“…even when a memory is proven wrong, beyond all doubt, a person still remembers it.”

— Sallie Tisdale, Harper’s Magazine, November 2023

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I’ve been thinking about memory a lot lately, after experiencing several “senior moments.” (“They’re just normal at your age,” my physician says, which kinda-sorta reassures me — what’s normal five years from now? Ten years from now?) Author Sallie Tisdale, no stranger to memoir writing, wrote an essay in the November Harper’s about memory which touched many nerves for me. In particular, she offers the thought that we are incapable of distinguishing accurate memories from false ones: All memories feel true!

She cites a study by the late psychiatrist-researcher Daniel Offer challenging the common belief that “adolescence is inherently a time of storm and stress.” That’s certainly my experience, and talking to others, I’ve rarely heard someone say, “I had a very happy childhood.” (My wife used to think she had an unhappy childhood, but changed her mind!) In his Offer Longitudinal Study, he interviewed 73 14-year-olds about their lives, most of whom were pretty happy with their lives. That was in 1962. He re-interviewed them (other than two who had died) at 48-years-old, when the majority remembered their teen years as times of great sadness and turmoil. Specifically, when going into details, their “…recollections were about the same as would be expected by chance.”

“Memory” (1896), bronze door by Olin Levi Warner. Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building. (Carol Highsmith, public domain)=

In another study reinforcing the notion that our memories are tenuous, Elizabeth Loftus (famous for challenging sexual abuse allegations in many court appearances during the 1990s) and Lawrence Patihis managed to convince 30% of volunteers that they’d seen a video of the crash of Flight 93 following 9/11. There is no such video,

As far as early memories are concerned, they’re all based on photos or stories we’ve heard — our ability to form permanent memories doesn’t kick in until we’re at least age seven, and usually later.

My own particular problem with memory, besides forgetting faces and names, is that I selectively remember what I’d just as soon forget! For example, instead of remembering, with great joy, the wonderful week we spent in a town in the Dolomites a few years back, the first thing that comes up is the negative review we received on booking.com (our only one!) when we left dishes in the sink after leaving in a hurry to catch a train. Even though the review was written in German, Gott sei Dank, I’m still mortified. (It makes sense, of course, that we selectively remember negative experiences — they’re the ones that our ancestors learned from back when life was “nasty, brutish and short.”)

Nearly 100 years ago, psychologist Frederic Bartlett (cited by Tisdale) summed it up: “Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction.” (My italics.)

Ah yes. I remember it well.