Memories are made of this?

     What price memories? Just how accurate are they? Can we trust our own? The short answer is "no".  We can't.

     Simple experiments show that our memories are very faulty. Maybe you've seen the film of people concentrating on counting balls that they completely miss the man in a gorilla costume walking among them. You may have done the test yourself, online.

     So, for one thing, our brains don't take in everything around us, only those things on which we focus. And they are constantly making new neural pathways, creating our neural net, reworking old memories to take new information into account.

     I actually have very few memories of childhood, one year in particular is an almost total blank. I was told that this is due to trauma of some sort, the brain's way of protecting us from pain. I'm sure it's true, there was a lot going on in my childhood, not all of it good.

     The year I can't bring to mind was when a cousin came to live with us, with her mother, when I was around 10/11. It was my first year in High School. I had no idea this had happened until my cousin mentioned it at my mother's funeral.  It came as a total shock to me. How could that be? That a whole year was wiped out? And I have no memory of people I sat next to in school that year either. They remember me, but it's just a blank to me.

However, there is one memory I was sure of, absolutely, with no doubt whatsoever for many years, only to realise quite recently that it is quite false.

     For most of my adult life I had a clear memory of a pin up I had in my teens.  It was a pull out from a magazine, a swimmer, Mark Spitz, a famous photo of him with his seven Olympic medals arranged on his chest.  You can see it easily using Google.

    Now as I remembered it this pin up was next to my bed, stuck to the side of a cupboard in my bedroom at my family home. I slept alone in the attic of our house at that time, in my early teens. Nothing wrong with that, you may say. And there wouldn't be, except that it wasn't like that at all.

     You see, in recent years I realised that he won those seven medals in 1972, by which time I had been married for 11 years.  I slept with my husband in our marital home and there was no way I would have had a pin up of anyone! Anywhere! My husband was a jealous man.

     My memory was almost entirely false, only the actual picture was real, yet it was as clear as anything for many many years!

     Now if we can create false memories, so clear and convincing, for whatever reason, if our memories are so unreliable, just how far can we trust witness statements in court, however sure they seem of their facts? It makes you think, doesn't it?

     It has certainly made me think.