False memories can form within seconds, study finds

> This pretty much defeats the strategy of writing a diary to make sure I don't get tangled up in false memories.

I would be extremely cautious drawing that conclusion just on the basis of this study. They were experimenting with recalling letters. Further research needs to be done to see what kinds of memories are affected by this and how. I still think writing a diary is important and valuable, it's just maybe not an infallible perfect record. It's certainly 100000% better than whatever phantom you now retain as a memory of an event 20 years later.

For me, it implies that we need to be aware of our biases and how they can affect how we interpret and remember an event. So instead of not writing a diary at all, I'd suggest continuing to write a diary and when writing also reflecting on your possible preconceptions/biases.

> Of course, this is only one study, involving a piece of knowledge that’s strongly reinforced throughout our lives (letters). So Otten and her team hope to keep testing the fallibility of short-term memory in other ways.

> Do the expectations that we have about people based on, for example, their gender, almost immediately start shaping what we remember about, say, their voice or facial expression? Or do I after only a few seconds start slightly misremembering certain data-representations, because it does not fit my beliefs about, say, climate change?” she said. “This is obviously a bit more complicated to explore than just asking people to look at a display of 6 letterlike items, but I look forward to exploring this further.”

I don't understand why people take one study and then use that as absolute truth about a general thing even though that single study only studied a tiny part of it.

Hmmm, I believe I have first-hand experience with this. Often as I go about my day, I get sudden flashes of a scene recalled. It feels visceral and real - how I imagine electrodes stimulating the brain might bring forth feelings and memories. They're usually just scenes, with a strong feeling attached.

These "memories" aren't recalled from my life, often it would be impossible for them to be, and yet they feel like mine.

I imagine there's some medical explanation for this, but I've no desire to approach a doctor with such symptoms!

My understanding of déjà vu is that it applies to the moment you're in aka "it feels like this has happened before". What I'm referring to is a sudden recollection of a moment, which isn't the current one. But the feeling is quite similar to déjà vu, just paired with imagery. I'm struck with a strong image in my mind, and a feeling that "that has happened before".

> IMO the test subjects are not recalling false memories; they are generating what they believe to have occurred and this is different.

From the paper:

“To rule out that these errors reflect a perceptual error that has directly been encoded into STM, we test whether illusory responses increase over time: If the illusions are simply the result of misperceptions, their frequency of occurrence should remain the same over the time-course of STM—since in all cases initial perceptual inference has been completed. Therefore, if the number of reported illusions increases as the retention interval increases, this is best explained by memory-related processes taking place during the retention interval, so during STM storage itself, and not in the perceptual or encoding process.”

So, it seems their memories are right more often just after seeing the stimulus than a short time later (100ms or 1s, if I scanned the paper correctly).

My guess would be that the unconscious brain discards uninteresting data very quickly even if the conscious brain attends to that data.

I thought of another benefit since writing this post, and it's too late to edit.

* The act of sitting down and writing out thoughts, feelings or memories is a mindful, peaceful and fulfilling experience that cannot easily be replaced. Simply putting words on a page (digitally or physically) often causes me to instinctively take a broader perspective.