was only 8 yrs old so all I remember is seeing adults upset and worried when I was at school. With false memories I do feel sure of who was there and how people felt but never really sure of what was being said or what was actually happening.
An example of this is from my sophomore year of high school me and one of my friends were having a disagreement. I only remember that was around November since we were auditioning for the play and we were asked to do a scene together since we were doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream and we were king & queen of the fairies. We did a scene where they were arguing and we did great because we were arguing in real life but we shocked everyone with our anger. While afterwards we talked and where alright. This is in relation to memory for “exceptional” events just the blog post above is and how emotional memories have more accuracy to them.
Ivan,
The concept of false memories is one of my favorite topics and yet, at the same time, one of my most hated… for the exact reasons that you stated here. Can we trust our own memories? That’s a concept so interesting and yet so freakishly mind-boggling that it is very disconcerting. If you don’t have your actual memories then what do you have, you know?
I liked your example of using the 9/11 attacks to illustrate this point. For me, I think that what I remember is true, only because I have recalled it so many times when people ask where I was or say something along the lines of “everyone remembers where they were.”
For me, I was living in Alaska at the time, so I was 6 hours behind and a world away. I was in the 8th grade and sleeping soundly when my dad woke me up saying that the twin towers had been hit. Now, I’m really bad at waking up and was probably groggy, but at the time I had no idea what that meant. I asked him if that was in Alaska. He said no, in New York, and I maybe fell back asleep? When I did finally get fully up, I went into the living room where my parents had the TV on the news and I saw what was actually going on and was scared but I remember there was no mention of terrorists or anything. At That’s the last memory I have of that morning. After that, my memory jumps to being in school that day and they put on the news there also. We all sat in our desks and watched the news most of the day. A girl sitting next to me, who I randomly remember was named Gina, said that her Aunt lived or worked there. I asked if she made it out. She whispered she had died.
The scariest part of your topic is that as I’m writing this I’m trying to remember what exactly I saw on that TV when I walked into the living room. I have a visceral memory of watching the second plane hit, but there’s no way that is correct. They had both been hit before my dad woke me up. However, if I wasn’t thinking about this full timeline, I would absolutely say I saw the second plane hit. And if something so important, such an integral part of our childhood, can actually be a false memory – who’s to say what else is?