Oh, Hello, you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 20,

The Reliability of Memory.

So in this episode, I'm going to discuss the, well, the reliability of human memory.

I'm going to focus my discussion around a number of different biases or inaccuracies or ways in which memory has been shown to be distorted or even falsified.

And these different effects can sort of be categorized in different ways.

So the type of things I'm going to talk about include spatial memory distortion, the impact of schemers

on memory, the misinformation effect, a very interesting one, source monitoring failure, false

memories, flashbulb memories, and I'll also talk a bit about eyewitness memory.

This discussion, I think, will show that memory is not as reliable as we like to think that it is, and so we should always be

careful when we're sure that we can remember something that we're sure happened. It may not

have been as we had thought. Okay, so let's get into it. First I'll start with discussing spatial

memory and distortion. There is a field of psychology called Gestaltz psychology, which kind of, it's a bit hard to define,

but it sort of focuses on how people perceive and interact with broader frameworks or environments of stimuli

rather than more traditional experimental psychology where you just have, you know, like you count

how many words from a list

they can't remember. Gestalt's psychologist will kind of focus on sort of a bigger picture,

more qualitative approach. And in terms of memory, the Gestalt psychologists produce some

interesting results where they showed that reproductions, when people were shown shapes and

then had to reproduce them later from memory, the shapes tended to shift towards more familiar typical forms.

So, for example, if it was initially sort of an amorphous blob sort of shape,

over time the person would draw it from memory becoming closer and closer to a circle

or closer and closer to a square, if it sort of looked like a square originally and so on.

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