Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [36]
This reliance on a vivid inner picture helps explain why memories are particularly apt to trigger the feeling of knowing. Two thousand years ago, Plato proposed a model of how memory works that is both radically outdated and remarkably timeless. Imagine, he suggested, that you have in your mind a wax tablet—“a gift of Memory, the mother of the Muses.” Everything you experience, from your own thoughts and sensory impressions to interactions with others, creates an imprint in that wax, like an insignia pressed into the seal on a letter. In this model, our memories are the marks in the wax: an unchanging mental replica of the events of the past, captured at the moment they occurred.
If Plato’s medium has fallen into obsolescence, his metaphor has endured. Every generation’s cutting-edge recording technology has been pressed into service to symbolize the workings of memory. Flashbulb memories are part of this tradition, as are books, gramophones, movies, and, most recently, computers. (This last analogy is in many ways the most explicit, not least because it is bidirectional: we speak of our memories as being like computers, but also of our computers as having memory—a locution that’s become so natural that we forget it is a metaphor.) Within this recording-technology model of memory, the vividness of an inner picture really does vouchsafe its accuracy. We don’t question the integrity of stored data if the photos aren’t faded or missing and the book hasn’t fallen apart at the seams.
The trouble is, this model of memory is simply wrong. Plato knew it was philosophically unsound, and, in his inimitable fashion, he proposed it only in order to genially eviscerate it. Later thinkers saw that it was scientifically flawed as well, and suggested successively more sophisticated (if still tentative) descriptions of how the brain remembers and forgets. Most contemporary neuroscientists agree that memory is not a single function but multiple distinct processes: remembering people, facts, particular times and places, how to perform physical actions, and so on. Similarly, they agree that these tasks are not accomplished by a single structure—the wax tablet or Polaroid or PC in the brain—but rather by many different ones, whose responsibilities range from face recognition to emotional processing. Perhaps most tellingly, they also agree that a memory is not so much stored intact in one part of the brain as reassembled by all these different structures each time we call it to mind.
So much for the recording-device model of memory. But once we dispense with the model, we also have to dispense with the idea that vividness is a good indicator of accuracy. If, instead of pulling our memories out of storage when we need them, we rebuild them afresh every time, then vividness could just be a feature that we build into some but not others. Alternatively, it could be a side effect of the building process itself. The neuroscientist William Hirst (one of the co-chairs of the 9/11 Memory Consortium) explained that some memories might strike us as convincing not because they are necessarily accurate but because of how often we call them to mind (i.e., reassemble them) and how easy it is do so. Hirst also suggests that some memories might feel particularly persuasive because of what he calls our “meta-theories about the kind of things we will or will not remember.” That is, some memories might feel “burned on our brain” because it is psychologically or culturally unacceptable to forget them. Think about all those “Never Forget” bumper stickers that appeared after 9/11. As Hirst points out, “sometimes, remembering becomes a moral imperative.”
This newer model of memory is imperfect. There are still many things we don’t understand about how our minds store, retrieve, and reconstruct information from the past. But the real question about this model might simply