Large numbers of people hold beliefs about memory that conflict with modern science. Perhaps the most pervasive false belief, , is that memory works like a video camera. In other words, the things we experience in our lives are recorded, stored and preserved in our brains as faithful reproductions, and retrieving our recollections is simply a matter of reviewing the video tape.
But over the last 150 years or so, researchers have found that this analogy is wrong in startling ways. Memory is not like a video camera; a better way to think of it is as an act of reconstruction, or what you might call "mental paleontology." This is the analogy that likes to use.
"A paleontologist uncovers a fossil, just as we have to uncover a memory....but that paleontologist doesn't have all of the pieces," she says. "And what that individual has to do is fill in the gaps with best guesses and prior experience."
What Thomas and other researchers have found, over and over again, is that our recollections are fallible. And the implications of this extend far beyond how we recall our childhoods or where we left our keys. They extend into , where we constantly ask people to make recollections or remember things under oath.
This week on Hidden Brain, how we remember, why we forget 鈥� and the simple lessons we all can learn to make our memories sharp and vivid.
More resources:
at Tufts University
: An example of the interaction between language and memory," by Elizabeth F. Loftus and John C. Palmer, 1974
: Using false photographs to create false childhood memories," by Kimberley A. Wade, Maryanne Garry, J. Don Read and D. Stephen Lindsay, 2002
by Ayanna K. Thomas and Elizabeth F. Loftus, 2002
by Jaap M. J. Murre and Joeri Dros, 2015
by Amy M. Smith, Victoria A. Floerke and Ayanna K. Thomas, 2016
Copyright 2025 NPR
