How your memory rewrites the past

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-02/nu-hym013114.php

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 4-Feb-2014
Contact: Marla Paul
Northwestern University
How your memory rewrites the past
Your memory is no video camera; it edits the past with present experiences

CHICAGO --- Your memory is a wily time traveler, plucking fragments of the present and inserting them into the past, reports a new Northwestern Medicine® study. In terms of accuracy, it's no video camera.

Rather, the memory rewrites the past with current information, updating your recollections with new experiences.

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The notion of a perfect memory is a myth, said Joel Voss, senior author of the paper and an assistant professor of medical social sciences and of neurology at Feinberg.

"Everyone likes to think of memory as this thing that lets us vividly remember our childhoods or what we did last week," Voss said. "But memory is designed to help us make good decisions in the moment and, therefore, memory has to stay up-to-date. The information that is relevant right now can overwrite what was there to begin with."

Bridge noted the study's implications for eyewitness court testimony. "Our memory is built to change, not regurgitate facts, so we are not very reliable witnesses," she said.

A caveat of the research is that it was done in a controlled experimental setting and shows how memories changed within the experiment. "Although this occurred in a laboratory setting, it's reasonable to think the memory behaves like this in the real world," Bridge said.