Steve Ramirez

But the fact that we can recall memories that were quiet for decades and they can come back to life gives me some reason to believe that our brain contains a lot more of our vast history than we originally thought.

For sure.

There's a lot of different theories as to why and how we manipulate our own memories.

And the one that you hit on the head here is an optimism bias that can exist in people that we tend to reflect on some parts of the past with more rosy colored glasses.

And weirdly enough, we also tend to remember things sometimes as being worse than they actually were.

So this is well documented in psychology.

And I think it's because our brains are not at all

objectively recording what's happening with experience but we might be in a good mood and that might make us remember the good times of the past or maybe we're in a bit of a sour mood and that makes us more likely to recall related somewhat souring memories as well.

One of the sort of inconvenient truths of this all I thought was captured beautifully by Daniela Schiller is a professor at Mount Sinai in New York.

And she was giving a talk once and said that the inconvenient truth of this is that the memories that we hold dear, the ones that are the most real memories in our brain are the ones that we don't recall because those are the ones that are left untarnished by the process of recollection.

To me, what that means is that, yeah, the memories that we don't recall, like maybe the memories that you haven't thought of in decades, the first time you recall it is the most real that you will experience that memory.

And then the second and third and fourth time, it's not that it's less real, it's just warped a bit more.

And it doesn't even have to be warped to the point of becoming a false memory per se.

It could just be that the different, again, the hues and contours and emotions and...

and how we felt about that memory can also change.

I think about this personally often when sometimes I was recounting to my friends the other day, the first time I went to go visit my family in El Salvador, and I was six years old when this happened.

And if I really sit with that memory of having a dinner at my mom's village that she grew up in, a lot of the details are pretty consistently similar.

I remember my grandparents were there

My mom and dad were there.

A lot of my cousins were there.