Monday, 18 June 2012
Memories: Always a Work in Progress
People tend to think that their memories are reliable and bear no resemblance to the false ones invented by people who suffer from confabulatory hypermnesia (severe false memory syndrome). But experiments using morally complex scenarios, such as those developed by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, have shown that normal subjects are surprisingly quick to invent explanations to justify intuitive moral stances, such as accepting the taboo against incest.
Such explanations are somewhat reminiscent of those offered by split-brain patients whose left-hemisphere provides language-based justifications for their behaviour to make it seem to make sense.
A related but more generalizd phenomenon is memory reconsolidation: the process whereby, every time you remember something, the neural substrate of this memory is “recalibrated” on the basis of the current situation and thus, from one reconstruction to the next, can become fairly different from the actual stimulus that originally created it.
Confabulatory hypermnesia, or severe false memory syndrome
Jonathan Haidt’s Home Page
“I read Playboy for the articles”
Memory and the Brain, The Emergence of Consciousness | Comments Closed
