Celine van Golde

I'm trying to remember the specific car incident that I've witnessed, but I've got some gaps in my memory, so I'm filling it in and I'm taking it from a different source, a car crash that I saw on a TV episode.

Memory decays very rapidly.

So within the first even hour that we've experienced something, we will forget about 60% of details of what we've witnessed.

It's not arbitrary what we forget, so we will keep on remembering those details that were central to us, that we paid attention to, that we focused on.

And then over time, we see that about, and this goes into days and months, that we remember about 30% of all the details of that specific one-off incidents that we witnessed.

And it actually makes sense because when you go out in the street, you're not expecting to come across a crime or to witness a car accident.

So you might not be paying attention from start to finish.

It might be all of a sudden your attention gets like captured by it.

You witness it and then it's different than if you study for a test where your sole focus is on just remembering what you're learning.

With an incident like that, so many things are going on.

So while you observe everything, you also forget a lot of those details, right?

Now, what then happens is you remember about 30%, but at the same time, there's a pressure on you to remember certain things because police will come and ask you questions, friends might ask you questions, family might ask you questions, so you're eager to provide answers.

Now, those natural gaps that are in our memory

can actually quite easily be filled with information from different sources.

And that can be a person asking a leading question.

So, oh, what was the blue car doing?

Like, were they driving erratically before they crashed?

And that question already implies that a car was blue, even though I might not have said that before or not remember it that way.

And then I can take that information and slot that into my memory for the color of the car that I witnessed.

It can also be that my co-witness, another person that's heard, like, oh my God, did you just see how that one person punched the other one?