Why You Shouldn’t Fight With Your Memory

I was having fun hanging out with my older brother and older sisters in the vacant lot in front of the town hall. However, an older brother shouted “Mazinger Z!” and the older brothers rushed from the vacant lot to the house right in front of them. I followed the hyungs and went to see Mazinger Z. The older brothers huddled together in front of the TV. I also thought that I should hurry up and join the hyungs.

This is my ‘first memory’. No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember until I was six. Most of my memories start at the age of seven, but interestingly, I only have one memory when I was five. My wife says she remembers a scene when she was three years old. I’ve asked people around me about my first memory a few times, and I found out that my memory starts relatively late. I don’t know why.

What is your “first memory”? If you have time, write down your first memory. what exactly happened? When did it happen? Who was there and who was not? What do you remember clearly, what do you not remember at all, and what do you remember vaguely? What were your feelings at that time? And… what are your thoughts and feelings about your first memory?

Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler thought that the first memories a person has are a window into his or her life. He always asked patients about their first memories during his first consultations and used them as a tool to understand the patient’s present.

But are memories really accurate? Can you be sure that your first memory is an actual experience? Elizabeth Loftus’ research team showed two groups of participants a video of two cars colliding. Then, each group was asked how fast the car was traveling when it crashed, using different words.

One group was asked: “How fast were the two cars traveling when they collided head-on?” I answered that it seems to be about 60 kilometers on average. Another group was asked: “What speed were the two cars traveling when they touched each other? I answered that it seems to be about 50 kilometers on average. Participants were then asked if they had seen any broken glass after the two cars collided. The first group reported seeing glass fragments three times as many times as the second group.

The actual video doesn’t show any glass fragments. When faced with a situation where they had to recall a specific part, they created the details based on the information they currently had. The first group and the second group were asked different questions, including “when bumped head on” and “when they touched each other” respectively. In other words, there were many people who said they saw glass fragments in the first group, which contains violent expressions. This is the part where you can see how scary ‘guided interrogation’ can be.

We can see that memories are not mere records. The mechanism of memory has already been answered to some extent from the neurological aspect, and this experiment is supported as it is. Of course, it is not the key to reveal the details of brain science now, so let’s refrain from detailed descriptions and do it later when the opportunity arises.

The fact that memories can be reconstructed in this way suggests that creating ‘fake memories’ is easier than you think. The Loftus research team was given a Disneyland flyer with a phrase asking participants to recall a wonderful memory at Disneyland. It is said that the flyers described the memories of people riding various rides and shaking hands with Bugs Bunny so warmly, passionately, and vaguely that many participants actually returned to Disneyland later.

After viewing the flyer, the research team asked participants about memories of past visits to Disneyland, and 16 percent said they remembered shaking hands with Bugs Bunny. However, Bugs Bunny is not a Disneyland character, but a Warner Bros. character. I can’t afford to be at Disneyland.

In another experiment, participants were told about four memories by a relative before the experiment. Participants were told by a relative that the events had really happened. When the participants were interviewed, most of them remembered the incident, with 25 percent vividly recalling the scene in the mall where they were found by an elderly woman crying over the loss of her mother. But the case was false. The research team asked relatives to lie about one of four events. One in four recalled the event “vividly” only after listening to a relative.

How much of our memory is true and how much is false? let’s admit it Memory is imprecise enough. However, the fortunate thing (?) is that, unless it is a special case such as a court battle, how accurately we remember the past does not have a big impact on our present life.

What directly affects our present and future lives is our attitude toward the events we remember, rather than the past events themselves. In that sense, it is very important to think that the past and the interpretation of the past are separate. Because you can’t change the past, but you can change your attitude.

Alfred Adler was a smart man. When he asked about his first memory, what he was interested in was not the authenticity of the memory. He was interested in the attitude toward the first memory. We live not on the basis of truth, but on the memory that we believe to be true. That is why the attitude of remembering ‘how’ is more important than remembering ‘what’.

How do you remember your life so far? Your attitude will determine your future.