Kira (Kira Greene)

So, for example, we have in the forensic literature, we'll have a discussion of co-witness effects, which is the idea that let's say I witness a car crash.

And then you witnessed that car crash too.

And then we talk about it later and you tell me about some detail I didn't see and that contaminates my memory of the event.

Okay.

We might see that as, oh, now my memory has been contaminated.

My memory has been altered and this is terrible because my memory has changed.

But actually what a lot of the evidence shows is that this kind of collaborative memory on average ends up meaning that the group on average ends up with a better memory with more details of the event.

So you and I together are

We'll recall more details of the crash than either one of us would have done on our own.

So that's in a very forensic context.

But of course, this applies in other kind of social contexts as well, that memory is collaborative, that we often work with other people, maybe without thinking that, but just in the course of our lives.

day-to-day conversations where we're remembering events, we're talking about them.

The way even that we discuss the same event with different people can be completely different and that can trigger us to remember an event in a different way, to give it a different sort of emotional tone, to remember or recall different details.

And then maybe that memory gets slightly altered when we kind of reconsolidate it, when we lock it back down again.

But that really kind of social process of memory, I think, is something that is often overlooked.

That memory, I should say, it isn't happening locked away in a little box.

You know, our brains might be inside our skulls, but our minds are out there and engaged in a social setting.

And our minds are constantly in contact with other people's minds.

And we're getting information from other people and social cues from other people.

And all of that helps to construct a memory that sometimes seems to be outside of one person.