How human memory works (and how it fools us)

We tell you all the psychological and neuroscientific keys to understand how it works.

Many people believe that the memory is a kind of trunk where we store our memories.. Others, more technology-friendly, understand that memory is more like a computer on whose hard disk we file our learning, experiences and life experiences, so that we can resort to them when we need them.

But the truth is that both conceptions are erroneous.

So how does human memory work?

We don't have any memories as such stored in our brains. That would be, from a physical and Biological point of view, literally impossible.

What the brain consolidates in memory are "patterns of functioning".The brain's "brain activity," that is, the way specific groups of neurons are activated every time we learn something new.

I don't want to make a big deal out of this, so I'll just limit myself to saying that any information that enters the brain is converted into a chemical electrical stimulus.

Neuroscience of memories

What the brain stores is the particular frequency, amplitude and sequence of neural circuits involved in learning. It is not a particular event that is stored, but the way the system functions in response to that particular event..

Then, when we remember something consciously or unintentionally an image comes to our mind, what our brain does is to re-edit again that specific pattern of functioning. And this has serious implications. Perhaps the most important is that our memory plays tricks on us.

We do not retrieve the memory as it was stored, but rather we reassemble it every time we need it by reactivating the corresponding patterns of functioning.

The "defects" of memory

The problem lies in the fact that this recall mechanism occurs en bloc. The system's activation can bring as stowaways other memories that have been filtered out, that belong to another time or to a different memory.that belong to another time or another place.

Science and interference

I am going to tell you about an experiment that shows how vulnerable we are to memory interference, and how we can be subtly induced to remember something in the wrong way, or that simply never happened.

A group of people were shown a video in which they could observe a traffic accident, specifically the collision between two vehicles. They were then divided into two smaller groups and questioned separately about what they had seen. Members of the first group were asked to estimate approximately how fast the cars were traveling when they "collided".

Members of the second group were asked the same question, but with a seemingly insignificant difference. They were asked how fast they estimated the cars were traveling when one "rammed" into the other.

The members of the latter group, on average, calculated much higher values than those in the first group, where the cars had simply "collided." Some time later, they were brought back together in the lab and asked for details about the accident in the video.

Twice as many of the members of the group in which the cars had "embedded" as the members of the other group said they saw windshield glass exploding and scattered on the sidewalk.. It should be noted that no windshields were broken in the video in question.

We barely remember

We think we can remember the past accurately, but we cannot.. The brain is forced to reconstruct the memory every time we decide to retrieve it; it must put it together as if it were a puzzle of which, to make matters worse, it does not have all the pieces, since much of the information is not available because it was never stored or was filtered by the attention systems.

When we recall a certain episode of our life, such as the day we graduated from university, or when we got our first job, the recovery of the memory does not occur in a clean and intact way as when, for example, we open a text document in our computer, but rather the brain must make an active effort to track down information that is scattered, and then put together all those diverse and fragmented elements to present us with a and fragmented elements to present us with as solid and elegant a version of what happened as possible.

The brain is in charge of "filling in" the gaps in memory.

Potholes and blanks are filled in the brain by scraps of other memories, personal conjectures and abundant pre-established beliefs, with the ultimate goal of obtaining a more or less coherent whole that satisfies our expectations.

This happens basically for three reasons:

As we said earlier, when we experience a given event, what the brain stores is a pattern of functioning. In the process, much of the original information never enters the memory. And if it does enter, it is not effectively consolidated in the memory. This creates bumps in the process that take away the congruence of the story when we want to recall it.

Then we have the problem of false and unrelated memories that are mixed with the real memory when we bring it to consciousness. Something similar happens here as when we throw a net into the sea, we can catch some small fish, which is what we are interested in, but many times we also find garbage that at some point was thrown into the ocean: an old shoe, a plastic bag, an empty soda bottle, etc.

This phenomenon occurs because the brain is constantly receiving new information, consolidating learning for what it has learned.This phenomenon occurs because the brain is constantly receiving new information, consolidating learning, for which it often resorts to the same neural circuits that are being used for other learning, which can cause some interference.

Thus, the experience to be stored in memory can be merged or modified with previous experiences, causing them to end up being stored as an undifferentiated whole.

Giving meaning and logic to the world around us

Finally, the brain is an organ interested in making sense of the world.. In fact, he even seems to have an aberrant hatred for uncertainty and inconsistencies.

And it is in his eagerness to explain everything when, not knowing certain data in particular, he invents them to get out of the way and thus save face. We have here another fissure in the system, my friend reader. The essence of memory is not reproductive, but reconstructive.and, as such, vulnerable to multiple forms of interference.