Question

Has there ever been a time where you “misremembered” something? Describe it below. Do you have any ideas about why this may have happened? 3-4 sentence answer

Answer 1

• We all experience false memories, especially when we’re drawing from several pieces of conceptually similar information.Scientists have known for a long time that emotion can influence memory.
• One of the most famous examples is the “flashbulb memory,” a highly detailed, exceptionally vivid memory of the moment and circumstances under which an emotionally arousing event took place or highly salient information was received. These memories are notorious for changing over time.
• For instance,it happened with me a few years ago,when I was asked how I felt about a having boyfriend now, everything’s good was my answer back then. But if someone asks me about the person after we broke up,I did say he was bad for me. Our emotions change over time, and it’s hard to get back in that initial emotional space.
• This phenomenon has implications for issues in everyday life, like false memories in court case testimonies.
• We all enhance, reshape, exaggerate, or outright lie about our life experiences from time to time. For some, it may be a matter of positioning one's self for a promotion at work or landing a date with an attractive individual in a bar.
• We are social animals. Our happiness, welfare and existence depend on connectedness. And we believe that the more we align our experiences with others, the more they will like us and accept us into their circle. When that happens, the happier and safer we feel.
• Misremembering happens to us all the time, Schacter says, because our minds rely on patterns to reconstruct memories and the patterns often lead us astray. Routine behaviors, called “schemas” by the psychologist Frederic Bartlett in his classic “Remembering” (1932), distort our memories by making us assume events happened the way they usually do. For example, I may “remember” that I biked to work today because I ordinarily do that, when today I actually drove.
  
• Positivity bias is an example of such a memory distortion. Since we have a tendency to remember emotionally charged events, our memories are crowded more with emotional events than with ordinary things from our daily lives and these tend to be biased toward the positive, while negative memories slip away.
• We typically underestimate the length of time that something will take, or the likelihood of future events, because our memories are often weak on the most common (hence most likely) events in our past.
• We remember the emotional moments, the fun or scary ones, and forget the daily drives to work and lunch-table conversations. This leads us to predict the future inaccurately, because we misremember a richer past
• We remember by rebuilding the past from bits and pieces and the same ability helps us imagine the future. The hippocampus, long considered the seat of memory in the brain, is actually a “simulator” the part of the brain responsible for creating movies in the mind, whether they are memories of yesterday, plans for tomorrow, or imaginings from a book or an article we read. In all cases, our minds draw from a store of memory details to build episodes.