How Sure Are You?

Memories are a funny thing. As much as we like to think we remember events and experiences accurately, we are quite often mistaken. 

People are full of false memories. The reason is not because of bias or faulty thinking. It’s just because our memories are incomplete. 

We absorb and remember only a small portion of all the elements that make up an experience or episode. Our recollection, even immediately after an event, is filled with gaps, pieces, and holes. 

The moment we reflect on what happened and draw upon our memory of the event, we are forced to fill in those holes. We replace what we don’t know with what we think should or could have happened. 

As soon as we reconstruct this history, we form a more complete but less accurate memory. If we draw on this memory quite often, sometimes by retelling a story about the experience, we continue to fill in gaps that serve our reason for remembering. With each successive reconstruction, we further enhance our memory. 

Here's the kicker: It seems the more we are sure of a memory, the more likely it is to be flawed. Our confidence doesn’t correlate with accuracy. 

In fact, the reason we are so sure is that we have done an expert job of filling in the details. With repeated retellings, our commitment to the memory usually becomes even stronger. Of course, we are completely surprised when we learn later that our memory has deceived us. 

Objective references such as falsely remembering quotations, misremembering passages in books, and viewing a video of what occurred and realizing we have misremembered are always a shock to the system. 

The problem is if we think this is an anomaly and not the norm. Unfortunately, all of our memories are somewhat inaccurate, although clearly some are more flawed than others. 

If there is a lesson here, it is this: The more confidence we have in a memory, the more likely it is to be false in parts.

Finding objective references to test for the accuracy of memories that are essential to performance seems a reasonable course of action. So does dampening the level of insistence we project when remembering an event completely and without error.  

As American inventor Charles Kettering reminds us: “It ain’t the things you don’t know that’ll get you in trouble, but the things you know for sure that ain’t so.”