Hey Guys!

I actually did some research on memory at one point.

The information you seek in your memory is most likely accessible. You'd be surprised how much can be remembered through hypnosis, meditation and reflection. Memories can be very reliable however, are easily distorted. There's the paradox.

1. Memories are easily altered when you've heard the story or event many times.

Suppose that at family gatherings you keep hearing about the time that Uncle Sam scared everyone at a New Year's Party by pounding a hammer into the wall with such force that the wall collapsed. The story is so colorful that you can practically see Uncle Sam in your mind. The more you think about this even, the more likely you are to believe that you actually were there, even if you were sound asleep in another house. This process has been called imagination inflation because your own active imagination inflates your belief that the event really occurred.

2. The Image of the event contains lots of details.

Ordinarily, we can distinguish an imagined even from a real one by the amount of detail we recall; real events tend to produce more details. However,the longer you think about an imagined even, the more details you are likely to add- what Sam was wearing, the fact that he'd had too much to drink, the crumbling plaster, people standing around in party hats - and these details may in turn persuade you that the event really happened and that you have a direct memory of it.

3. You focus on your emotion reactions to the even rather than one what actually happened.

Emotional reactions to an imagined event can resemble those that would have occurred in response to a real even and so they can mislead us. This means that your feelings about an even, no matter how strong they are, do not guarantee that the even really happened. Consider our Sam story again for a moment. A woman Sam knows believed for years that she had been present in the room as an 11-year-old child when her uncle destroyed the wall. Because the story was so vivid and upsetting to her, she felt angry at him for what she thought was his mean and violent behavior and she assumed that she must have been angry at the time as well. Then, as an adult, she learned that she was not at the part at all but had merely heard about it repeatedly over the years; and that Sam had not pounded the wall in anger but as a joke - to inform the assembled guests that he and his wife were about to remodel their home. Nevertheless she he has not been able to be persuaded that her memory is wrong.

4. The Event is easy to Imagine

If forming an image of an event takes little effort as does visualizing a man pounding a wall with a hammer, then we tend to think our memory is real. In contrast, when we must make an effort to form an image, for example, of being in a place we have never see or doing something that is utterly foreign to us, our cognitive efforts apparently serve as a cue that the event did not really take place or that we were not there when it did.


But that's all I know about that. Hope that was helpful.