Let the Record Show

I have previously written about unreliable brains and their secretive plans to make us think that events happened differently than they in fact did.

I'm not sure why they do it, but there's documentation. It's happening all around you, people! The plot even extends inside your own head!

T. Scott is with me on this (though in a less alarmist fashion), with an interesting post about keeping a journal over the years, and sometimes finding, on re-reading entries, that the way he remembers something is not the way he initially wrote it down.

I too have kept a journal for many years, and one of these days if I go back over the collected volumes, I expect I'll be startled to find things I thought happened one way, that actually were somewhat different. If my contemporary description is to be believed, that is. There's always the chance that I lied about it when I first wrote it down, and remembered it accurately, but in general the opposite is probably more likely. I don't remember lying to my journal, anyway.

Mostly when I glance back over the pages I find that I seem to spend a lot of time talking about how tired and busy I am. I am apparently always simultaneously stressed out and on the verge of falling asleep. My faithful legions of blog followers are fortunate, since I occasionally try to think of something more interesting than that to say here, or at least to find interesting things that other people are saying.

This makes me wonder if memory will get better now that it's easier for people to record and document events in their lives. If we can go back and fact check our recollections, will we be inclined to preserve the memories more accurately?

Or will we just misremember the things that aren't recorded, since pretty much no one documents everything, and think we remember perfectly the things that are recorded, even if the memory has actually faded and what we're remembering is the documentation?

Knowing the wiliness of our slippery minds, I'm betting on the latter.
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