Julia Shaw: recommendation

Transcript context

…That’s terrifying. Is there any- anything you’ve learned about defending against that? I guess knowing that first step is just knowing that it’s possible, that’s already a very powerful piece of knowledge. That’s right. So the first thing that’s important is for people to understand that they are capable of creating these false memories and that they’re not this really unusual, hard-to-generate thing. They’re actually a normal memory process. And that insight is why I wrote The Memory Illusion because I think people need to just understand that their minds work like this, and that they’re really glitchy when it comes to the accuracy of their autobiographical memories. But again, that’s probably ultimately a good thing as well in terms of our overall human experience. But then what happens if you do have an important piece of information that’s important and not being distorted, right? You are a witness to a crime, for example, and you now know that this is going to be important. What do you do? And the really simple answer is don’t trust your brain. Just make sure you write it down. Assume you are going to forget everything. Assume you’re going to forget no matter how important, how emotional, how intense, how much you say to yourself, “I will remember.” You won’t. Just assume that you’re not going to remember. And the closer you get to the time at which an event happened — and we call this contemporaneous evidence — the closer you get in time, the more high-quality that memory is going to be. And I think there’s this myth sometimes that if you’re drunk or if you’re high or if you’re really emotional, that somehow you should wait. You should sort of go home, sleep it off, and then recall your memory. That is not what the current advice in memory research actually says. It’s in the moment as soon as possible, write it down, record it outside your brain. You can do it again when you wake up, but then at least you have an original version. Yeah. You used the analogy of a Wikipedia page for memory. I think that’s a pretty useful way to think about it. It’s kind of crowdsourced by all the different influences you have, all the different experiences, all the other people, you telling other people about the memory. All of that edits the page, the Wikipedia page of your memory.…

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