The Way We Remember Our Own Stories

Our memory is notoriusly bad and often predictably false. It is influenced by later information, retellings by other people, and more. The psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus spent a good part of her research career showing us how our memories can be altered and influenced, or even completely fabricated as false memories.

But regardless of which part of our memories really happened the way we remember them, how we remember our life’s stories influences us. How we remember our own past influences our present and consequently our future.

Every moment, we utilize an attention-based magnifier that highlights specifics of the flood of information that streams towards us. We never get the whole picture of the sensory input that reaches our eyes, ears, and other sensory gates. Only a fraction reaches the processing parts of our brains and a smaller one yet reaches our consciouseness.

We can do the same with our memories. There usually is a certain way we remember each story in our autobiographic memory. But, we can rewrite it. We can go back and highlight different aspects of it and ignore others. We can decide how we want to rememember our stories.

I knowing that, shouldn’t we take an effort at rewriting part of our memories by focusing on something that helps us rather than drags us down?

The existential psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom, in Creatures of a Day, recounts the story of a patient who did exactly that. In a box of her own writing that she gathered over a span of about 40 years, she had dreaded to find a dark story about a terrible day in her life. She never found the story, though, and instead rewrote it into a more salutary one that allowed her to reconcile with her past.

Yalom then shared his thoughts on that:

“Giving up hope for a better past is a potent idea. […] you’ve given it a creative and unexpected twist. You didn’t give up the hope for a better past; instead you’ve written a new past for yourself.”