Sane
So studies have been done, results have been compared, argued over and tentatively settled on. Sadly this is the best that the psychological sciences do for "exact". The net of it is that it is now believed that every time we recall a memory we are essentially building it from scratch.
It's not to say that we are always lying when we recall things. Not exactly lying anyway. See we have all these data points that help us to anchor our memories and recall them in context. Like remembering that you had ice cream yesterday and knowing that it was yesterday because that was the day that you had to take your jacket to the cleaners to get ice cream out and they said they would call you the next day and they just called you saying it was the next day so the previous day must have been the one that included the ice cream. Most of these little anchor points just happen in the background. As we go through our day we absorb little details and things we know weave into the tapestry of events.
When we remember a day we don't really remember everything. As you move through your day try keeping a notebook and jotting down every person you meet and every detail about those meetings. Include scenery, peripheral events, people, weather, etc. Your fingers would be aching after one or two passing conversations. Writing everything down in order would just take too long because the storage method, ie; writing it all down, takes too long. Well our brain doesn't take that time either.
Our sensory organs are far less accurate in design than they are usually given credit for. We actually have a pretty broad range of detection with them, but they aren't really designed for focus. The ability to focus comes from how we use those senses.
Take sight. Our eyes feed us dozens of pinhole sized images to draw a two dimensional picture. The reason that we don't see things as tiny pictures is three-fold. Firstly we don't see gaps because those gaps are in places that we can't see. Secondly our minds push as much of the picture together to keep it gap-free. Thirdly our eyes are almost constantly moving. Little darting glances and imperceptible shifts. This movement drags those pinhole-sized images around and allows our brain to stitch together a complete image. Then this image is compared with the one from the other eye and we perceive depth from the comparison.
The important thing to remember from all of that is that we aren't actually seeing everything we are seeing. Much of the picture is being filled in because we "know" what should be there. This is from experience, which comes down to memories. Which, as previously discussed, are made up on the spot.
So if so much of our experience is made up of our brain telling stories based on educated guessing, then how do we keep our memory anchored? Basically we have a series of pass/fail tests that we put every experience we have through to discern where we will place it in the map of things we know. Those pass/fail tests grow from personal experience, genetic hardwiring and from what we learn from observing others. These observations can be simply watching other people interact with situations, hearing stories or just watching how people react. The shared experience with others is one of the main points that we use to anchor our memories and our sense of reality. Basically it comes down to "I know this because it has also been experienced by someone else."
This then leads to how we make judgements on who we do and do not allow to affect our shared experience and how we filter those things we observe based on our previous experiences and a ton of other things that most people spend their whole lives trying never to realize, so I'll just skip ahead.
Basically it's all about trust. We accept other people's versions of the events and allow them to become part of our shared reality because we trust other people. Without the ability to trust people and events we would learn nothing. Every time an event happened we would have to treat it as completely new because we would not be able to check it against previous experience because in order for us to run all of those lovely pass/fail tests that we do to the things we observe we have to trust that the situation is similar enough to previous situations which were similar. In order to judge similarity we have to be able to trust the observed patterns and be able to accept that they exist and can be relied upon.
Let's take all this on faith for a second and pretend that you believe all of this. Memory is the story we tell ourselves about what we know which is based on our capacity to trust what we know and that part of that is being able to trust other people.
In this equation trust becomes the only valuable currency because it allows us to establish things we have learned and to learn new things. Also through our trust in the observations of others we develop a sense of personal identity. So if trust breaks down at any point in that equation or is is short supply then the other parts of the equation suffer as well. If our version of events isn't trusted then it is discarded by the person hearing it as false information and our story is written out of their complete record of events that they remember. More than that, we personally are cast in their mind as a source of false information and, depending on how deeply the distrust goes we could even be completely written out of the events completely. We then cease to be a part of their shared reality and cease to exist in their world.
So...the point.
I honestly had one at the start. There was a focus of all of this but as usual I got lost in the exposition. Maybe someone else can look at this mess and tell me what they see. Maybe this is one of those things that's really important and that's why I can't see the locus.
I know there was a question that I was trying to formulate. Usually in these cases the question is the answer. All of this explanation diverted from the point. It's sort of like how if you really don't want to mow the lawn, but know you have to you can find a thousand things to do around the house that seem super important at the time. These things are really just helping us avoid the original task of lawn mowing. This is just like that.
It's not to say that we are always lying when we recall things. Not exactly lying anyway. See we have all these data points that help us to anchor our memories and recall them in context. Like remembering that you had ice cream yesterday and knowing that it was yesterday because that was the day that you had to take your jacket to the cleaners to get ice cream out and they said they would call you the next day and they just called you saying it was the next day so the previous day must have been the one that included the ice cream. Most of these little anchor points just happen in the background. As we go through our day we absorb little details and things we know weave into the tapestry of events.
When we remember a day we don't really remember everything. As you move through your day try keeping a notebook and jotting down every person you meet and every detail about those meetings. Include scenery, peripheral events, people, weather, etc. Your fingers would be aching after one or two passing conversations. Writing everything down in order would just take too long because the storage method, ie; writing it all down, takes too long. Well our brain doesn't take that time either.
Our sensory organs are far less accurate in design than they are usually given credit for. We actually have a pretty broad range of detection with them, but they aren't really designed for focus. The ability to focus comes from how we use those senses.
Take sight. Our eyes feed us dozens of pinhole sized images to draw a two dimensional picture. The reason that we don't see things as tiny pictures is three-fold. Firstly we don't see gaps because those gaps are in places that we can't see. Secondly our minds push as much of the picture together to keep it gap-free. Thirdly our eyes are almost constantly moving. Little darting glances and imperceptible shifts. This movement drags those pinhole-sized images around and allows our brain to stitch together a complete image. Then this image is compared with the one from the other eye and we perceive depth from the comparison.
The important thing to remember from all of that is that we aren't actually seeing everything we are seeing. Much of the picture is being filled in because we "know" what should be there. This is from experience, which comes down to memories. Which, as previously discussed, are made up on the spot.
So if so much of our experience is made up of our brain telling stories based on educated guessing, then how do we keep our memory anchored? Basically we have a series of pass/fail tests that we put every experience we have through to discern where we will place it in the map of things we know. Those pass/fail tests grow from personal experience, genetic hardwiring and from what we learn from observing others. These observations can be simply watching other people interact with situations, hearing stories or just watching how people react. The shared experience with others is one of the main points that we use to anchor our memories and our sense of reality. Basically it comes down to "I know this because it has also been experienced by someone else."
This then leads to how we make judgements on who we do and do not allow to affect our shared experience and how we filter those things we observe based on our previous experiences and a ton of other things that most people spend their whole lives trying never to realize, so I'll just skip ahead.
Basically it's all about trust. We accept other people's versions of the events and allow them to become part of our shared reality because we trust other people. Without the ability to trust people and events we would learn nothing. Every time an event happened we would have to treat it as completely new because we would not be able to check it against previous experience because in order for us to run all of those lovely pass/fail tests that we do to the things we observe we have to trust that the situation is similar enough to previous situations which were similar. In order to judge similarity we have to be able to trust the observed patterns and be able to accept that they exist and can be relied upon.
Let's take all this on faith for a second and pretend that you believe all of this. Memory is the story we tell ourselves about what we know which is based on our capacity to trust what we know and that part of that is being able to trust other people.
In this equation trust becomes the only valuable currency because it allows us to establish things we have learned and to learn new things. Also through our trust in the observations of others we develop a sense of personal identity. So if trust breaks down at any point in that equation or is is short supply then the other parts of the equation suffer as well. If our version of events isn't trusted then it is discarded by the person hearing it as false information and our story is written out of their complete record of events that they remember. More than that, we personally are cast in their mind as a source of false information and, depending on how deeply the distrust goes we could even be completely written out of the events completely. We then cease to be a part of their shared reality and cease to exist in their world.
So...the point.
I honestly had one at the start. There was a focus of all of this but as usual I got lost in the exposition. Maybe someone else can look at this mess and tell me what they see. Maybe this is one of those things that's really important and that's why I can't see the locus.
I know there was a question that I was trying to formulate. Usually in these cases the question is the answer. All of this explanation diverted from the point. It's sort of like how if you really don't want to mow the lawn, but know you have to you can find a thousand things to do around the house that seem super important at the time. These things are really just helping us avoid the original task of lawn mowing. This is just like that.