What is your earliest childhood memory? Okay before you even get started typing,
let me save you some time and let you know that you’re probably wrong. Time
for me to literally… figuratively?... no, literally, ruin your childhood.
[Intro Music]
Alright seriously, according to the demographics from my last few videos this is still the most relevant
flashbulb memory question. Where were you when you first heard about 9/11? Go ahead and write
it in the comments. If you’re a Generation X-er, where were you when you first heard about the
Challenger explosion? If you’re a baby boomer, JFK’s assassination… And believe it or not,
there’s actually enough people to make this a relevant question too… where were you when the
carrier pigeon or telegram or whatever arrived telling you about Pearl Harbor?
Go ahead and write it in the comments along with which situation applies to
you so that people can make fun of how old you are. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. Actually,
while I’m out here I’m gonna go check the mail…
♫ I'm Mrs. Lifestyles of the rich and famous. You want a piece of me.
Oh my God that Britney's shameless! You want a piece of me. ♫
Okay, done? Well you probably already know what I’m going to tell you next. You’re
probably completely wrong about where you were and who told you.
Flashbulb memories have several definitions but the one I prefer is the one about the super cool
generational phenomenon where everyone remembers their specific situation surrounding a common
event. These common events are pretty rare, happening only every 20 years or so. Luckily,
they were pretty well studied by the time 9/11 rolled around, so several professors had the
foresight to have their students write down where they were and who they heard it from.
Several years later they were asked to write it again, and you’d be surprised at how many of them
got it completely wrong. How is this possible? Well it’s not enough to say that those students
were simply stupid or scatter-brained. Your brain is not a perfect video camera, capturing
all audio and visual information and storing it for later. And knowing that makes it impossible
for me to enjoy movies like Limitless… Something wrong at law school?
How do you know I’m in law school? People who aren’t usually don’t
carry around dry academically constipated books about a dead supreme court justice.
You’re a creep aren’t you. You’ve been... you’ve been following me.
No, I just noticed the book. You just saw the corner of it,
how did you know that? I’d seen it before. 12 years
ago in college. Sitting on the couch of a TA I was trying to make, waiting for her to come back out
of the bathroom, hoping she’d have a condom. Somehow my unconscious had served that up. A
memory I’d never even recorded. Or was it there the whole time and all I needed was the access?
No! That’s not how memory works! That’s not [deep breath]
Well, I hope you don’t mind, but I still have to make dinner. I know I’m not a cooking show but a
man’s gotta eat, right? Anyway, a nootropic is a drug that increases cognitive ability.
They do exist, though not nearly on the scale of what’s in the movie. Over the counter drugs like
ginkgo biloba or caffeine have some minor effect in some very specific situations. ADHD drugs on
the other hand have a much more profound effect. But they only help you from the moment that they
take effect. They don’t magically go back twelve years and help you for a memory you never even
intentionally recorded in the first f-! [Inhaler] So if your brain isn’t a perfect video camera
recording all audio and visual information for you to retrieve years later, how does
memory work? Well, every time you retrieve a memory, it is reconstructed on the spot.
You might think this is a pretty inefficient way to store memories – and it is. It’s like having
every song on your ipod in a compressed zip file, every time you want to listen
to something you’d have to decompress it. The quality is going to be garbage and if
you go long enough without accessing it at all it's gonna be corrupt. But this system
worked with hundreds of thousands of years of pre-history where no one was going to fact
check how big that fish you caught really was. So because our memories are reconstructed from
such a flimsy skeleton every time you want to remember something, it’s subject to a number
of errors. Seven, to be exact. In his 2001 book, Dr. Daniel Schacter outlined what he
called the seven sins of memory. The seven sins can be divided into two groups, sins of
omission – when you leave something out, and sins of commission – when you add or change something.
The first sin of omission is transience. As I said before, the longer you go without accessing
a memory the more likely it is to be decayed. How long it takes to decay depends entirely on
how important your brain thinks the information is. I say your brain, because if you remember
from the Dreams video, your brain spends most of your non-REM sleeping time sorting through the
memories that you’ve accumulated that day and figuring out which ones are important
enough for storage. The more important it is the longer you’ll be able to access it. This
could be anywhere from years to just minutes. The second sin is absent-mindedness. Basically,
you forgot to hit record on your metaphorical camera so now you’re not paying enough attention
to even get a basic sketch of what happened. Most illicit substances come with this price
tag. But for most normal people, this could be as simple as not paying attention when you put
your phone down… so now you have to try and find it by calling it or something but you can’t,
because you don’t have your phone. Blocking is the final sin of omission
and it’s the primary cause of the tip of the tongue phenomenon. That’s when you know you
know something but you just can’t get to that information. Like when you’re trying to remember
an actor's name and all you think about is Matt Damon. You know it’s not Matt Damon but Matt Damon
is all you think about. That’s blocking. Thanks a lot Matt Damon. Luckily I showed you a good
work around for this last video with dreaming. Unless, like me, you dream about Matt Damon.
The second group of sins are sins of commission. Sins of commission are why that fish gets bigger
every time you tell the story. Or why you’re telling a story to a group and your friend
knows that what you’re saying actually happened to him… but he lets you finish the story anyway
because he’s a cool guy. It’s also why you’re the most unreliable, yet weirdly
most trusted source of information when it comes to witnessing a crime… a video topic in itself.
The first sin of commission is misattribution. This is when you can correctly recall a memory,
but you can’t correctly source that memory. So you think it happened to you but really you saw it in
a movie or a friend told you about it. Now it’s time for me to make good on
that promise and ruin your childhood. But first we’ve got our diced sausages.
A lot of your childhood memories are not actually your own memories. They’re stories
about you that your parents told you. They may be true. But odds are, you don’t remember
them as they actually happened. Go ahead and put some freshly
chopped onions in there. You remember them as they
were told to you by your lovingly biased parents. But thanks to misattribution,
you’ve long forgotten that you were actually told this story, and just assume it’s a valid memory.
Fresh pico. Nevermind the container. I should really talk to that You Suck At Cooking guy.
This may have also been what happened with your flashbulb memory. You may have remembered it
one way, but then your friend came to you months or years later and told you their
version. You remember them being there with you and their version is completely different
so now you either have to incorporate their version or change to their version entirely.
This often happens unconsciously. It’s not an error of stupidity. It’s an error of trust.
[Metal banging] Alright, we get this pizza crust that I made earlier. This
little bit of fancy pants olive oil. [Brushing. Pan clanging on counter]
This is somewhat related to the next sin, suggestibility. Suggestibility occurs well
after the memory has been stored, when you hear conflicting information and incorporate
that as part of your own memory. Get yourself some [bang] pizza sauce.
This is a major problem in eyewitness testimony and is often why witnesses are separated from
each other before their accounts can be gathered. If you remember that jewelry
thief was wearing a red trench coat and said something about San Diego… but then
you overhear the store clerk saying that she was wearing a red trench coat and that
her last name was San Francisco… you begin to doubt your own memory. Was it San Diego?
The clerk was closer… maybe it was San Francisco. [Metal clang] Make sure to spread that out evenly.
So when you’re questioned, you’re pretty sure it was a red trench coat, because that was confirmed
by the clerk. But now, you’re unsure about the San Diego/San Francisco thing… which one was it?
And was that where she was from, was that where she was going, or was that her last name? You’re
unsure, so you better go with the story that the other person said because she sounded pretty sure.
Then you get yourself some completely processed cheese. It just isn’t good without those
steroids and antibiotics in it.
[Metal scraping, Kitchen Sounds]
Bias is by far the most fun of the commission sins. There are literally dozens if not hundreds
of different biases that can affect your memory. Basically, your memory is not reconstructed in the
context of how you felt and believed at the time but rather how you feel and believe now. Think
back to high school… for most of you, you’re going to remember it being the most fun time of your
life even though if you really think about it, it’s just as much of an emotional bag as any other
point of your life. Talking to a new group of friends that you’re trying to impress? Maybe even
some girls? This is when you’re gonna round up your GPA just a little bit or maybe even add a few
inches... to the fish that you caught. Grow up. A lot of the biases that affect memory fall under
the category of being Self-Serving. You want to remember yourself being just a little bit
better than you really are. These aren’t always a conscious altering of the memory. If you’ve ever
changed your mind on a hot button political issue, you may look back on your younger self and think,
hmmm I was always a little bit on that side – even though you totally never were. Let’s say
you voted for someone who turned out to be a little bit less than what you expected. At the
time, you voted for him because you were very pro-that guy. But now, when you tell the story,
you voted for him because you were more anti-the other guy. These are related to the always fun,
hindsight bias or “I knew it all along” bias. How many times have you caught yourself saying
“I knew that would happen” but you didn’t stop your friend from doing whatever stupid
thing he was about to do because, let’s face it, you didn’t know it was going to happen.
The final sin is persistence, its commissions answer to blocking. This is when you have a
memory that repeats itself over and over even when you want it to stop. It’s commonly associated with
PTSD and depression. But it has a lighter side as well. Ever have a song stuck in your head?
♫ I'm Mrs. Lifestyles of the rich and famous. You want a piece of me. Oh my God that Britney's
shameless! You want a piece of me. ♫ Yeah, me neither. But side note,
the more you try to suppress the song, the more likely it is to play over and over. It’s been
hypothesized that the reason the song repeats itself over and over is because your brain
subconsciously knows that there’s an end to the song and it’s just trying to get there. So one
way to try to get rid of it is to just indulge and sing the song all the way through to completion.
[Timer Beep, Kitchen Sounds]
For the Psychology students out there who stumbled on my video in order to study for a memory test, one of my professors
came up with a pretty easy mnemonic device to help remember the sins of memory. Sins of
omission are TAB and sins of commission are Ms BP. So the next time someone asks you where you were
when you first heard about something… or a friend is telling you a story about a fish
that you actually caught… or you catch yourself lying to your kids about how awesome high school
is going to be... take a second to think about what might be affecting your memory, because now,
you know better.