What mistake do we make when we think the way we think?
We think we have more and better memory than we actually have. And what’s more, the one we have is very unreliable and, to top it off, manipulable.
Doesn’t it just happen to some patients?
I’m afraid it happens to all of us: it’s a realization based on empirical data supported by already classic experiments. Right now, I could condition, modify and even change his memory of a specific event by asking him the precise question or questions.
Why and how?
Because when I ask you the question I redefine the way you remember your experience, or I can even create a memory, or delete others if I know how to ask…
don’t scare me
If we try to reconstruct the scene of an event and I ask you about the speed of the school bus that was passing at that moment, you will end up remembering, for example, that it was going fast…
And wasn’t he in a hurry?
No one knows, because there was never actually a bus in that scene, but I may have inserted, question after question, that memory into your memory and now you evoke it as if it were true.
You lied to me: will I have lied?
And if I’m a skilled interrogator I can get you to remember that you experienced an event in the first person that never actually happened, such as getting lost in a supermarket or in a big city
Is our memory so malleable?
We change it to fit what we think others think happened. It is a mechanism of integration in the tribal truth.
Why does it make us liars?
Because our memory is an organ of adaptation to the environment and not a recorder of facts. We don’t have a fleshy hard drive in our brain recording everything, because memory is a construct: it’s something we build every time we use it, and it’s evolved to be useful; not to be exact.
How is it more useful than accurate?
This question leads us to explain other discoveries in psychology, such as the widespread illusion that we are better than we really are.
Is this useful for adapting?
Because it makes us more confident in ourselves: psychologists call it the “better than average” effect.
I imagine it.
If I ask you: do you have a sense of humor? Or: do you drive well?
Will I answer “better than average”?
Or at least he will think so.
Why doesn’t our partner and even family and friends think so too?
Perhaps because, although only we think we are better than we are and this superiority is false, it can have an adaptive benefit: giving us self-confidence. Our brain, if it has to choose between truth and survival, chooses survival, fortunately.
Are you and I here because of this?
And that genes, this evolutionary memory, are as important as our individual memory and favor the diversity of personalities and minds in the species to adapt to changes in our environment.
Are crazy people useful?
Who is crazy today can be the great leader or guru to cross the desert and save the tribe. And we tend to believe that babies don’t know anything: that their brains are empty boxes.
And doesn’t it fill up when they grow?
This is what Piaget thought. But today we know that babies actually have a very sophisticated understanding of the world.
In what sense?
Much of what we think we learn when we grow up, we actually knew from birth: it’s innate knowledge that also allows us to adapt and survive in very adverse circumstances.
Doesn’t this innateness have drawbacks?
It makes us irrational beings: we are more afraid of a snake or a reptile or a predator than of the attack… Or of a scream: aahhhh!
Ugh, yes!
…What about a silent electric car, which in reality today is more dangerous for our survival when we cross streets. And if I put a viper in class, there will be a lot more panic than if someone shows off a loaded gun…
Don’t scare us again.
We are afraid of snakes, which do not kill anyone in a classroom; guns, yes they do. Psychologists know everything that scares humans and it is very similar to the whole planet: the open throat of a predator, roars, darkness, spiders…
They are only for scary movies.
But we are also afraid of loneliness, making a fool of ourselves or being the “odd ones” in the group; we want to be popular, like when not being part of it meant being abandoned and devoured by beasts.
