Inspired by [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/g2csg5/what_fact_is_ignored_generously/fnlesbi?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share) comment by u/squigs, I came here to ask you: Why we can’t remember details of things and, in most of the times, we make up things to fill the gaps on our memory.
Why does our brain do this?
In: Biology
Because we can’t possibly process everything so we have learned to filter out unnecessary information and fill that spot with what makes sense or is common.
We are organisms, not angels, and our brains are organs, not providers of truth. –(poorly paraphrased from) Stephen Pinker
Evolution of our human memory results in “good enough to do the job, on average”, not always the best way.
Human memories are quite reliable. Our languages are the most complex out of any animal, because we can describe abstract details, I would say for that reason alone we have the most powerful memories in the animal kingdom. You may forget what words mean but you still generally remember your native language throughout your life. We also can’t remember everything, we have to filter out relevant information. I don’t think any other animal has as long of a memory as humans. Humans live longer than elephants or dolphins, and there are plenty of 90-100 year olds that remember quite a lot.
Our memory evolved as a tool to help us survive, not as a method of storing information perfectly.
For survival, it is advantageous to remember the important things like what dangers were learned about, what new information was learned, and how to apply new skills (and any other important broad strokes) but not the exact series of events.
Over time, the irrelevant information gets pared away so that new, more relevant information can be stored.
We don’t have a full understanding of how human memory works, but the leading theory in neuroscience is that each time you recall a memory, it’s becomes subject to additions or changes. This causes issues when you add in the idea of priming, or that how we are asked to remember certain situations alters our recollection. There’s a famous experiment where the subjects are shown the same collision between a red and blue car, and asked how fast the red was moving at the time of impact. The researchers will ask different subjects the question using adjectives of varying degrees (e.g. hit, smashed, crashed, slammed), and found that if they framed the question (or primed it) as if the red car was going faster, the subject recalled car moving faster. These subtle little priming changes will cause us to recall certain details in more exaggerated or altered ways, and much like a game of telephone, you move farther and farther away from the actual truth. Its like the old saying “if you say a lie enough it becomes the truth.” If you keep recalling whatever it is you’re lying about but inserting that lie into the memory, eventually it will become more strongly associated with that event that the actual truth.
Sorry that was long (and probably not eli5 level) but I’m a neuroscientist out of work and got carried away
Our brain isn’t like a database. For most people and most events, you don’t remember the exact details but rather a collection of memory fragments. When you recall a memory, your brain pieces these fragments back together to recreate the memory. Also, our brain loves patterns as it saves time learning each and every new thing when instead you can just fit new information as generalizations into some schema you’ve already learned.
These generalizations allows us to do a few things. You can imagine things you’ve never seen which can be fun when daydreaming or acting. But it also has some drawbacks in that we can be influenced to mix memories with imagination in ways that we really believe the memory to be authentic. Perhaps a sibling and you are recalling memories and your sibling injects some detail that wasn’t accurate. But if the injection was believable to you, you may very well reconstruct your memory in a way that adds the faulty details, believing it to be true. Or a more sinister example would be of people gaslighting, causing a person to doubt their own memories and work in details fabricated by the manipulative person. Or it can be self-inflicted, telling yourself that something is or is not true over and over, looking for any evidence to support your desired belief and ignoring anything to the contrary until you really believe it.
I think that no one knows the answer, but some context may be helpful.
There exist people who can recite everything that happened to them on every day of their lives. While it’s rare, the fact that *any* such people exist proves that poor memory is not the best that evolution could do, and isn’t a necessary consequence of the way our brains work.
Additionally, it appears that [most if not all chimpanzees have eidetic/photographic short-term memory](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12993-chimps-outperform-humans-at-memory-task/), and possibly long-term memory too (I don’t know if that has been or could be tested). So it’s possible that lousy memory is unique to humans.
A scientist involved in that study speculates in the article that loss of photographic memory was a side effect of our acquisition of language skills, but it’s not clear to me if there’s any evidence to support that and I don’t see why it would be true.
Oliver Sacks wrote:
>We, as human beings, are landed with memory systems that have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections — but also great flexibility and creativity. Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength: if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information.
>Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.
but, again, I don’t know if that’s a scientific hypothesis backed by data or just the musings of a writer.
Our brain remembers impulses, thoughts, and major events quite well. What we often miss out on are details. We fill in these gaps with other information, or what we infer to be true. Often times, this is used by police to suggest that something happened, and then they take the details that were filled in to find the truth of the situation. This amazing ability to “repair” our memories is also it’s greatest weakness, though. By introducing incorrect or extraneous information, our brain fills in the wrong information. We assume this to be correct, and so it is compounded upon until it becomes our new “truth”.
what the hell did u/squigs do to you?
Check out Stumbling on Happiness by Dr. Daniel Gilbert. It is very funny and gets into this matter and so much more.
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