Why does no one have a reliable memory?

When people are having an experience, more than one event actually happens at that moment. In a seminar you have attended to make a presentation, your main action may be to make a presentation. However, at that time, you may meet one of the participants' eyes, experience performance anxiety, try to control your gestures and facial expressions, try to understand the attention and interest of the participants in the presentation, think about the source of the noise coming from outside. Multitasking can also give you clues about your complex attention. complex attention; short-term memory and working memory can be activated at the same time. It is the ability of the person to continue with the basic action that needs to be focused despite the disruptors and distractions. Examples such as being able to chat at the same time while eating, listening to music while studying, or watching a television program while dressing your child can show that the person uses his/her complex attention effectively. Well, despite the fact that more than one action can be taken by a person during an event, do all these experiences remain in mind like a photographic frame?

Most people think that what they remember is true, but beliefs, values, and prejudices can fill in the blanks. I want you to remember the presentation example I gave at the beginning of the article. Let's imagine that one of the audience yawns while the person is presenting and the presenter notices it. After the seminar is over, the presenter may have thoughts such as: “Everyone is bored”, “Nobody liked my presentation”, “I made the participants sleepy”. At this very point, the individual started to fill the gaps in his mind with his prejudices. And perhaps months after the presentation, even though the presenter sees a person yawn, they can also insert unrealistic thoughts such as “Many people were yawning” or “They were talking among themselves” in those gaps.

The area of ​​our brain called the Hippocampus collects and puts all these events together into scattered lego pieces. Three things can help us to put these pieces together more accurately.

The first of these is emotions. If the human brain associates the emotion it felt with the event it experienced, it can remember the event more accurately even if time passes.

The second is space. When the person encodes the objects or tangible things in the place where the experience is experienced, he can remember the lived event more accurately. Coding the experience with a sentence such as "The male participant in the blue shirt sitting in the 4th row at the seminar in the conference hall yawned" can prevent prejudices and beliefs from filling in the blanks.

Finally, narrating an event causes us to remember it more accurately, even if time has passed since that event. For example, while it is difficult to memorize mathematical data, it may be easier to memorize theater or movie lines. As a result, no one has a completely reliable memory, but there are different ways to remember our personal memories exactly as they happened.