Memory isn’t etched in neural stone. It’s a creative process, sketched in sand
They said their finding provided evidence that the mind uses sophisticated compression routines … for efficiently packaging previous events as they are being sent to memory.
After watching each video clip, the participants were shown a series of stills and asked to say if each one had or hadn’t featured in the video they’d just watched. Here’s the main finding. Participants who watched the video type that climaxed with the ball (or shuttlecock etc) flying off into the distance were prone to saying they’d seen the causal moment of contact in the video, even when that particular image had in fact been missing.
In other words, because seeing the ball fly off implied that the kicker (or other protagonist) had struck the ball, the participants tended to invent a memory for having seen that causal action happen, even when they hadn’t. This memory distortion happened within seconds, sometimes as soon as a second after the relevant part of the video had been seen.
- Christian Jarrett
Related
Our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them
Capture as it happens - Memory fades, protecting our world view, and forcing cause and effect
Our experience is not unified but an assembled story by the interpreter that we are
(Source: bps-research-digest.blogspot.com)
