A great deal on people seem to believe their memory to be perfect.  The trouble is human memory is part of human nature.  Processes taking place naturally can’t create anything perfect.  The human memory evolved to save useful knowledge and not to exactly depict the past.  In a world which constantly changes we have no benefit from the later.

Something important to know in this context is the concept of perception.  It consists of a screening mechanism preventing us from being constantly overwhelmed by information.  Different individuals have a little different perception.  It is also possible to train oneself into perceiving more or less of something in certain situations.  In contrast there are no individuals perceiving everything in their surroundings.  Those believing that of themselves are probably on the opposite rather unaware.  They don’t know there are things in their surroundings which they don’t notice.  Everything which could be interest others they believe themselves to always notice.  Since people have different interests this does not at all have to be so.

There is surprisingly little information our senses convey.  Our memory puts this together to a whole impression of something.  Have we too little to compare to we will make misjudgements.  Moreover we can only remember things we noticed at the time.  We then only remember some details and fill in the rest with things we expect to find there.  If our expectations are faulty we will misremember.  At worst it is subconsciously embellished to something which could not have happened.  Therapists who have got stuck in premature conclusions tend to cause this problem.

The belief that memory stores all sensory information can downright harmful one’s mental health.  Things are believed to have literarily not existed before one become aware of them oneself.  Which in turn can frighten people without there being any real threat.  I first become aware of this problem in connection with the 2012 scare.  A small number in fact seem to have believed the world would end on the December solstice of 2012.  They saw things in nature which they did not knew about before.  Then they got panic and believed them to indicate the end of the world.  Some of these were a matter of changing weather patterns.  These were reasons to worry although panic is counterproductive.  Otherwise the trouble was loads of others being already aware of these.  Oftentimes this also included me.  They had been there all the time without them noticing it.

Memories of things conveyed by others are neither any simple recordings.  Single outstanding details can naturally get stuck in our memory.  However we otherwise have to make an effort to acquire knowledge.  Oftentimes mind devices are required to connect different pieces of information.  If we don’t do this consciously the connections may very well get wrong.  My mum believed it was Vancouver which suffered a great fire a couple of years ago.  Actually it was the village of Lutton which partially burnt down in 2021.  I recognised the name of the place when it was featured in a TV program which had been filmed before that.  There are several places by this name but only one in British Colombia.

Single part of the stories of our lives has to be correlated with each other too.  Otherwise we risk mixing up events which happened different years.  Or believe something happened at a different age than it did.  One example is which birthday I celebrated in a certain red cottage.  (It is the one to the left in this photo.)  All the girls in my class were invited so this was after I changed school.  However it was before we moved to a different condominium.  As such it must have been when I turned 11.  Without such a context it can’t be remembered when it was.

Curiously we remember colours as brighter than they were.  This is called the Kodachrome effect after a colour saturating photographic film.  I am as such not sure if sunsets really was more colourful when I as little.  If it was so it was a short-lived effect of the eruption of Pinatubo in 1991.  I don’t remember any news reports on this volcanic eruption.  But I remember an adult mentioning it.

All this does not mean human memory is bad.  It is compared to certain animals which hid their food storages in a lot of different palaces.  On the other hand we are better at remembering what has just happened.  We are very good at remembering were to find a certain type of objects too.  I think this was a vital skill in the original human society.  Different eatable lifeforms can be found in different places.  Same applies to substances which can be used to make objects.

Awareness of own error is an advantage in this context.  I use things I have access to, to correct erroneous details.  This makes me aware there are details I don’t remember too.  Like the time I saw something in the sky which I did not know what it was.  Due to compulsive actions I then had I saw something moving unevenly over the sky one dark night.  The object was just a spot of light without any details.  For a while afterwards I thought it could have been a helicopter.  Far later I learned they move more evenly than it did.  Maybe I remember the movement of the object as faster than it was?  I this case it was likely a sky lantern.  For a while they were called ufoballonger (UFO-balloons) in Swedish since they generated UFO reports.  The latter I don’t either have much confidence in.

Uploaded on the 1st of Mars 2024.