Question

Given what we know about brain mechanisms in memory, are our memories accurate? Explain your answer using information on how memories are stored in the brain.

Answer 1

• The hippocampus is a region of the brain that is specialized to codifying and structuring memories, particularly autobiographical and episodic memories (memories about people, places, and events).
• Short-term memory appears to work completely differently. A phone number can be remembered instantly, but forgotten just as fast. Repetition of experience, such as reciting a phone number, is one of many ways that memories migrate from short-term memory to long-term systems.
• We tend to think that memories are stored in our brains just as they are in computers. Once registered, the data are put away for safe-keeping and eventual recall. The facts don’t change.
• But neuroscientists have shown that each time we remember something, we are reconstructing the event, reassembling it from traces throughout the brain. Psychologists have pointed out that we also suppress memories that are painful or damaging to self-esteem. We could say that, as a result, memory is unreliable. We could also say it is adaptive, reshaping itself to accommodate the new situations we find ourselves facing.
• The average human has a limited short-term memory and a fairly inaccurate long-term memory. Our ability to consciously focus on more than one thing at a time is limited. We can split our attention by alternating focus between details, but this comes at a cost of decreased awareness. Attention affects what we perceive and how we process, encode, and recall memories.
• Every thought and every stimulus we have rewires our brain and every thought changes our perception of reality. When we encode memories we make connections. When we recall memories, we recall them from lots of different places. This can result in the brain inserting false details in old memories and then re-coding them that way.