On Memories and Lies

You’re a liar. 

Sorry, I don’t mean to offend. Most people are unintentional liars. We can’t help it. It’s just how our brains work. We lie every time we talk about something we remember. 

“Nonsense,” I can hear you saying. “Maybe some people remember things wrong, but not me. My memory’s a steel trap!” 

That’s just what you’ve been taught your whole life. We’re all raised to think of memory as a recall system. It’s a concept that’s been ingrained into our heads, and even reinforced in popular culture. In Pixar’s Inside Out, an almost perfect movie, memories are represented as glass orbs, and they’re stored in a sprawling shelving system. When you remember something, that memory is retrieved and projected into your mind’s eye. Perhaps that’s how you conceptualize your memory. Or perhaps you think of it as a filing cabinet, with each memory as a sheet of paper in a file folder or manila envelope. Every time you remember something, your brain opens up the cabinet and selects the correct file to read. 

But that’s not how it works. Your memory is not a filing cabinet, or a library, or a steel trap. Your memory is an Etch-a-Sketch. 

Allow me to explain. 

In 2013, some neuroscientists at MIT studied memory in mice (Ramirez et al.). The exact procedure they used is a little complicated, but these are the basics. Mice were trained to like food but dislike brief electrical shocks (which I can only imagine was a nearly Sisyphean task). The scientists then forced the mice to either remember eating while being shocked or to remember being shocked while eating. The results showed that the mice’s memories changed based on what they were doing in real life. For the mice in the first group, the good memory of eating food was still there, but they acted nervous when forced to remember it. And for the second group of mice, the bad memory of being shocked was still there, but the mice could remember it without acting fearful. 

Here’s the takeaway: remembering a past experience didn’t just change the mouse’s behavior; it actually changed that memory. 

From this experiment, these neuroscientists concluded that when you remember something, you’re not retrieving an image from a library. Instead, it’s more like you’re drawing a new picture on an Etch-a-Sketch. In addition, the only reference you have when drawing this new picture is whatever picture you drew last time. It’s an eternal game of Telephone with yourself! (I mean, Etch-a-Sketches are hard to use already, but if your only reference was another Etch-a-Sketch drawing, it’d be even harder!) Finally, if something interrupts you while you’re remembering something, it’s going to affect what you remember—and as a result, it’s going to affect how you remember it every subsequent time. (Think of it this way: if a clown jumped out at you while you were drawing on an Etch-a-Sketch, it would significantly affect the picture you were trying to draw.) 

This is why people remember things differently. Every time you remember an event, you remember it just a little bit differently. Over time, everyone’s Etch-a-Sketch drawings get more and more different. Eventually, two people who were sitting next to each other watching an event might have completely different memories of what happened. So here’s the question.

Does that make them liars? 

If it does, then that undermines our entire justice system. After all, if fifteen people claim to remember seeing a certain individual rob a store, that case is closed. But if remembering incorrectly is lying, then we can’t trust those fifteen testimonies. And no one can “tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” It’s impossible—or at least it is if incorrect memories count as lies. 

However, Immanuel Kant would laugh at such a paltry application of this definition. “Undermine our justice system?” he would say. “It undermines our entire society!” Kant was a philosopher who believed that lying was always wrong—that it always violated the categorical imperative—and he argued that if it became socially acceptable, no one would ever trust each other (36). What kind of society could exist without trust? It would crumble and collapse. If remembering incorrectly is equitable to lying, then by Kant’s theory, civilization shouldn’t even exist! 

Either Kant is wrong and our justice system is built on lies, or our definition of lying is. Maybe it’s up to each individual to decide—an answer I suspect Kant would disagree with. Personally, I don’t think misremembering counts as lying, but I’ve been wrong before. 

In fact, let me tell you about a time I was wrong, a time I came head-to-head with this phenomenon. Let me take you back to sixth grade. See, there was this girl. (There’s always a girl, isn’t there?) Her name was Lindsey and I thought she was “hot stuff,” as my mom would say. My best friend and her best friend flirted with each other all the time, and over the course of a few months, we’d formed a friendship. She was cute, funny, and nice—or so I thought! 

One day, Lindsey’s best friend Sierra asked me who I had a crush on, an apparently innocuous question that shook the foundations of my emotional world. After all, I didn’t (and still don’t) know how to communicate with women. Sierra’s question was all the evidence I needed to think that Lindsey knew I liked her, so I had to act fast. Somehow, I came up with the brilliant idea to ask her out. But, since I was too freaked out to tell her in person, so I wrote her a note. That’s right! I told a girl I liked her in a note. 

I take it back: I do know how to communicate with women. 

Anyway, a friend of mine delivered the note, and I waited for Lindsey to reply. Instead of doing that, she posted the note on Facebook. I was humiliated. My self-confidence disintegrated and my embarrassment defined me for two years. I never spoke to Lindsey again, but the memory of that incident lingered in my mind for years. 

Fast forward almost a decade. I was in an English class, and I was asked to write about a “defining moment” I’d experienced. I decided to write about this little incident, a choice that my therapists have referred to as “totally healthy” and “not problematic or concerning at all.” I started sketching out the vague outline of the events, but I soon realized that over the course of nine years, my memories had faded along with the humiliation. So I wrote what I could remember, and then I did some research. 

I went to my middle school’s website to figure out what day it was, and I went to Facebook to see what Lindsey had really said about me in her post. What I found shook me to the core. My timeline was thrown off, and it turned out that Lindsey hadn’t been trying to humiliate me at all—it was Sierra who had spun it that way! Initially, Lindsey had posted, “Aw, my first love letter!” People had understandably replied asking who it was from, and Sierra had mocked me in the comments, calling me “an ugly nerd with no friends.” And as it turns out, Lindsey and other kids I knew had defended me! My research contradicted my memory, forcing me into cognitive dissonance. Literally everything I thought I knew about that event was wrong. 

Just like the mice, my environment had changed my memories—my memories of the day and my memories of Lindsey. Even though I got over it after a few years, my social anxiety and depression caused me to remember the experience more negatively and more inaccurately for nine years. My poor mental health ruined my memory of that day exactly like the brief electrical shocks ruined the mice’s memory of eating food. There were some significant benefits of this discovery. It meant that Lindsey wasn’t the terrible person I’d thought she was for years. It meant the cynical worldview I’d been constantly tempted with for a decade was founded on misperceptions, and that maybe the world was a kinder and better place than I’d thought. And it meant that perhaps I could choose how to remember things and that even the worst things in my life could be seen in a positive light. 

That being said, there were some terrible consequences as well—namely, my narrative made no sense anymore, and I still had an English essay due the next day. 

So, when faced with a choice between telling incontrovertible facts and telling imperfect memory, what does an autobiographical storyteller do? 

The answer is in the question: he tells a story. 

And now I had an even larger story to tell—not only the story of what had happened to me and how it had affected me, but the story of how I’d learned the truth and how it changed my perceptions—the story I’ve just told you. I’ll admit it: it’s an inherently imperfect and subjective narrative. But now I’m aware of how subjective it is, and I’m willing to acknowledge that imperfection. It might not be an accurate retelling of the events of December 7, 2010 at Plum Valley Middle School, but it’s an accurate retelling of how I perceived those events and their impact on me. And as far as I’m concerned, that means I’m not a liar. 

And so, now that I think about it, perhaps I was wrong when I started this essay. I guess you’re not really a liar. 

You’re just not very good at using an Etch-a-Sketch. 

Works Cited 

Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Edited and translated by Allen W. Wood, Yale University Press, 2018. 

Ramirez, Steve et al. “Creating a false memory in the hippocampus.” Science, vol. 26, no. 341, 26 Jul. 2016, pp. 387-391. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23491113.