Memory.

I’m writing this on Memorial Day, and I ask you: Do you trust your memory?

I have recently had several occasions to consider the question of memory.

The first and most personal was a battle of memories. Some of you may remember that I sent a survey out to my readers—with entry into a raffle as a reward for completing it—but forgot to collect contact information along with the survey responses. When I wrote an email apologizing and asking for names and email addresses, I also mentioned that I would like to know who called me an “adorable genius.”

The Battle

In an odd twist, not one but two people claimed to have written the “adorable genius” quote! And they both had clear evidence in their own minds that they had written it.

I tried every way I could think of, jogging their memories and getting concrete evidence. Neither recognized, upon my sending them, the answers to the other two questions in the survey. Both have Charter as their Internet Service Provider and live in Madison, so the IP address and location contained in the SurveyMonkey report were of no use. And both expressed a level of hurt that I would doubt them. After various exchanges with both men, I believe that each of them believes he wrote the comment. I will probably never know which one of them it actually was.

If you have an idea of how to solve this quandary, please let me know. In the meantime, I’ll accept that memory is not perfect. And I will be honored that at least two people in my life have such a positive sentiment toward me. Perhaps in this particular case, the truth doesn’t really matter in the end.

The Importance—and Unreliability—of Memory

In other situations, mistaken memory has greater consequences. I have been listening to the Amanda Knox story, Waiting to Be Heard , a memoir of an American college student wrongly convicted of murder in Italy. Following the murder, Amanda was questioned repeatedly by police until she did not trust her own memory. Amanda was not an eyewitness to the crime, but was the first person to discover the crime scene. She was therefore questioned aggressively, and was ultimately, in part because she did not report every detail of what she saw consistently, accused of and sentenced for the murder.

According to Wikipedia, it is well-accepted that eyewitness testimony in trials is fairly unreliable and should not be viewed as the absolute truth. A person’s mood can affect how he or she remembers something—and moods can swing quite dramatically at the time of a crime. Furthermore, in something called the “misinformation effect,” someone’s memory can become compromised because of additional information obtained after the event. The Journal of the Association for Psychological Science published a study showing that simply recalling a memory enhances or distorts it! (See Lifehacker’s Why Your Memory Sucks (and What You Can Do About It) and Double Wood’s 4 Crazy Things We Misunderstand About Human Memory for engaging explorations of these topics!)

The Delusion of Trusting Memory

If something as simple as this can make memory unreliable, why do we ever trust our recollection of events?

Furthermore, why do we trust ourselves to remember to do the things we say we’re going to do? Last week I had a short homework assignment to do for a non-credit personal growth class I’m taking. The assignment was given on Monday and was due on Wednesday night. I did not put time in my calendar to do it. All day Tuesday I thought about doing the assignment, but I wanted to wait until I had more material to put into it. Guess what? Wednesday night came and went, and I had not done it.

I am also notorious for thinking I’ll remember what I need from the grocery store, then forgetting a key item I meant to buy. Yet I persist in almost never writing down my shopping lists (and in doubling back to the store to get what I forgot). Perhaps if the grocery were 50 miles instead of a 5-minute walk from my house, I would change my system.

Write it Down!

On a group business coaching call last week, one of the participants expressed frustration that an employee did not remember how to do a task after learning how to do it. Sometimes this employee didn’t remember having done the task at all. The obvious solution was to have this employee write down everything he does and document it. This way he can repeat the task later and also have evidence of what he has done and not done.

The truth is, our memories are almost completely unreliable. We are overly confident in our ability to remember things, and we make a lot of mistakes due to that overconfidence. Not only that, but we expect other people to remember things accurately! I am still baffled that two people are 100% certain that they wrote that   “adorable genius” comment. But after the little bit of research I did on memory, it makes sense that at some point their memory was simply altered.

Clearly, writing things down is a great antidote and solves many memory issues. If I had collected information the first time around for my secret admirers, I would have known who gave me the “adorable genius” compliment. If I put things on my calendar I almost always remember to do them. If I put things on a shopping list I buy them. If I write down my brilliant blog ideas I remember to write about them!

While I know writing things down is a good idea, I imagine I will continue to do so only sometimes—until something becomes a big enough problem that I need to make a change.

Memorial Day

On a day like Memorial Day, we are called to remember in a different way. This day is an opportunity to honor the men and women we have lost. Yet most of us go to parties and picnics without thinking too much about the solemn aspects of the holiday. Our memories are so unreliable that we forget to remember at all.

On this Memorial Day, whether we remember accurately or not, let’s remember that sometimes the point is, quite simply, just to remember.