Each experience leaves a trace destined to change over time, or to disappear to make room for new information. We talk about it in the Corriere Salute on newsstands for free with the Corriere della Sera on Thursday 5 May
We are publishing a preview of an article in the new Corriere Salute. You can read the full text on the free issue on newsstands Thursday 5 May or in Pdf on the Digital Edition of Corriere della Sera.
No, not a camera. Our memory is not a recorder that carves in the mind everything that happens to us since we come into the world onwards, but a complex system that forms memories by remixing real experiences, emotions, thoughts: for this reason sometimes it can even be unreliable. For example, with time, memories change and their essence remains, as he recently pointed out in Nature Communications Maria Wimber from the University of Glasgow: investigating how to recover memories on a group of volunteers who were shown images of animated or inanimate objects, in black and white or colored, the expert showed that with the passing of days they remain very present the semantic information relating to something we have seen, so if there was an object or a living being in the photograph, while the perceptual information relating to color is quickly lost.
Memories change a little each time we recall them e slowly we tend to forget the details superficial to keep the ones that have meaning: After months of having dinner with a friend, we’ll remember the conversation, not what we ordered or how the table was set, says Wimber. Is called “Semantization” of memories It is a useful adaptive process, because we do not need to fill our minds with information but to retain useful information.
Accumulating details without forgetting anything would flood our mind and it would be a problem, so this tendency to the essential becomes stronger with the passage of time and with the increase of information to which we are exposed in the course of life: for this reason we will still have a memory of something that happened to us years and years ago. thinner than what happened a few weeks ago. Details also tend to slip away even when we recall the memory without reliving it and, as Wimber says, this has important implications, for example, in eyewitnesses who are asked to repeat and recall an event many times: the memories could in any case, “corrupt” for frequent interrogations, because one cannot relive what happened. Each memory then is not a carbon copy of lived reality and even excluding the phenomenon of false memories this involves some jokes.
You can continue reading the article in Corriere Salute on newsstands for free on Thursday 5 May or in Pdf in the Digital Edition of Corriere della Sera.
May 3, 2022 (change May 3, 2022 | 18:40)
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