So last time we talked about attention & vision. We talked about how things can happen right in front of us & we won’t even see them. Let’s talk for a moment the effect this has on your memories.
The part of your brain that manages your memories is also the part of your brain that manages your imagination. So there can be tremendous cross contamination between those two. We can remember things in ways that didn’t happen, & we can even actively alter our memories with intention; both forms of false memories. Memory work is a common technique in PTSD therapies, & instrumental in my own coaching.
Your memory can fill in the blanks when it wants to….similar to our visual field. Our brain is always filling in the area that we’re not seeing with information that may not be updated. Our brain can expect things to happen in a certain way, even though things didn’t actually happen the way you remember them and sometimes it just plain makes things up.
In one very interesting experiment, scientists showed 20 respondents a doctored photo of an image of a hot air balloon & asked the respondent to tell them about that day. Over 50% of respondents invented a complete or partial false memory of their own. Literally telling the scientists details about their memory of their day in the hot air balloon….that never happened.
In another experiment where they asked people to wait in a simil-office environment. The “office” had some objects that one would typically find in an office, but it was also missing some key pieces: a phone, a computer etc. In addition there were strange objects that one would never expect to find in an office – like a pineapple.
Afterwards they were asked which objects they remembered seeing. Not surprisingly, they all called to mind the pineapple. But what was surprising was that almost all of the respondents filled in their memory with objects that they expected to be there, but actually weren’t present. They had all remembered seeing a phone…but there was no phone.
Because when we are conditioned to expect certain things, we can literally (subconsciously) fool ourselves into seeing what wasn’t there and remembering what never happened. We fit pieces into a pre-existing narrative that we have in our mind. Where does this narrative come from? That’s what we’ll start looking at in the next seminar.
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