Your Memories: Changed by the Present
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Exploring both interstellar and interpersonal space-time continuums. The Last Show with David Cooper. We'd like to think that our childhood and our memories of what happened to us when we are young are locked in stone, a sort of fixed memory of what happened to us. But what if your memories can update themselves based on how your relationships are going right now? Well, that's what social personality psychologist at Michigan State University, William Chopik, found when studying how your current relationships can reshape traumatic childhood memories. Bill, welcome to the show. Yeah, nice to be here. Like I say, I sort of think of my memory as like a hard drive. You sort of store it once, it stays there.
It's not this fluid thing that can get edited based on where I'm at now in life. But I guess my view on memory is wrong.
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.
How can current relationships reshape childhood memories?
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.
Interesting. I talk about that a lot in therapy, like this idea that the lens that I have looking at events can change them, even though the events are the same. And if I'm feeling depressed or if I'm doing well in life, that lens kind of changes. Is it more similar to 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.
Let's talk about your study. So what exactly did you ask people? How did you sort of come to this conclusion?
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.
What does William Chopik's research reveal about memory?
But then you ask people multiple times and they give you different answers about what happened to them when they were younger.
Now, is it like significant others that can shift this? Is it friends? Is it parents? Like what relationships that are going well in my life right now might sort of make me, I don't know, soften my past if I've had a particularly rough one?
Well, all of them are related a little bit. So whether that be like your dating relationship or your relationship with your friends, but then also what's going on in their professional lives as well. So we found some linkages with all your relationships and then all your kind of professional and academic stress. The relationships that kind of were most closely related to your memories were the current relationships with your parents. So if that was going well, you tended to remember your past with them more fondly. And then when you were kind of argumentative and fighting with them and having more stress and strain, that's when you remember things more harshly.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–1:07
2
How can current relationships reshape childhood memories?
1:07–3:04
3
What does William Chopik's research reveal about memory?
3:04–6:13
4
How does emotional state influence memory retrieval?
6:13–9:15
5
What methodology was used in Chopik's study?
9:15–9:56
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Last Show with David Cooper
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