memories

the daily dish

Spring-boarding off a series of articles by William Saletan, Jonah Lehrer reveals the true nature or remembering:

We like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them. But they aren't. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes. The larger moral of the experiment is that memory is a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information. It shows us that every time we remember anything, the neuronal structure of the memory is delicately transformed, or reconsolidated. And that is why it's so easy to convince naive subjects that they met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland.

Video above via David Craney who provides a false memory test and digs further into the research.