Julia Shaw

You can do it again when you wake up, but then at least you have an original version.

It does.

And collective and individual memory are these really interesting, they interact in really interesting ways.

So I would always say, when I train, for example, people who go to deal with warlords in the German military, I was working with agents who are going abroad and who are in these really difficult situations where they had to remember a lot of information that was important for national security.

They couldn't just sit there with a tape recorder being like,

Hey, or like their phone being like, hey, Mr. Warlord, can you just talk into this a bit closer?

You can't do that.

And so you have to remember it.

And so what they were doing is they were coming back from their deployments and they would meet up immediately and have like a team meeting to be like, what did you remember?

What happened?

And the problem is that they would do that before writing their notes.

And that is that is the wrong way around.

And so they don't do that anymore because I've told them not to do that anymore.

But it feels good.

It feels like collectively we are going to remember more details because you do.

But it doesn't mean that those details are right.

And so that's where I'd always say, have your own version before you talk to anybody.

Then, and my colleague, Dr. Annalise Freidevelt is one of the experts on the effect of things like eye closure on memory and collective memory.

And she has found repeatedly that if you remember things together,

especially if you've already got an original version of your own, you do usually remember more details.