The fallibility of memory

We’re watching a TV series that jumps around all over the place in time (This Is Us, since you ask; highly recommended), and in one episode they look at everyone’s reactions to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, that happened on Tuesday January 29th, 1986.

It’s a pretty emotive episode (in keeping with much of the series) – both me and my wife were kids when the disaster happened, and can remember how we felt, and where we were, pretty clearly. Which is amazing, given how long ago it was!

Trouble is, I don’t remember it at all.

My memory of what happened and where I was is completely wrong! I can remember being in a particular playground at a particular school with particular friends and yet, when I check the dates, I’d left that school 2 years previously, and the friends I remember sharing the experience with, were at totally different schools!

😲

It happened again more recently, in a subtly different way. I’ve written before of my love and respect for Stephen King’s writing, and I ‘remember’ how I got into his books, first reading Cujo as a young teenager (because it didn’t look that scary), then thinking, Oh this horror-book malarkey isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and diving straight into Salem’s Lot.

Big mistake. I ‘remember’ not sleeping for months afterwards, and of all his books that I have revisited the thrill of re-reading in recent years, that’s the one I avoided at all costs. I had no desire for sleepless nights again, thank you.

But when a friend re-read it and raved about how good it is, I couldn’t resist, and with great trepidation (and a warm-bodied, very much completely alive wife lying next to me) I bashed through it at bedtime, in the still, small hours, to re-discover that it is indeed very good. I had sleepless nights, only because I could't put it down!

😆

And you know what? It was fine. I didn’t find it scary at all. (And only had slightly weird dreams on the very first night I started reading it, before anything even remotely scary had happened in the book; trauma working its way out, harmlessly)

But then… almost as soon as I’d finished the book, a short clip from the Tobe Hooper-adapted, David Soul-starring TV mini series they made of the film surfaced on Twitter/X and as I watched vampire-children scratching at windows and felt my heart rate instantly shoot through the roof I suddenly realised it wasn’t the book that scared me so much, it was the TV series I'd foolishly watched!!

And I hadn’t even ‘remembered’ that they’d made that TV series.

🧛🏼‍♂️

Why does this happen?

It’s because memory doesn’t work how we think it works.

It looks like there’s this ever-growing filing cabinet we have called a mind, and whenever we recall something, we’re going back to fish out the original file. But, at the risk of over-simplifying things, it’s more like we remember the last time we remember it, and it gets changed over time.

I was first alerted to this curious phenomenon when I watched the TV show Quiz, all about the court case for the couple who were accused of cheating on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

I went and looked up the original research and discovered that the clip you’re about to watch is actually based in fact (you can read a review article of the science, here):

Choice quote, that jibes perfectly with the 3 Principles understanding:

“All memories are—by definition—a lie.”

It's fascinating and for me the most critical thing to see here—in addition to us always and only ever experiencing a Thought-created perceptual reality, being created on the fly, as it were—is that each time memory recall happens, our current state of mind will feed into its re-creation.

So:

• Recall something in a low mood → it naturally looks worse… and this gets laid down in memory.
• Recall something in a higher state of consciousness → the situation is naturally seen from a different perspective… and this gets laid down in memory.

Now I wonder if that has any implications for the resolution of past traumatic experiences?!

😳

It certainly brings a deeper appreciation for what Sydney Banks had to say in The Missing Link:

“The past is a ghost that cannot be held in the palm of your hand.”

and…

“I do not ask anyone to ignore their past experiences. This would be denial, and denial is not a healthy state. Instead, seek a clearer understanding of the past; realize that the negative feelings and emotions from past traumatic experiences are no longer true. They are merely memories, a collection of old, stale thoughts.”

and…

“The past is dead. Forget what is old and dead, and start life anew.”

💖

Giles

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When you’re ready

Healing doesn’t always mean an end to experiencing past traumas. It *does* mean that experience changes 💗

The Daily RemindersGiles P Croft

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