Purposeful Growth

Our memories of past experiences are part illusion. The brain isn’t large enough to record everything we experience so it fills in the gaps with imagination.

Daniel Gilbert’s entertaining and enlightening book, Stumbling on Happiness, describes how memory works; a description that should humble anyone harboring the illusion of a

great memory. Our brain’s capacity is huge, but not nearly large enough to store every sight, sound, smell, touch, taste, and emotion we experience. It turns out we make up much of what we think we remember. 

Have you ever argued passionately with someone about your recollection of a past situation that you both experienced? If you’re like most of us the answer is yes, and the resulting argument might never have been settled because you both may have been simultaneously right and wrong.

Because the brain can’t store every detail, it makes up for this limitation by storing just enough to recall a past experience. This generally is sufficient for our needs, but does lead to eye-witness fallibility and lots of personal arguments over past experiences.

Gilbert explains it this way. We compress the huge amount of data that we perceive in a given experience into a few critical components: the sensory highlights and associated emotions. Later, as we recall the event, our mind brings up the highlights and emotions and fills in the rest. That’s right, we imagine what would have occurred to smooth out the few pieces of fact and form a complete story.

This is all very interesting, but what value is this information beyond water-cooler talk? How about fewer arguments? Wouldn’t that contribute to a more tranquil life? How about better decisions? Isn’t that important to your personal growth?

In the future, if recollection of a past event is important to you because of a disagreement, to make a decision, or to learn from it, consider the emotion that accompanied the past event. The emotion at the time will provide clues about the role that imagination played in recalling the past event. And remember that the past is past, our memories are fallible, and part of what we each remember is illusion.

This article first appeared in the Personal Development Topic at Suite101.com.

For related articles, see the Mind & Attitude topic here.