this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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Memory is a liar. It feels when you're accessing it like it is reliable. It is not. Eyewitness testimony frequently has people who adamantly remember stuff that didn't happen. They tried it with those famous events where people always remember where they were when so-and-so happened. They got a population of people, found out where they were when the shocking world event had happened, and then they asked them a long time later and a lot of people's vivid memories of where they were, were just bullshit their brain made up for them.
You can actually create false memories in people that will feel completely real, if you know how to do it, and they'll remember both the process of you implanting the false memory, and then this fake memory that they 100% remember as if it had happened.
The brain just stores hints and mostly-important stuff, and for the rest it just makes shit up as it goes along so you can get on with your day and won't become upset because you don't remember. But it's like an LLM. It just makes up nonsense if it doesn't know the answer, and to you it feels 100% real.
Yep. Memory is really silly. It's why journaling is important. But journaling itself can be deceiving if one isn't recording truths or is leaving out critical components.
I often wonder what the world would become if we had technology that auto journaled and was immutable. Would we be still so easily be led astray or would we contort ourselves in some other way to cling to our biases and cognitive distortions.
Journaling is also incredibly subjective, but there is nothing to beat firsthand experience from the moment itself. I've got a terrible memory and always wish I had a better habit of journaling so that I could actually remember things that happen...