@Baba -- UC Irvine Professor of Psychology Elizabeth Loftus is an expert at implanting memories in people of things that didn't happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il0u2s_WGXA
On a more prosaic level, we remember things that didn't happen all the time. Ask a witness to a car accident if the red car ran the stop sign and he or she will remember it doing so, even if the car was blue and the stop sign was actually a Yield sign.
On sheer volume, forgetting things that actually happened dwarfs remember false memories by many orders of magnitude. The human brain is designed to forget the vast majority of the data it receives. This feature, not a bug, of human cognition is necessary. We are ***bombarded*** with sensory input every waking moments of our lives. If we were to process and remember every detail of that input, our brains would be overwhelmed. Instead, we remember salient features of salient moments, store that skeletal framework in our memory, and reconstruct the memory by "filling in the blanks" of the skeleton using general knowledge and contemporary awareness.
Curiously, research indicates the neural circuitry involved in subconsciously and automatically selecting what we're going to forget operates using neurotransmitters called cannabinoids, so named because it appears the psychoactive components of cannabis (marijuana) work primarily by altering the cannabinoid receptors in the brain.
There are some people (Actress Marilu Henner is one of them) who remember everything. Give them a date and they will tell you what day it was and what happened. In vivid detail. I know they're very rare but what accounts for that OS? Mahalo for your thoughtful and informative reply and Happy Sunday! :)
@RosieG -- There is substantial individual variation. Unlike Ms. Henner, I store very little in the way of episodic memories (i.e. memories of what we did when in life).
Ms. Henner is doubly an exception because many people with perfect recall (called "mnenomists" in the literature) are highly dysfunctional. If you remember all things in your life with equal ease and with relatively equal emotional affect, it becomes difficult to decide what one finds important.
I think having that kind of memory would drive me bonkers. Forgetting is good. It unclutters the mind. I expect everything we ever experienced is buried somewhere in the subconscious and I'm happy to have it stay there. Mahalo for your reply OS! :)
If you have access to Netflix, I highly recommend the TV series "Brain Games." In it, they explore how our brains work and how easy it is to trick them. It's a Nat Geo show... really well done and highly engaging.
The answer to your question is both. As OS noted earlier, we're "bombarded" with info constantly and we can only focus on one detail at a time. That's all our brains can do. We start losing details right after an event and the details fade rapidly. Plus, it's really easy to pollute them with misinformation, especially if the person with misinformation seems confident about what they're saying. Brain Games did a test on this and discovered that the people who were most confident about recalling an event were the ones who were wrong the most. They also had a group of people view an event and they interviewed them all later, but they added two decoy people into the mix to give false information about the event. The real witnesses started having "real" memories with the false information.
As humans, we're prone to have false memories and forget things. It's what our brains do. They couldn't possibly remember or process everything, so they pick out the things that they think are most important and relevant to us at the time.
This post was edited by Just Asking at November 4, 2016 4:45 AM MDT
As is true of many things JA, and Old School reminds me of it constantly..."it's complicated". Thank you for your thoughtful and informative reply and Happy Friday! We don't subscribe to Netfliex. What does it cost to do so? :)
Baba 