Our unreliable memories

When I was 13, I used to hang out a lot at a friend's house. The other
day, the same friend and I reminisced about those days. He asked me:
"Remember the dog?" I asked him: "What dog?" He replied: "My dog!"
I had absolutely no recollection of his dog!

Then, trying to get in the swing of things, I said: "oh hang on, yes,
yes, it was a brown dog wasn't it?" He laughed. "No, it was black, it
was a big black dog. Don't you remember?" he asked. I did not.

According to "Memory the Self-Justifying Historian", Chapter Three of
"Mistakes Were Made", my inability to remember the dog is not
surprising. Our minds forget selectively, all the time.

This post is part of a series - also mirrored on the Chaptets blog - in
which chapter-summaries (or chaptets) are serialised.  The book I am
focusing on now is: Mistakes Were Made (but not by me). 

By comparison to the previous chapter, I found this chapter immensely
interesting.  Therefore, I am splitting my summary of it into two parts.

I should point out that my previous Chaptet entry may have been too
critical because I found chapter two largely unsurprising - I knew
humans are biased and prejudiced and have blind spots.  But the
unreliablilty of our memory is something that truly surprised me!

CHAPTER THREE: OUR UNRELIABLE MEMORY

Summary - part 1

Memory is our personal, live-in, self-justifying historian.

History is written by the victors, and when we write our own histories,
we do so just as the conquerors of nations do: to justify our actions
and make us look and feel good about ourselves and what we did, or what
we failed to do. If mistakes were made, memory helps remember that they
were made by someone else.

Of course, memories can be remarkably detailed and accurate, too. We
remember first kisses and favorite teachers. We remember family stories,
movies, dates, baseball stats, childhood humiliations and triumphs. We
remember the central events of our life stories. But when we do
misremember, our mistakes aren't random. The everyday,
dissonance-reducing distortions of memory help us make sense of the
world and our place in it, protecting our decisions and beliefs. The
distortion is even more powerful when it is motivated by the need to
keep our self-concept consistent; by the wish to be right; by the need
to preserve self-esteem; by the need to excuse failures or bad
decisions; or by the need to find an explanation, preferably one safely
in the past, of current problems. Confabulation, distortion and plain
forgetting are the foot soldiers of memory, and they are summoned to the
front lines when the totalitarian ego wants to protect us from the pain
and embarrassment of actions we took that are dissonant with our core
self-images: "I did that?"

Being absolutely, positively sure a memory is accurate does not
mean that it is; our errors in memory support our current feelings and
beliefs.

We do not remember everything that happens to us; we select only
highlights. Moreover, recovering a memory is like watching a few
unconnected frames of a film and then figuring out what the rest of the
scene must have been like. Because memory is reconstructive, it is subject
to confabulation - "source confusion"".

The author of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy, at the end
of each chapter, subjected her memories to the evidence for or against
them. The evidence killed some good stories! It is likely she had fused
memories in order to have story-lines consonant with her feelings, in
order to justify her present-day feelings.

You have memories about your father that are salient to you and that
represent the man he was and the relationship you had with him. What
have you forgotten? You remember that time when you were disobedient and
he swatted you. But could you have been the kind of kid a father
couldn't explain things to, because you were impatient and impulsive and
didn't listen?

Every parent has been an unwilling player in the you-can't-win game.

Betsy Petersen produced a full-bodied whine in her memoir Dancing With
Daddy, blaming her parents for only giving her swimming lessons,
trampoline lessons, horseback-riding lessons, and tennis lessons, but
not ballet lessons. "The only thing I wanted, they would not give me,"
she wrote. Parent blaming is a popular and convenient form of
self-justification because it allows people to live less uncomfortably
with their regrets and imperfections. Mistakes were made, by them. Never
mind that I raised hell about those lessons or stubbornly refused to
take advantage of them. Memory thus minimizes our responsibility and
exaggerates theirs.