What mistake do we make when we think about how we think?
We believe we have more and better memories than we actually have. And, furthermore, the one we have is very unreliable and, if that were not enough, manipulable.
Doesn't it only happen to some patients?
I fear that it happens to all of us: it is a finding based on empirical data supported by now classic experiments. Right now, I could condition, modify and even change your memory of a specific event by asking you the precise question or questions.
Why and how?
Because by asking you the question I redefine the way you remember your experience or I can even create a memory or suppress others by knowing 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 going fast?
No one knows, because there was never actually a bus in that scene, but I have inserted, question by question, that memory into your memory and now you evoke it as if it were true.
You have lied to me: have I lied?
And if I am a skilled interrogator, I can get you to remember that you experienced an event in the first person that never really happened: like 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 into 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 meat hard drive in our brain recording everything, because memory is a construct: it's something we build every time we use it and it has 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 illusion that we are better than we really are.
Is that useful to adapt?
Because it makes us more self-confident: psychologists call it the “better than average” effect.
I imagine.
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 you will think so; sure.
Why don't our partners and even family and friends think about it too?
Perhaps because, although only we believe that we are better than we are and that superiority is false, it can have an adaptive benefit: giving us self-confidence. And our brain, if it must choose between truth and survival, chooses survival, fortunately.
Thanks to her, you and I are here?
And because genes, that 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?
Whoever 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 know nothing: that their brain is an empty box.
And doesn't it fill up as it grows?
That's what Piaget believed. 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 as we grow up we actually already knew from birth: it is innate knowledge that also allows us to adapt and survive in very adverse circumstances.
Doesn't that nativism have drawbacks?
It makes us less than rational beings: we are more afraid of a snake or a reptile or an attacking predator... Or of a scream: aahhhh!
Phew, yes!
...That of a silent electric car, which in reality today is more dangerous for our survival when crossing streets. And if I bring a snake into class, there will be much more panic than if someone shows off a loaded gun...
Don't scare us again.
Snakes don't kill anyone in a classroom; the guns, yes. Psychologists know everything that scares humans and it is very similar all over the planet: open jaws, roars, darkness, spiders...
They're only for scary movies.
But we are also afraid of loneliness, making a fool of ourselves or being the “weird ones” in the group; we want to be popular, like when not being part of it meant being abandoned and devoured by wild beasts.
