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.
