Prediction Bases on Fallible Memories
Human Memory is Fallible: The recounting of John Dean’s testimony highlights how human memory can be inaccurate. Dean recalled details of meetings that either didn’t occur as he described or involved different people than he remembered. Despite his inaccuracies, he believed he was telling the truth.
Memory as Construction, Not Recall: The argument stresses that human memory is not about retrieving stored facts from a mental “file storage,” but rather about constructing plausible narratives based on the context and available information. This construction can lead to memories that feel accurate and detailed but are actually incorrect or distorted.
There’s a lovely example of that which is a scientist called Ulric Neisser. This psychologist looked at the memory of John Dean, who testified at the Watergate trials. It’s very rare for someone to spend a long time talking about events that happened a few years ago and for you to have the ground truth. But he was talking about meetings in the Oval Office, and he didn’t know they were all recorded. So, afterwards, you could see what was actually said and what he reported. What he reported was garbage. There were meetings that didn’t exist, a different bunch of people, and when he attributed things to people, it was different people who said something a bit like that. When he attributed things to himself, he didn’t actually say that. He said something vaguely similar in a different meeting, but it was clear he was trying to tell the truth. He was doing the best he could, and actually, what he said conveyed what was going on in the White House very well, even though all the details were wrong. You won’t believe that about your own memories, but your own memories are actually like that. Unless you keep rehearsing something, which we do for amazing things to happen to us, when you recall the details, many of them will be hopelessly wrong and you won’t know it, and your hero won’t know it, but that’s just the way human memory is. It’s because when you remember something, you don’t get it out of some file storage somewhere; you just make up something that sounds plausible given the context. And of course, if it’s something you know a lot about, the thing you made up that sounds plausible is probably true. If it’s something you don’t know much about, or something that happened long ago, you make up something that seems plausible to you given the connection strengths you have in your brain. A lot of it will be plausible but false. There is no line in human memory between making stuff up and remembering stuff. Remembering stuff is just making stuff up that works.