Do you often misremember things? Your memory may be playing tricks on you

In the process of couples counseling, we often find a phenomenon that deserves our attention: one spouse is upset about something that happened in the past, and often feels extremely uncomfortable and cries when thinking about it.

It stands to reason that for something that has such a significant impact on the relationship between husband and wife, the other party should remember it clearly.

However, what often happens is that when one party brings up the incident, the other party will freeze there, staring at the ceiling, trying hard to recall the situation at the time, and will easily say, "If I hadn't brought it up today, I would have forgotten about it."

Moreover, there are often huge differences between the couple's recollections of the whole incident.

Memory is actually a very interesting field of research.

Although most people are not very confident about their memory and know that they will forget things, they are extremely confident about certain contents of their memory, thinking that they are copies of the objective world and cannot be wrong.

Therefore, in the family, a common situation of husband and wife quarreling is that one party says very excitedly: "You clearly said that, and you refuse to admit it." The other party feels extremely aggrieved and says even more excitedly, "I never said such a thing at all."

In fact, our memory can be wrong and can create something out of nothing. I have verified this situation countless times in class.

Every semester, I always like to do an experiment with students. Before the experiment, I asked them to close their eyes and then read a few words to them one by one (if you are interested, you can test it with your friends):

bed, rest, wake up, tired, dreaming, awake, nap, blanket, quilt, snooze, snoring, yawn, drowsy.

Then they can open their eyes. At this point I will ask them a few questions:

Question 1: Have I read the word "snoring" just now? Most people nodded and said they had.

Question 2: Have I read the word "mother" just now? Most people will shake their heads and say no.

Question 3: Have I read the word "sleep" just now? The answer to this question is very interesting. Usually some people nod and say they have read it, while others shake their heads and say no.

Those who nodded were very confident and said that they had read it; those who shook their heads were equally confident and said that they had never read it at all.

It should be noted that my students all have high IQs. Being in their early twenties, they do not have any defects in memory.

Why are the first two questions not difficult, but the last one is difficult?

This is related to a network model of semantic memory.

This model believes that semantic memory is a network, the nodes in the network are concepts, and the lines between the nodes represent the connections between concepts.

If the line between two concepts (nodes) is shorter, then the relationship between the two concepts is closer. What is important is that when a concept is activated (that is, when I read it), the nodes connected to it will also receive a certain amount of activation. When the activation level of a concept exceeds a certain threshold (threshold value), the concept will be extracted.

The words I read in class are all more or less related to sleep. In other words, when I read each word, the word sleep will be activated to a certain extent.

After reading this string of words, for some students, the activation of the word "sleep" will exceed the threshold, thus creating the illusion that I have indeed read this word. These words are not very related to mother, so everyone is very sure that the word "mother" has not received much activation.

This example also shows that our memory is not so accurate. This is just an example of memorizing words, and events in the real world are more complex than memorizing words, and are more easily affected by our inner state, making them more prone to errors.

Humans are naturally inclined to logic and love stories. When given some illogical materials, people will involuntarily want to get a meaningful and logical story from these materials. This tendency occurs naturally in our memory process. This subjective interpretation process is far more subjective than the event itself.

Hopefully, the next time we have an argument because of “you clearly said that,” we can think of this, and then the argument is more likely not to go on in an endless cycle, but to stop and imagine what happened and seek more constructive strategies to solve relationship problems.

Author: Wang Kui

Associate Researcher, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Second-level Psychological Counselor

Image source: soogif

Editor: Guru