Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…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. It does. And collective and individual memory are these really interesting… They interact in a really interesting way. So I would always say, when I train, for example, people who go to deal with warlords in the German military. I was working with agents who were going abroad and who were in these really difficult situations where they had to remember a lot of information that was important for national security. They couldn’t just sit there with a tape recorder being like, “Hey,” or their phone, being like, “Hey, Mister Warlord, can you just talk into this a bit closer?” You can’t do that. And so you have to remember it. And so what they were doing is they were coming back from their deployments, and they would meet up immediately and have a team meeting, “What did you remember? What happened?” And the problem is that they would do that before writing their notes, and that is the wrong way around. And so they don’t do that anymore because I’ve told them not to do that anymore. But it feels good. It feels like collectively, we are going to remember more details.…

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