Why Memory is Unpredictable & How to Improve it | Dr. Alan Castel & Dr. Andrew Huberman

Taking Mental Pictures

00:00A long time ago, I decided um I was in a in a really cool circumstance. I was on a picnic. It was my first girlfriend. And I remember thinking like, gosh, she's so beautiful. I'm just going to take a picture. We were just sitting at this park that's up in the hills behind uh where I used to live.

00:13And I just went and I decided, okay, like I remember the picture. Now, of course, in my mind now, it's it's blurry. Like I don't remember specific details, but I remember more or less I think I remember that the angle was that. And then like a year and a half ago, I was in uh Manhattan.

00:28and I was in an Uber and I just was like maybe I could just do that for a like a trivial street scene. So I just like look there was that one of those scaffolds for construction and I just decided you just do that and there was a guy walking by and I'm like I wonder if I'll remember it and I still remember it.

00:42Now the question I have is do I actually remember the content of what I saw besides just their crude you know the scaffold the guy in one case you know my my girlfriend we were sitting on this nice big lawn above there this lake there it's it's a beautiful spot uh in Palto still there or is what's stamped in my decision to do that and the and the sort of conscious collection of it is are is it these weren't like big emotionally salient events where the the difference between these visual memories and other visual memories is that the emotional load wasn't that high,

01:23but I made the decision to do it. It was like it was coming from me. It wasn't. So, I'm not just trying to remember like like we also went to was her senior my junior prom. Like I don't I remember a few things from that prom, but I can't reme I don't have a visual picture of the prom.

01:37But the prom was also a lot more emotionally, you know, laden than anything I just described. Does that make sense? Yeah, it's a fascinating question because I think selection is the important thing here that you're making a conscious decision like this is a special moment.

01:52Can I just take a

Memory Selection Process

01:53picture of it? And the work on visual memory is interesting. We are very visual people. But the research on photographic memory does show that even people who have very strong visual memory will make memory errors. So it's not that you know it's exactly photographic but their visual memory is exceptional.

02:10I think what's interesting here and this is something I think is important is the selection process that you're choosing. This is a special moment. I'm going to time stamp it and remember it. You're not, you know, doing anything special other than realizing a lot is going on now.

02:23There's probably some emotional veilance there versus taking this random picture in New York City. And it would be interesting to kind of test your memory later because we know sometimes we think we remember something well and in fact we misremember things or details and hopefully you know you got the right girlfriend of course but maybe the hill looks a little bit different or sometimes people are like of course it was spring cuz we went to the prom but it's like no actually now that you know we it was a different season entirely that was fall and confusing with the other picnic I took.

02:52But I think that's important especially as you know we get older that there are some memories these days we have our

How Phones Affect Memory

02:57phones for everything. So you probably you probably couldn't then, but you could have pulled out your phone and actually taken a picture. And you see a lot of people offloading information now. You know, I'm not going to remember this. I'll take a picture.

03:06There is some research showing that that act of deciding to take the picture actually improves your own memory for the event. For the event. Interesting. Now, it can also make your memory worse because you're realizing I want to I'm taking this photo so I don't need to remember it later.

03:22And so you could see it going both ways. But that selection process is important. So sometimes you're choosing this is mundane. I'm going to offload it and take a picture. Or this is a special moment. I want to take this picture. And I see it, you know, when I take pictures of my family.

03:38This is a special moment. I want to take this photo. But there are times where I'm like, I don't have my camera. I don't want to interfere. This is going to be like an internal memory that I can take. Um, and hopefully it lasts forever. I tell myself that my mindset at the time was this is a special moment.

03:52I never want to forget this. Yeah,

Memory As Reconstruction

03:56I hope I never forget it. Well, you know, memory is reconstructive and I think, you know, the more you retrieve it and go back there, the more you'll have this feeling of remembering it. And our brain does a lot of interesting things in terms of, you know, reconstructing the past also has a similar brain signature as imagining the future, which you know, in some ways makes sense.

04:15We shouldn't have separate parts of the brain for thinking about the past and thinking about the future. But that can kind of then predict why you might misremember something, why your imagination has to be based surely on the experiences you've had already, right?

04:29Or you know, if I say what would it be like to go to Mars? Well, you've never been to Mars, but you've seen movies in the past about it. So our, you know, if I said imagine a space alien, you and I being similar age are probably going to think of the ET version of one, whereas someone who's younger than us might have a very different kind of representation of that.

04:48So it's interesting to think of memory as kind of a reconstruction of the past, but also imagining the future involves, you know, our past experiences. Never thought about it that way. It's the perfect time, I think, to raise the quote that uh a former guest on this podcast put on social media the other day.

05:07They weren't his words, but this Morgan Howell, who did a really wonderful episode on the psychology of money. Um, and I I really love his first book, but also his second book, The Art of Spending Money. Um, he put out a he said it's a Russian quote, "The past is more unpredictable than the future."

05:27Yeah. Goodness, that raises questions about eyewitness testimony. Um, spousal arguments. You know, I occasionally will get an email, my wife and I are have a debate or my husband and I are debate and and I have a rule. I I don't get into uh spousal uh debates or arguments of any kind.

05:44So, do we remember things the way they happened or do we confabulate uh do we um muck it all up? You know, I don't think we muck it all up and I don't think we do it intentionally either. But as a result of all the information we have in our memory, we're constantly interpreting, you know, the future and our current state.

06:02And you spoke a little bit about eyewitness memory. I think that's a really good example of that where something horrible might have happened

Faulty Eyewitness Identification

06:10and like your experience where you think you're taking a picture and you're going to remember everything and it feels like you will. I can remember the shirt. I can remember the smell. I can remember the weather. Um, and sometimes that can be accurate.

06:21A lot of research shows that sometimes we misremember these things. In some of these classic cases, unfortunately, um, you know, now that there's DNA evidence, you can determine that maybe they got the wrong person. And when that happens, you want to look back and say, "How could that happen?"

06:37And some of it comes down to faulty eyewitness identification. And these are not cases where people are lying or intentionally changing things, but they'll identify someone. They'll say, "That's the person." And as a result of identifying that person in a lineup, that person then replaces what they actually saw.

06:55So our memory can be contaminated just like any form of evidence could be contaminated. And then when you replay it again, you're replaying the person you identified, not the person you actually saw. Wow. So it's almost like we as we become more familiar with this person that we identified, quote unquote, our knowledge about them, facial features, etc.

07:15is is elaborated in our brain and we superimpose that on the actual experience.

Ronald Cotton Case

07:23Yeah. And and this is you know one of the most famous cases Ronald Cotton case where really horrible event happened um and the woman made a point of trying to remember her attacker. So it wasn't just she got a quick glance but she had a long interaction with him and that's you know a traumatic event and she said if I survive this I want to remember his face so I can identify him later.

07:43So this is like the the perfect situation where your memory should be sharp. And um it was crossra identification which we know is not as reliable as identifying someone of your own race. And when she saw a lineup she identified she took her time and said this feels like it's a multiplechoice test.

08:00And I studied hard for it. She took her time and she identified the person and she thought in her mind this is the person who was inches from my throat. um and she identified him and he had a an alibi that didn't stand up and he was you know then you know found guilty and it was only you know decades later that DNA evidence exonerated him and she felt horrible.

08:25um she felt like, you know, and there's a lot of reasons why this could happen, you know, whether leading questions or how the identification process was conducted, but she was trying to do what she felt was her job and take someone who she thought was guilty off the street and um later they got to meet in fact and she you know could apologize to him.

08:47She felt terrible. And so this is one case study and you know I wouldn't draw any conclusions but it had a lot of the principles that we've talked about where you feel like you're taking a photo. It's a cross race identification where your confidence might be high for good reason um but accuracy might not be and then this kind of changing of the face whereas once you identify the face that's what you start to remember and so I think there's a lot of interesting memory principles at play here.

09:15How does

Memory In Legal Systems

09:18the legal system deal with this kind of thing? I mean nowadays there's so many more cameras and phones which can track location. I like to think those things have improved the courtroom scenarios uh that it's harder for people to make genuine mistakes.

09:33Yeah. I think it's you know memory should be treated as one source of evidence just like DNA just like any sort of evidence but also we need to be aware that it can be contaminated just like any other source of evidence as well. So we can't just say oh well DNA evidence is perfect.

09:45Well, it can also be contaminated in predictable ways. And I think, you know, coming back to this idea of metacognition, most people feel like they have a pretty good understanding of how memory works, but it's not always accurate. And sometimes confidence, high confidence doesn't necessarily mean high accuracy.

Confidence Versus Accuracy

10:04And I think part of the reason we're fooled is usually, you know, the more you see something, the better you'll remember it, just like the Apple logo. But that's not always the case. And there's predictable reasons why. the more you see something, the more you might stop attending to the features or you don't need to use it.

10:18And so that is a more kind of predictable memory principle. But we don't have this, you know, always accurate metacognitive insight. And I I think that's interesting. I think that's both concerning, you know, in the eyewitness memory case, but it's also important for learning.

10:34How can we be kind of effective and maximize our learning? [music]