Is It a Reflection or a Mirage?
Wouldn’t you like to live in the past sometimes? In the magical wonderland of past where you can re-live those joyous moments exactly like they were back in the old days, or at least you thought you could.
If your answer is yes, don’t worry. There is nothing more natural than the idea of curling up in a cozy blanket of sweet memories and forget about the cold and uncertain realities of tomorrow, and the worrisome unknowns it may hold.
According to University of Surrey in England, young adults and teens—such as us—tend to have more nostalgic thoughts when coping with the upheaval of everything: searching for one’s true self, becoming independent, working on multiple assignments and projects, exams, balancing one’s social life… It makes sense that during the most turbulent and rapidly altering years, we wish we could go back to simpler times, when we sang along to Disney songs (Hannah Montana all the way!) in our PJ’s without a care in the world.
However, in spite of how strong you believe your memory is, it is actually one of the most unreliable sources of information. In some ways, our brains are designed to misinform, or even deceive us deliberately. So, without further ado, here are some interesting facts that will shed light on this problem, and maybe even spark some trust issues…with yourself.
First of all, even though we can get very absent-minded in our daily lives, our brains’ capacity to store memories is virtually limitless and it has an estimated minimum of 2,500,000 GB of space, which is roughly equal to 312,500 of your standard 8-gigabyte flash drives. However, our short-term memory—which we actually use—can only hold 5 to 9 pieces of information for 15 to 30 seconds.
Lucky for us, it is possible to access our inner Professor X through encoding retrieval mechanisms. Encoding is putting information into long-term memory by connecting it with other contextual clues such as smells or emotions, whereas retrieval is the recalling of that memory.
Fun fact: Your brain is more prone to remember negative events and feelings—especially fearful ones—because brain encodes it with greater care due to survival instincts and peaking hormone levels. This is why it is always easier to remember old arguments or heartbreaks after a friendship ends.
These two processes play the leading role in memory distortion, which renders your memory unreliable. Think of a memory as a toy and yourself as a curious toddler. When you take it out of its box and play with it, you wear it out and then put it back in. The next time you decide to play again, you play with the already worn-out version and make it even shabbier, until it breaks and gets thrown away. Memories work the same way, except they don’t get broken, but become unrecognizable.
This all basically means that the harder you try to remember something accurately, the less accurate it will get, so you either have to find a way to recall that memory without actually recalling it or you have to accept that they are bound to ebb away.
If you are wondering how can you know that the memory is there without remembering it, you can always google “Schrödinger’s Cat” experiment.
Deformation of memories can affect out lives tremendously in subtle ways and these effects vary between missing a few details from making up an entire scenario in one’s head. Being programmed to decipher and create symmetries, our brains love certain patterns and familiarity. This causes some of the rather “odd” or uncommon details from your memories to be evened out through retrieval and re-encoding. Furthermore, one’s current feelings and thoughts about the elements of that memory can also distort the memory, and even the emotions you reminisce them with.
For example, suppose that you are going out with your current best friend Brad and his girlfriend Becky, who you hate at the moment, and even though Brad usually drives a white BMW, you guys were actually driving a red mini-cooper at the time. Your brain is highly prone to recalling that Becky said some hurtful things and upset you that night, whereas it was Brad you called you nicknames. Yet, your brain may doctor the image of that night to accord it with your present emotions. It wouldn’t also be surprising if you thought you drove the wrong car, for your brain leaves the irregularities in a pattern out to store the information more easily.
All in all, you should always bear in mind that your recalling of an event or an information may not only be lacking specific details, but it can also be extremely inaccurate or even made up. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that nostalgic feelings are to be averted. Connections to out past experiences can remind us of better times and cheer us up or remind of worse times to learn from. In the end, we all latch on memories to assure ourselves of who we are and why do we live as an existential instinct.
All we are suggesting is that next time you have a nostalgic daydream, try to understand whether your memories are accurate or whether they are just elusive dreams of idealized versions of the truth.
See for yourself whether it is a reflection of the past, or a mirage of it
After all, there is always the slight chance that the past you know may not even exist…