Experiment after experiment, however, has shown that this trust is misplaced. Even if you leave out people with obvious memory deficits -- victims of dementia, for example -- the rest of us give far too much credence to our brain's version of the past. In truth, what we remember is a conglomerate of what actually did happen, what we were told happened, what we imagine happened based upon the emotions associated with the event, and pure (if inadvertent) fabrication. And the scariest part is that absent hard evidence (a video, for example), there's no way to tell which parts are what.
It all feels true.
If you don't believe this, consider what happened to cognitive researcher Elizabeth Loftus, of the University of California - Irvine, whose experiments establishing the unreliability of memory are described in neuroscientist David Eagleman's wonderful book The Brain: The Story of You:
We're all susceptible to this memory manipulation -- even Loftus herself. As it turned out, when Elizabeth was a child, her mother had drowned in a swimming pool. Years later, a conversation with a relative brought out an extraordinary fact: that Elizabeth had been the one to find her mother's body in the pool. That news came as a shock to her; she hadn't known that, and in fact didn't believe it. But, she describes, "I went home from that birthday and I started to think: maybe I did. I started to think about other things that I did remember -- like when the firemen came, they gave me oxygen. Maybe I needed the oxygen because I was so upset I found the body?" Soon, she could visualize her mother in the swimming pool.But then, her relative called to say he had made a mistake. It wasn't the young Elizabeth after all who had found the body. It had been Elizabeth's aunt. And that's how Loftus had the experience what it was like to possess her own false memory, richly detailed and deeply felt.
So it's not like false memories seem vague or tentative. They're so vivid you can't tell them from real ones.
Which brings us to the strange story of an arcade video game called "Polybius."
In the early 1980s, a rumor began to circulate that there was an arcade game that combined some very frightening effects. Its visuals and sounds were dark, surreal, and suggestive. Children who played the game sometimes had seizures or hallucinations, and afterwards experienced periods of amnesia and night terrors. Worse, there was something about it that was strangely addictive. People who played it more than two or three times were likely to become obsessed by it, and keep coming back over and over. Some, they said, finally could think of nothing else and went incurably mad. Some committed suicide.
Some simply... vanished.
The FBI launched an investigation, removing Polybius from arcades wherever they could find it. The "Men in Black" got involved, and there were reports of mysterious strangers showing up and demanding that arcade owners provide lists of the names (or at least initials) of high scorers in the game. Those unfortunates were rounded up for psychological testing -- and some of them never returned, either.
There are webpages and subreddits devoted to people's memories of Polybius, their experiences of playing it, and scary things that happened subsequently. There's just one problem with all this, and you've guessed it:
Polybius never existed. Despite many, many people searching, there has never been a single Polybius cabinet found, nor even a photograph from the time period showing one. Oh, sure, we have mock-ups people made long after the fact:
But hard evidence of the real deal? Zero. Nada. Zip. Zilch.
So what happened here?
Part of it, of course, was a deliberate hoax; an "urban legend." Part of it was confabulation of memory with a real event, when an arcade in Portland, Oregon removed a game that had triggered a couple of kids to have a seizure. There was also an incident in 1981 where the FBI raided arcades that had converted game stations into illegal gambling machines. There was a 1980 New York Times article citing research (later largely called into question) that playing violent video games predisposes kids to commit violence themselves. And in 1982, there was a widely-reported incident that a teenager had died while playing the game Berzerk in a Calumet City, Illinois arcade -- the story was true, but his heart failure was caused by a physical defect, and had nothing to do with playing the game.
Put all that together, and there are still people now -- forty-some-odd years later -- who are certain they remember Polybius, and what it was like to play it.
It's another example of the "Mandela Effect," isn't it? This phenomenon got its name from certain people's memories that Nelson Mandela died in jail -- when in fact, the reality is that he survived, eventually became president of South Africa, and died peacefully in his home in Johannesburg in 2013. Other examples are that the "Berenstain Bears" -- the annoyingly moralistic cartoon characters who preach such eternal truths as Be Nice To Your Siblings Even When You Feel Like Punching The Shit Out Of Them and Your Parents Are Always Right About Everything and Pay Attention In School Or Else You Are Bad -- were originally the Berenstein Bears (with an "e," not an "a"), that the Fruit of the Loom logo originally had a cornucopia (not just a bunch of fruit), and (I shit you not) that Sri Lanka and New Zealand "should be" in different places.
Almost no one who experiences the Mandela Effect, though, laughs it off and says, "Wow, memory sure is unreliable, isn't it?" Those memories feel completely real, just as real as memories of stuff you know occurred, that you have incontrovertible hard evidence for. The idea that you could be so certain of something that never happened is profoundly disconcerting, to the extent that people have looked for some explanation, any explanation, for how their memories ended up with information that is demonstrably false. Some have even cited the "Many-Worlds" Model of quantum mechanics, and posited that there really is a timeline where Mandela died in prison, the cartoon bears were the "Berenstein Bears," Fruit of the Loom had a cornucopia in its logo, and Sri Lanka and New Zealand were somewhere other than where they now are. It's just that we've side-slipped into a parallel universe, bringing along our memories of the one where we started -- where all those things were dramatically different.
That's how certain people are that their memories are flawless. They'd rather believe that the entire universe bifurcated than that they're simply remembering wrong.
How many times have you been in an argument with a friend, relative, or significant other, and one of you has said, "I know what happened! I was there!", often with a self-righteous tone that how dare anyone question that they might be recalling things incorrectly? Well, the truth is that none of us are remembering things correctly; what remains in our mind is a partial record, colored by emotions and second-hand contamination and imagination, blended so well there's no way to tease apart the accurate parts from the inaccurate. What our memories for sure are not is a factual, blow-by-blow account, a mental video of the past that misses nothing and mistakes nothing.
I know this is kind of a terrifying thing. Our memories are a huge part of our sense of self; if you want a brilliant (fictional) example of the chaos that happens when our memories become unmoored from reality, watch the fantastic movie Memento, in which the main character (played to perfection by Guy Pearce) has anterograde amnesia, a cognitive disorder where he can't form any new short-term memories. To compensate for this, he takes Polaroid photographs of stuff he thinks is important, and if it's really important he tattoos it onto his skin. But then the problem is, how does he know the contents of the photos and tattoos are true? He has no touchstone for what truth about the past actually is.
Although Pearce's character has an extreme form of this problem, in reality, all of us have the same issue. Those neural firings in the memory centers of our brain are all we have left of the past -- that, and certain fragmentary records, objects, and writings.
So, how accurate is our view of the past?
No way to tell. Better than zero, but certainly far less than one hundred percent.
And there's not even any need for a cursed arcade game to screw around with your perception. We're built like this -- like it or not.
****************************************
