The topic that interested me the most this week was false memories. Our mind is susceptible to receive false information, which we start to believe as true. The video we watched showed that our memory can easily be altered just by seeing false pictures. With this recent discovery we now know that memoirs and eyewitness testimonies may not be as accurate as we think.
I always thought I had a good memory, but now I'm starting to question it. My family told me stories when I was little and now that I heard them I can picture it and it starts to feel like a memory. I can see the colors objects were, what people said, and how I was feeling. How many of my memories are real?
Also every time we retrieve memories we change a few details. This reminded me of a teacher I had in middle school. He would tell us stories about his life and each year we noticed a change. For example, he told us he had to jump over a fence to the runway to catch his plane (this was a LONG time ago) and each year we noticed the fence kept getting higher and higher. First, it was four feet then six and then 9 feet. We never thought much of it, we just said he was crazy (we still think he is), but he may not be as crazy as we thought he was.
Kelsey,
ReplyDeleteI really agree with you post. I found this topic very interesting as well. After hearing about false memories had made me start to question my memory as well. It was a very good post.
-Randi
Hi Kelsey!
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you, the whole changing of memories thing is really fascinating to me as well. Interesting that you made the point that you're trying to recall if your childhood memories actually existed or not, because I'm looking back at specific memories and thinking "did that really happen?" Especially ones that are hazy. I could be telling people stories that contain false information! And everyone knows that's no good. I actually told my mother the stories about the people remembering the challenger and 9/11 and she started to tell me her stories. I wondered what actually happened and what didn't.
PS - That teacher you're talking about better be Herr H. I read that and laughed out loud!
Learning about false memories was probably one of the worst things I have learned in school. Haha. Basically, remeniscing destroys or alters childhood memories.
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