Today one of us at TGBR played a game that required memorizing strings of numbers. The game started off with just two digits, but went all the way up to 10 digits. Sometimes the number has to be memorized “backwards” which made it more challenging.
What was interesting was how even the slightest bit of familiarity aided the process. ‘206’ popped up as part of a longer string, and was easily memorized as a single entity because it’s the area code here in Seattle. Any time 7x7 occurred (737, 747, 727, etc) that, too, was held in the mind as a single digit. And strings of numbers that started with ‘19’ were easily coded as dates, So, when 2061984737 popped up, instead of it feeling like a 10 digit number, it felt like a three digit number.
Our brains, it seems, are desperate to attach meaning to things. We prefer character and reason to stark, abstract existence. This is how we, here at TGBR, choose to interpret new findings that show people with so-called “perfect” recall can be tricked into having false memories.
An article at Discover describes how scientists were able to achieve this, and for the sake of time, we won’t rehash the explanation here. Suffice it to say that no one’s memory is invulnerable to manipulation.
We’re insisting it all goes back to a terrible need to consider the question ”why?” why did that happen? What does it mean? How does that fit into the rest of the universe?
And if the universe is in our own heads, than our memories are their own worst enemies.
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