Inception

I am still reading "Subliminal" by Leonard Mlodinow. It's a great book! The last couple chapters I read included the following points (among others):

Point 1: People tend to remember the gist of memories rather than the details. There are multiple examples in the book of inaccurate eyewitness accounts from individuals who were heralded for their memory. This may be a survival tactic so that we respond quickly to changes in our environment. Imagine if we remembered every single detail - it'd be incredibly taxing and time consuming for our minds to sift through all of the details to pull out relevant information and figure out a fight/flight response.

Point 2: People create false memories based on new information to fill in memory gaps. For example, Ulric Neisser asked students at Emory to write their account of how they heard about the Challenger explosion. He asked a subset of these students three years later to again document how they heard about the explosion. There were significant differences between the original write-ups and the write-ups from three years later. The latter write-ups were more dramatic and cliche. The funny thing is that the authors had more confidence in the latter write-ups than the former ones!

It is interesting that people tend to modify memories into more simplistic, understandable stories over time. Our perspective, and new information we hear from other people, influences this process. For example, I recollected a health saga from 10 years ago in the first post of this blog. The post reads as an a vivid, dramatic re-telling of multiple challenging incidents in an organized story. I honestly don't remember the day-to-day boring-ness so did not write about it. After reading this book and re-reading the post, I bet events were less orderly when they occurred, and I probably created details. I could not tell you which, and would probably be extremely surprised to find out, but it'd be interesting to do a comparison with an old journal and see.

The movies Life of Pi and Inception both flirt with limits of memory in different ways. *Spoiler Alert* Life of Pi includes two accounts of the same story, both of which include examples of human virtue and depravity. One story is more fantastic and ethereal - it provides hope and faith in the ability of our species to survive through tremendous darkness. The insurance agents balk that the first story is unbelievable, so Pi shares another version that is short, concrete, and stark. At the end, the storyteller asks his audience - which do you like better? Given what we know about the subconscious mind, both stories are probably partially false. I like the first version, the fantastic retelling, because I connect with it more. Oddly it feels "more authentic" even though its not really, just more dramatic like the second memories of the Emory students. All of us "strong communicators" probably apply dramatic storytelling tactics to engage our audience more than we realize. I express emotions through my facial expressions, my hand movements, my words, and my body language - and it is an effective public speaking tactic. People listen. And probably remember 15% of what I said later :)

*Spoiler Alert, although I'm assuming you probably already saw this movie* Inception describes tactics for planting false memories. Memory planting is described as a tricky process. However, as described in Subliminal its not that hard to do...researchers have planted memories in subjects by starting with a true past incident and warping the details. This technique works since as mentioned earlier people remember the gist but not the details and seem to recreate their own false memories to fill in gaps.

Taking this a step further - does this imply that we can change our memory of the past based on shifting our current perspective? For example, if we choose to view life in a hopeful, uplifting manner, would our memories from the past be re-colored in a new light? I bet guided meditation and other therapy techniques work because of this - these techniques retrain our minds to falsify and/or erase details of past traumas and replace the memories with new positive imagery. I'm sure ad agencies exploit memory falsification for other motives, but eh  as long as they don't convince me to do something crazy, I'm ok with it. Makes my life more exciting and colorful!

Separate Note: I am feeling much better after R&R and will resume normal activities tomorrow!