By now, the outcome of the US election has lost its novelty and,泭you have probably begun to acknowledge the outcome at least as a fact of life (perhaps like athletes foot, or my attitude to the slow, inexorable retreat of my hair).
But something else will be happening too. Your recollection of what happened in the campaign will be changing, because your memory is泭not nearly as reliable as you think it is. You might think of your memory as an archive of all the things youve experienced. But its not like that, because of泭forgetting and reconstruction.
Forgetting happens all the time. Rapidly soon after an event, later more slowly. That may be no bad thing would it really benefit you to recall all the items on the menu in the cafe where you had your lunch yesterday? By now, much of what you saw, heard, and thought during the泭campaign will have been forgotten.
Reconstruction is the process which fills in these gaps in our knowledge when we try to remember. Recall that big red泭Brexit bus that said that 瞿350 million a week would go to the NHS? Well, actually it didnt. It said We send 瞿350 million a week to the EU, lets fund our NHS instead.泭The bus itself泭never actually said that the 瞿350m would go to the NHS. What you remember about the bus泭is quite likely to be incorrect. That incorrect memory泭泭could result from what you do remember (there was a bus, it mentioned the NHS, and vote leave politicians did talk about spending the 瞿350m on the NHS at least up until the morning after the referendum), and from your memory filling in the gaps in your recollection 泭after all, it is very plausible that the bus did say it. That would be a reconstructed memory. Perhaps you find it hard to agree given the politically loaded content? OK let me ask you something less controversial:泭how many wheels did that bus have?
Theres a strong chance youll say four because lets face it you remember it was a bus, and buses have four wheels, right? No. . Unless you are a real bus afficionado, Ill be willing to bet that you didnt remember that, and your memory reconstructed it wrong.
Because the very act of summoning up a memory like this causes it to be reconstructed, that will in turn shape the way it is recalled another time, and then another, and so on until a memory is an unholy mess of facts correctly recalled泭from an original event, and elements of various reconstructions泭that have happened across the intervening years.
Try and imagine your earliest memory. Now, try and think whether this is actually a real memory, or a memory that you泭know took place because someone told you about it , or something you saw in a photograph, or something that you imagined. Its pretty hard, isnt it?
This matters, because it means memory is very far from an impartial representation of true events.泭The way we reconstruct memories will be influenced by what we know about the world, a knowledge base that includes our deeply held political convictions.泭So, as泭we look back, what we remember will change. But it will change in line with our political baggage. If you think泭Trump is泭strong, and that America needs strong leadership, but are less keen on some of his more extreme proposals, then泭probably youre going to remember his promises to make America great again, but泭you may start to forget his talk of building walls and of locking his opponent up (). This forgetting泭may seem conveniently selective,泭but it is泭happening, unbidden and unseen, inside the workings of your memory.泭Its quite like confirmation bias an unseen, hidden process that is part of the way our information architecture works that silently shapes our persona.
Heres another example. If you listen to UK media, you will hear commentators talk as if the Brexit result was a landslide, but it was just not that emphatic a decision the majority for Brexit being around 2%. What I suspect is that people mentally aligned the scale of the impact of the decision泭with the size of the vote itself.泭The ensuing reassessment of their knowledge about the world may have then reached back to reshape memory.泭This isnt necessarily dishonest, and it isnt rewriting history because memory is not a journal. It is, instead, a rebuilt web of knowledge unreliably hung on泭unreliable hooks of recollection.
You probably shouldnt trust your own memory uncritically.
泭
Originally posted in the 泭on November 30, 2016.
