2023-05-05 15:42:47
Was his sweater blue, or green? You saw someone a few minutes ago, but you still can’t remember. Don’t panic: you’re not the only one, according to scientific research.
The fact that some distortions occasionally occur in our long-term memory has been known since the 1930s. Scientists at the University of Amsterdam have now come to a surprising new insight: memories in our brain seem to be distorted after just two seconds.
Surprising research result
Dutch neuroscientist Marte Otten and colleagues are conducting research into our memory and the storage of memories. That research has yielded surprising results, after which it was recently published in scientific journal Plos One.
The results of the study are based, among other things, on an experiment with about 400 test subjects. They were always shown different letters or symbols. They were then asked the simple question of what they had seen. What seems? Half of the people who were sure of their case, what they had just seen, were wrong.
Sensory illusion or memory illusion
There are two ways your brain can store things incorrectly. Or the perception is not correct, so that your brain also stores something that is not correct: that is the sensory illusion. Or you register something correctly, but it is immediately stored incorrectly in the brain: that is the memory illusion.
In this study, the research candidates were sometimes asked directly what they had observed, but sometimes that question was asked ‘only’ after two seconds. What turned out? If the question was asked after two seconds, it was much more likely to be answered incorrectly. In those two seconds, the memory has already been distorted in the brain.
In this study, the participants were shown letters or symbols in the correct way, or vice versa. Why our brain already stores the memory incorrectly after such a short time, according to the scientists, probably has to do with expectations. Because you’ve probably seen a letter K many times in your life in the usual way, your brain will quickly reshape a mirrored K. You then remember a perfectly normal letter K, while just before that you really observed something else.
Don’t worry, you probably won’t memorize entire conversations incorrectly right away. When events or conversations take place in a recognizable context, you are less likely to remember them in a completely different way.
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Poor memory? After just two seconds your brain lets you down