Trust your memory? Maybe you shouldn’t
http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/18/health/lifeswork-loftus-memory-malleability/index.html?hpt=hp_t3
I talk about my thoughts on the uselessness of human memory here and when I read the article linked above I found a whole lot of parallels. I was particularly interested in the experimental results where they could implant memories quite easily. Most people implicitly trust their memories and I suppose they would have a lot of problem trying to adapt to not trusting their memories. I learned as a youth that my memory was crap (I recall not liking the discovery, but I may have implanted that memory in myself ;-)) so I have learned not to trust my memory. I feel, though, that I have turned my crappy memory into an asset (or rather my acceptance of my crappy memory since most people have crappy memories) in that I am able to combine information I have learned in ways that are often novel (at least to me; since I have never been able to turn any of my ideas into a working business I might just be lying to myself). Perhaps if I had a more disciplined mind I wouldn’t be able to make such cognitive ‘leaps’.
At the bottom of the article the author mentions something I have seen a couple of times:
Depressive Realism. The idea is that depressed people are actually people with better memories and that happy people actually have crappy memories because they really believe life is what they remember through their rose colored memories. I am not certain that the article I just linked is that useful (I didn’t finish reading it), but felt I would link it here since I know some of my reader(s) won’t make it to the bottom of the initial link.
