Ciara Greene
speaker
121 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Ciara Greene’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So if you can't do that, if you're not able to kind of essentially leave some of those details behind you, then what you're going to have more trouble doing is identifying the gist, identifying the commonalities among all of those different events.
Yes, absolutely. I think, again, it comes back to that idea that we really have these very unrealistic expectations of what our memories can or should do. And we tend to hold, to a certain extent ourselves, but really other people to very unrealistic standards regarding their memory.
And we tend to assume, for example, and there's lots of evidence of this, that in, for example, forensic or legal settings, as you've said, We tend to assume that if someone's memory changes or has gaps in it, that they're hiding something or that they're lying. That if their memory of an event changes, that shows that they're lying about that event and that they can't be trusted.
If there's a gap in their memory, maybe they're lying, maybe they can't be trusted, there's something going on. Where in fact, that is completely normal. And if somebody is actually able to give you this perfect, clear description of what happened to them, a lot of that is going to have been essentially reconstructed and rebuilt.
So in fact, even the story I told you earlier on about my accident, and in particular, the story I told you about the incident with the ketamine and so on, I was literally under the influence of drugs. I do not have a clear memory of that, but I have a reconstructed memory of how I remember it having happened.
That doesn't mean that that's actually necessarily an accurate representation of what happened. It's my reality, but it doesn't necessarily correspond to external reality.
Yeah, she says that, so people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. And I think that really is that idea again of that core aspect of what it is that we're trying to remember from events. So I remember that my bike accident was frightening and terrifying.
But did I cross the white line before the back wheel went out or not? I don't know. I could probably, if I thought about that long enough, I would construct a memory in which I would tell you with certainty that I was on the correct side of the white line. But there's no guarantee that that memory is accurate.
But what I can tell you with confidence is how I feel about it and about that core emotional content of the memory.
Well, yeah, that's the case with a lot of famous quotes. I mean, I'd say 90% of quotes on the internet are attributed to Oscar Wilde. And I mean, the man said a lot of things, but he didn't say everything.
If you had that Jill Price-like, perfect, vivid memory of that first pregnancy, you might be more likely to say, there's absolutely no way I'm ever doing that again. That was like a horror movie. I'm not doing it again.
Yes. So Gillian was pregnant with her second child and she was really sick, as a lot of people are. She just had appalling morning sickness, which was not restricted to the morning. You know, she was just sick all the time. She felt absolutely miserable. And she was saying to me and to her husband and anybody who'd listen how miserable this was.
And I remember her telling me, you know, that this was just so miserable and it had not been anything like this bad the last time. And what was different with this pregnancy when it hadn't been this bad the last time? And I was listening to this in incredulity and I was just saying, like, Gillian, are you mad? It was just this bad the last time. I remember it. We were working together.
We were good friends. Your first pregnancy was terrible. You were so sick. You were in bits. And her husband was saying the same. Her husband was saying, like, are you kidding? You couldn't get out of bed when you were pregnant the first time. It was so bad.
I do tend to look at everything through this lens. So I just think it was absolutely fascinating how her memory of that had been distorted. And what always seemed obvious to me and to Gillian in retrospect was that her memory had not been distorted in a completely random way. It had been distorted in a very systematic way.
And if we think that, you know, about the purpose of evolution at its bare core, you know, of allowing us to propagate our genes, allowing us to reproduce. You know, you could think about that idea that would anybody ever have a second child if they remembered how bad it was the first time around?
So that maybe there is an evolutionary benefit or like a functional benefit to misremembering or forgetting some of those negative experiences because it allows us to move forward with our lives. But there is some evidence suggesting that actually this is true
that women who are trying to get pregnant or want to have a second child do misremember the kind of the difficulties of their first pregnancy and of their first childbirth and that they will kind of dial down the negative elements of that and that sort of supports them to be able to kind of just even mentally deal with the idea of doing it again.
To an extent. I mean, it's not the case necessarily that we're actually just taking memories and taking them out and putting them away. But certainly we are kind of combining things together and digesting them in such a way that we're kind of clearing up some kind of mental space. Now, when I say mental space, I don't mean long-term memory storage.
We actually do have quite like the ability to store a huge amount of information. A lot of the time when we talk about not being able to remember something, it's not that that memory isn't there anywhere, it's that we don't have an easy route to access it.
Showing 61–80 of 121 · page 4 of 7
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