William Chopik

Well, yeah, it's not entirely wrong, but there's a lot of things that kind of shape what you remember, how you remember it.

I will say it's not even a hard drive in the sense that when you encode the memory, when it first happens, it's imbued with emotion or where you were, how you're feeling.

But yeah, it's less so kind of accessing files in a storage system and more that with a combination of also like running it through a filter.

And that filter, a lot of things go into that.

Yeah, that's a closer metaphor to what's happening because, yeah, you can't change the past.

That's set fixed stone.

There's no time machines that I'm aware of.

But, yeah, the idea is that when you're retrieving these memories, you do so currently.

So a lot of the stuff that's happening to you right now will kind of warp, twist, for better and for worse, in what you remember about the past.

So we followed about 1,000 emerging adults, so like college student age.

And we did that mostly because we thought their memories might be fresher, like they might remember things from their childhood more succinctly or accurately.

So for about two months, every four weeks, we asked them about their adverse childhood circumstances.

So things like, did they feel neglected or emotionally kind of...

yeah, physical and abuse and sexual abuse and also just feelings of neglect and kind of, yeah, just really, really tough circumstances from people's childhood.

And we found that even though a lot of these experiences happened really recently, like I remember thinking of an experience like three years ago, you'd think that you'd remember that pretty crystal clear, but it turns out that their memories did shift over time.

And one surprising thing from the study was that

Yeah, these things are really, really serious.

They're also locked in the past.

But then you ask people multiple times and they give you different answers about what happened to them when they were younger.

Well, all of them are related a little bit.