Are our memories accurate?
Depiction of a quantum atom (pink-orange background with a spinning multicolored atom, with lots of lines and dots that indicate motion in blue on top), credit geralt on pixabay
Quantum mechanics: We can never know with any kind of certainty how an atom will behave naturally because the very instant that we look at an atom, we alter it. The very act of looking is never a passive thing, it has an effect. In fact, physicists tell us that reality at its deepest level is the response of the observer. … You know it’s kinda like you, reliving past events.
Dr. Tom, Being Erica, season 1 episode 7
I love revisiting my favorite media–books, movies, tv shows–I find new meaning each time, and get to hang out with old friends.
Probably as a result of too many rewatchings of Being Erica, a Canadian tv show from the 2010s about time-travel therapy—one of the ways I describe my mental state is “I’m time-traveling.” When I want to get something done, but can’t focus, get things done, or sleep, it’s almost guaranteed that I’m time-traveling in my mind–worrying about the past, stressing about the future. I turn over past mistakes and try to predict future outcomes. I think it’s a thing that a lot of us do (especially for those of us with mental illness or neurodivergence).
In my mind, if I just worry enough about something before it happens, game out all the ways something can go wrong, I can avoid bad things.
If I do enough penance in my head for something I did wrong in my past, I might figure out a way to fix it.
And sometimes I do solve seemingly impossible problems, or find just the right way to make amends for my actions. But most of the time, I’m stressing over things I cannot change.
It’s understandable. Some of our brains just gravitate towards this sort of internal damage-control.
But what are we really doing when we interrogate our memories this way?
What does it do to the memories themselves to revisit them this way?
Early in the pandemic, I discovered Being Erica, a Canadian tv show that ran from 2009-2011. The main character, Erica Strange, is frankly, a mess. She has a series of dead-end jobs, despite a master’s degree in English. She can’t find the right guy. And on one fateful day, she doesn’t ask what’s in a free sample at a coffee shop and ends up in the hospital in anaphylactic shock (My celiac self cringes so hard at this part! You gotta ask, Erica!).
Enter Dr. Tom, a mystery therapist. Erica is eventually so curious that she goes to his office, and it turns out he’s not just a therapist, he’s a time-travel therapist. He asks Erica to make a list of her regrets, and then he sends her back in time, seemingly to fix her mistakes.
But it’s not really about fixing mistakes, as she learns quickly reliving her teen years–it’s about learning what patterns she’s living then and now, and changing her life in the present.
Near the end of the first season, Erica gets to go back to a perfect day instead of a regret. She’s thrilled at first, but the longer she stays in the past, the more differences pop up. Erica lived this day in the present the first time. Now she’s watching herself live it, which leads to a day of cascading disasters until she stops trying to control things.
This is a great illustration of the observer effect.
Originally discovered in quantum physics, the observer effect explains that watching a phenomenon necessarily changes it. This is true in fields as diverse as quantum physics, thermodynamics, and electronics (see more here).
In the study of cognition and memory, the observer effect means reliving a memory, if only in our minds, changes how we experience that memory in the future.
Much like Erica wrecking her perfect day by trying to make it perfect, we can’t look at our memories without altering them.
When we live the event, we aren’t usually thinking about how we’ll feel five, ten, fifteen years later. For big life events, we worry about forgetting the right things, the important things, and try to correct for the failures of memory with lots of documentation–wedding videographers, graduation photographers, endless smartphone pictures of toddlers’ milestones. But for little things, little things that might later feel like larger butterfly-effect level things, we definitely don’t think too much about future-proofing memories.
But when we rewind to a significant memory in our head, we superimpose how we feel now about it on top. We might think about how much we miss when our kids were young, how much we wish we’d gotten to eat dinner at our wedding, regret how we did in school or what career we chose because our families insisted.
When our feelings about a memory change, so does how that memory exists in our heads. The first-dance song from our wedding feels really different at a fun 50th anniversary party than it does after a painful divorce.
It’s like instant replay in sports. We see what happened on the field differently after the experts analyze it for us–even if we’re shouting at the tv for a missed foul or an unfair score from the judges.
We are the instant-replay dudes in our own heads…except we don’t stop when the game is over. We become the people who replay the big game every year for the rest of our lives about our most important memories.
Doing this is perfectly normal–we all do it. Telling stories about our memories can be cathartic. It can be a hit at a party. Saying “I remember when…” is a basic part of human nature.
But memory isn’t static. When we relive, we rewrite.
We construct our memories.
The concept of constructive memory “describes the process by which we update our memories in light of new experiences, situations, and challenges.”*
Kourken Michaelian, another scientist of constructive memory theory, “develops an innovative simulation theory of memory; finding no intrinsic difference between remembering and imagining, he argues that to remember is to imagine the past.”**
*Brady Wagoner in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible **from Michaelian’s description for Mental Time Travel
Sit with those two bits of constructive memory theory a minute.
“We update our memories in light of new experiences, situations, and challenges.”
“To remember is to imagine the past.”
What would it mean in your life for that to be true?
What if “what happened” isn’t in a record somewhere, already published exactly as is, unable to be changed?
What if instead, as Michaelian argues, memory is linked to imagination, not unchangeable facts?
What would you do if you could reimagine your past?
If you want to learn more about constructive memory, this is a really neat resource for the history and application of the concept.
If you want to explore your memory-stories more fully, book a consultation call with me today!