Why shouldn't you trust your memory?

     If you have ever been in a relationship, I guess you would have faced the “You said that”, “No I didn’t say that” kind of situation. At the end who is right and who is wrong? Both of them are right in their own memory terms. The following will give you the clarity.

Seven crew members of the space shuttle Challenger were killed in the disaster on the morning of January 28 1986. Two psychologist Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch used this opportunity to conduct the experiment. Next day morning, they gave questionnaire to the students asking questions like where they have been when they heard the news, who were near them, who told them about the disaster and at what time they have heard about the disaster. Two and half years later, they asked the same students the same question about the disaster. When they compared two answers there was a lot of difference between the answers. In the next round, they called the students for the interview and the produced the two answer sheets. Most students believed their current memory rather than believing what they have written the next day of the disaster.

Try this experiment yourself. Try to remember where have you been when the holiday was announced on March 2020. If not now at least a year later. Let me know if there is any differences between what you remember and what your friend remember with whom you were there.

Verbal overshadowing:

Do you remember the scene from Ghilli movie where Muthupandi asked his worker to draw the face of Velu but the drawing ended up being the face of Gemini Ganesan? Knowingly or unknowingly, that particular scene has a reason behind it and you can learn about your own brain.

    A twenty-two-year-old woman who lived alone in the apartment got an uninvited visitor. He scared her with his knife and took the things he needed and performed oral sex in her. She didn’t have the physical strength to prevent him from doing anything. She then started to make the mental note about his appearance like his nose is long, his ears are short. Later that night, police asked her to identified the suspect with photographs and she identified the wrong person and she was so confident in her own memory.

In one experiment, subjects were shown the face of a bank robber for 30 seconds. One group was asked to write the detailed description of the face of the robber and other group was asked to do unrelated activities. Then the subjects were given 8 similarly looking individuals photo and asked to find the bank robber. The subjects who did unrelated activities identified the robber 64% of the time and the subjects who described the face identified only 38% of the time.

I guess you would have known by now what is absolutely right with Ghilli movie scene.