Memories Are Not Set in Stone

Our memories are malleable and can be recast each time we recall them.

Key points:

• Memory is surprisingly unreliable and subject to editing when memories are encoded and retrieved.
• The more we recall an event, the more likely we are to amend it.
• In therapy, therefore, it may help to be open to different interpretations of events.

Around 40 years ago, I was invited to appear on London Weekend Television’s The Six O’Clock Show. My mother was terribly excited, first that I was to be appearing on television at all, and second because she really liked Michael Aspel, the presenter who would be interviewing me. I was a journalist at the time and I had been asked to appear on the show because the producers had picked up on a lighthearted article I had just had published in the Observer newspaper. It described how I had recently passed the St John Ambulance first aid test and, consequently, had become terrified that someone might fall from a ladder or collapse just as I passed by them in the street, leaving me duty-bound to attempt to use my distinctly inadequate skills.

It was only when, recently, the friend with whom I had taken that first aid course sent me a clipping of the article, which she had come across in her own files, that I noticed the date on it: It was published two years after my mother had died.

Continue reading