Your memories are constantly being rewritten

Those of you who follow me, read my articles and have taken my courses, or my colleagues' courses, in presentation skills, sales and rhetoric already know how deep my passion for the brain runs. And a study once landed that quickly became one of my favourites, because it shows, more clearly than anything before it, how we humans are constantly rewriting our own memories. In practice, it works something like this.

When you set out to tell someone about a memory from earlier in your life, picture yourself taking a book down off a shelf in your own archive. Sadly, the book you pull out is a little blurry and faded here and there, so your brain quickly fills in the gaps, topping it up with whatever information it judges to be likely, just to make the memory feel whole again. And then, when you slide the book back onto the shelf, your memory has been changed forever. So every single time you take that particular memory out, it shifts a little more, until eventually it may be more or less entirely replaced.

The culprit is human nature itself

The villain of the piece is our own nature. Your brain rewrites and optimises your story so that you can be as good as possible, right here and now. Neurologically, the one doing the editing is your hippocampus, a part of your limbic system. It turns out to be your very own editing studio, the one that fetches your memories out of the archive, tops them up and rewrites them to suit you and your situation today.

How the study was run

The experiment came in three steps:

1. Participants were shown a background image with an object placed somewhere on it.
2. That first background was then removed and replaced with a different one. Now the participants had to remember where the object had been placed. They all got it wrong, again and again, though they were never told so.
3. Finally, to test whether the original memory had been overwritten by the faulty one, participants were shown three possible positions for the object. Number one: the original position. Number two: their own remembered position. Number three: a completely new position. They chose number two, their own reconstruction, every time. The original memory had been overwritten entirely.

There is a separate study you can read about in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink. Participants in a project spanning fifty years had written down things about their lives, their beliefs and their friends when they were young. When the very same questions were put to them fifty years later, remarkably few of the answers matched. Mildly shocked, they realised that few things are as unreliable as our own memories, and that however we look back on our childhood, we can never be sure the picture we hold is the true one. The only real solution, if you genuinely want to know who you were last year, five years ago, ten years ago, is to keep a diary or a journal.

What this means for you as a presenter

So if you have ever stood in front of a room and felt that you keep saying slightly different things even though you are presenting the same subject, here is your answer. For it to come out right, and right every time, you need to settle on a script and programme it in through stubborn repetition. Once you have rehearsed it enough times, you will say the same thing, in exactly the right way, whenever you present.

And the best conclusion of all

Here is the loveliest part. If you want to change a memory, in yourself or in someone else, take it out again and again and alter it just a little each time. Do this often enough and you will have replaced a perhaps horrible memory with a new, less horrible one. The method is a popular one in cognitive behavioural therapy. One variation is to take an existing memory and turn it into a cartoon, make it drawn, silly, absurd, a Donald Duck version of itself, then repeat the process over and over. This can, of course, be done with other people too, though exactly how feels rather immoral to teach on a web page.