Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [24]
Nothing is coming soon that can help us with our procedural memory. But our semantic and episodic bio-memories can and will be extended by our e-memories.
We all know that biological memory is fallible, but it’s still extremely unnerving to learn just how true this is. As neuroscientists have shown, episodic memories feel a lot more fleshed out and precise than they really are. Unlike computers, brains aren’t all that great at faithfully storing masses of detail. What brains are best at storing are patterns, meanings, and gestalts. The act of remembering an event from your past is less like playing back a mental videotape in your mind’s home theater system than it is like telling a story based on a few relevant facts.
In an age of Total Recall, anything, even everything, is easily recorded accurately into your e-memory. Your brain can’t do this. When it lays down a new memory of an experience, what it actually encodes is a sparse constellation of authentic details and salient junctures. When your brain retrieves the memory later, it uses that constellation as a scaffold for reconstructing the original experience. As the memory plays out in your mind you may have the strong impression that it’s a high-fidelity record, but only a few of its contents are truly accurate. The rest of it is like a bunch of props, backdrops, casting extras, and stock footage.
When a friend tells you a five-minute-long humorous story, the memory you come away with isn’t the exact sequence of words he uttered. When you repeat the “same” story to your friends at work on Monday, what you actually do is reconstruct it in your own way according to the same pattern and meaning. You follow the overall map provided by those key junctures you memorized, but you freely embellish and fill in any gaps to make the story flow smoothly between them. You might repeat verbatim a few key bits of the original telling, but most of the word choices are yours. Generally, all I can remember of a joke is the great punch line that made me laugh, and I have to reinvent the rest in order to share it.
And it gets even stranger. Sometimes a feature that was confabulated during one act of remembering gets reremembered during the next act. In the process, the confabulation can become a permanent element of the bio-memory. Here’s how the eminent neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux sees it:
Like many scientists in the field of memory, I used to think that a memory is something stored in the brain and then accessed when used. Then, in 2000, a researcher in my lab [convinced us] that our usual way of thinking was wrong. In a nutshell . . . each time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. In short, your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it. This is why people who witness crimes testify about what they read in the paper rather than what they witnessed.
False memories can have tragic consequences. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, thousands of families were ripped apart when adult children claimed that they had recovered long-repressed memories of sexual molestation when they were little. It turned out many of these “memories” had been coaxed into being by gullible, credulous therapists who hadn’t realized what they were doing.
Most of our memories are not grossly altered as our brain repeatedly remembers them, but all of us harbor at least some memories that have been radically revised, and all of our memories are susceptible to gradual mutation and drift.
That is about to change.
E-MEMORY TRANSFORMS BIO-MEMORY
Biological memory is subjective, patchy, emotion-tinged, ego-filtered, impressionistic, and mutable. Digital