Factors influencing human memory fallibility and declarative memory improvement

Fallibility of Memory

The human brain is an amazing thing. Scientists argue that every experience we have ever had is located within the brain as a memory, even ones we are not aware that we have. Memory is something which dominates a person's life. Both the good and bad memories will likely influence such wide-ranging things as decision-making, relationships with other people, and even modification of our personality. Some memories are easily retrieved from the subconscious and others bury themselves deep, so deep that they cannot be accessed. However, memory is completely imperfect. The way a person remembers a situation, a conversation, or even how they remember another person will not necessarily be an exact duplication of the thing itself. The human memory can be modified by different factors so that what we believe to have happened is not what did occur.

Researcher Jonah Lehrer conducted research into this topic and determined that one of the factors behind the fallibility of memory is that human memory and the ability to tell stories intermingle within the brain. Memory becomes particularly complicated if it a story that we recall and continually retell. According to this research, "Over time, we tend to embellish and borrow details from other stories, resulting in part fact and part fiction -- and often even using the memories of others as our own, all the while entirely believing it ourselves" (Brayton). This embellishment and expansion of a memory is done at the subconscious level. For example, if a person makes a suggestion about how the story may be bettered, the person telling the story may, upon the next iteration of the tale include this suggested aspect while wholly forgetting that this component was invented by another party.

This social influence has other detrimental effects to the purity of human memory. Peers tend to influence the ways people perceive a given situation, whether it is in the present or the past. Jonah Lehrer describes a test wherein a film was shown and opinions of the movie were obtained from a group of individuals. Then, when the individuals were brought together and asked again to evaluate the film, the opinions of those around them tended to alter the perception of the film that was provided (Lehrer). Parts that they remembered to have disliked were reevaluated as positive when put into the position where they might be at odds with peers. Likewise, parts that were enjoyed were reevaluated as negative when a group setting was introduced to the experiment.