In a recent Science Alert article on memory, the author concluded otherwise, stating that your brain is a liar.
Calling your brain a liar may be a little strong, so let’s just say it confabulates. Sometimes it invents experiences or events that didn’t actually happen and it often exercises editorial license by heavily editing the ones that did. The point of editing is to create a coherent, believable narrative. And the point of a coherent, believable narrative is not just to report, but to persuade or convince. If a particular story fits within your (or my) current long-term narrative, it’s likely to be believed regardless of the facts.
That’s why Oliver Sacks was able to appropriate an incident that actually happened to his brother and recall it as his own experience. When he wrote about discovering, via another brother, that the memory was false, he noted that it was impossible to distinguish a false memory from a real one. A memory is a memory is a memory, and our confidence in our memories, although proven to be unfounded, is quite strong.
At the other end of the editing process, if an experience or event either doesn’t fit the long-term narrative or is deemed unimportant by the brain, it’s easily dismissed. It simply never happened. That’s why in the days right after my mother’s death, one of my younger brothers could claim with great conviction that he was just then learning about the existence of our 40-year-old half-sister. Kelly was the result of one of my father’s extramarital dalliances. She was not a secret, and there was—to put it mildly—a considerable amount of ongoing family drama surrounding her.
I found my brother’s deletion of Kelly from his narrative confounding. Oliver Sacks’ brother may have reacted similarly to finding that one brother had appropriated another brother’s experience. Yet these additions and subtractions happen to all of us; we just don’t notice them. The brain is engaged in an ongoing process of editing to construct and maintain the coherent and believable narrative that tells us who we are, what things mean, and how we should function in the world.
A coherent and believable narrative allows us to suspend disbelief and immerse ourselves in the story. Suspension of disbelief is an essential element of enjoying all kinds of stories, both “real” and imaginary. When we’re able to suspend disbelief, we don’t just relate to or understand the people or characters and the events taking place. We feel them as if they are happening to us. This has been confirmed by observing the brains of people reading fiction or watching movies.
Emotion Is Key
We don’t remember the boring stuff; we remember events and experiences that have a strong emotional component. But we don’t remember the details, at least not accurately. We remember the feeling. And each time we bring a particular memory to mind, our brain has to reconstruct the details, which it does by coming up with elements that support the feeling.
Here’s an example.
Let’s say you’re angered by an email you’ve received. Each time you think about the email over the next few days, you experience the same emotion. And when you think about it, you’re confident you recall the exact words you read. But if you were to go back and reread that email, you might discover the wording isn’t exactly as you remember it. The wording you think you recall, however, supports the feeling you’re experiencing because your brain is trying to match the details with the feeling.
(I use email as an example because it’s possible to go back and check the actual wording, which you can’t do after a spoken conversation unless it was recorded.)
Your inner narrator is much less concerned about accurate details than it is about maintaining a narrative that supports your status quo. So, yes, your inner narrator is unreliable. It’s also very powerful. It knows how to persuade you to suspend disbelief and go along with the story it’s telling you.
An unreliable narrator can add texture to works of fiction (The Usual Suspects, Fight Club, Atonement), but it’s chancy even as a literary device. An unreliable inner narrator can thwart your best-laid plans and highest aspirations—without any malice aforethought.