Our Memory Is Not Reliable
It's a new approach to the Roshoman story.
How often have we searched for things like keys, which we know we left in a particular place, only to find they have vanished from that spot?
How many times have we remembered an incident from our past, only to find that our memory, when compared to another person's recollection of the same event, is different?
There are many types of memory, too many to discuss. Here's one we should note — it's called Personal Identity.
Personal Identity is the unique identity of a person throughout their lifetime. In other words, being faced with multiple lifetime situations, our Identity allows us to establish ourselves as the same person, regardless of age or condition. We persist through our identity.
Two major memory categories are short-term and long-term recollections.
I took a course in Experimental Design in my Master's Degree school studies. My Master's was in General and Experimental Psychology, and I designed a new investigation concerning short-term memory to verify already proven analysis by George A. Miller.
George A. Miller conducted experiments on short-term memory and created his famous paper, "The Magical Number 7, plus or minus 2." This paper proved that creating Chunks is a process in which recalling individual pieces of information is more manageable when grouped. Chunks increase the ability. Here's how it works:
Let's say you need to remember numbers, like a phone number(ten digits) or your social security number (nine digits). The list of numbers stays in one's memory longer if grouped into Chunks. My paper found the memory improvement to be statistically valid.
I have always been interested in how the brain functions and remembers. The book by Eric R. Kandel called "In Search of Memory" fascinated me on many levels as a student. Frequently, I had to read specific paragraphs repeatedly to make sure I understood them. It is interesting to note that Kandel, in his new edition of this book, has added a subtitle, "In Search of Memory," plus "The Emergence of a New Science of Mind." Five principles are the basis of this new science of mind. The states that mind and brain are inseparable. I'll have to reread this new edition.
People often think memory operates like recording equipment, but this is false. Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer, in 1974, experimented with illustrating this process. Two groups of people watched a traffic accident on film. The researchers asked the first group, "How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other"? Then, the second group was asked, "How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?
Those who listened to the question using smashed rather than hit gave a higher estimation of their speed. Then, a week later, they were asked if they saw broken glass in the film. Using the word smashed prompted these viewers to report twice as often as those who heard the word hit, to have remembered seeing broken glass. However, the film contained no broken glass at all. Therefore, the viewer's memory was only somewhat influenced by the word used. Those who heard the word smash remembered a more severe accident, but it was surprising that both remembered broken when there wasn’t any.
On the op-ed page of the NY Times on September 3, 2021, David Brooks describes current research on brain functioning. For years, scientific research assigned different activities to different brain parts; for example, the Hippocampus records episodic memories, and the Amygdala recognizes fear. However, the brain, body, and environment work together to create new mindsets in recent discoveries. We can no longer assign different functions to different parts of us. We are learning that all aspects of us cooperate with all other elements to make us functional humans. So, conceptually, we should be ready to revise our long-held concepts.