December 22, 2025 • 33 mins
Happy Holidays- New episodes starting Jan. 5th
Why did lions look so strange in medieval European art? What does this have to do with Native American folklore, eyewitness memory of a car accident, or what a person remembers 3 years after witnessing the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center? And what does any of this have to do with flashbulb memories, misinformation, and the telephone game that you played as a child? Join Eagleman for part 1 of an astonishing journey into what we believe about our memories.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
When you look at medieval European art, why do the
people look fine but the lions look so strange? And
what does this have to do with Native American folklore
or I witness memory of a car accident, or what
a person remembers three years after watching the nine to
(00:25):
eleven attack on the World Trade Center, And what does
any of this have to do with flashbulb memories or
misinformation or the telephone game that you played as a child.
Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a
neuroscientist and an author at Stanford, and in these episodes
(00:47):
we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand
why and how our lives look the way they do.
Today's episode is part one of a two parter about
memory and why it rifts. So I want to start
with this fascinating observation that you can notice if you
(01:08):
look across visual painting in Europe all through the Middle Ages.
Painters got better and better through time at painting architecture
and the human form and mountain scapes, but they were
absolutely terrible at painting lions. If you look at lions
in these medieval paintings, you'll see that they generally look
(01:30):
quite different from their real life counterparts. They have exaggerated
features like overly large heads and bodies that are too long,
and tufted tails that aren't really like actual lion tails,
and they often look more like large, fierce dogs or
mythical creatures. I'll put some pictures on eagleman dot com
(01:53):
slash podcasts so you can see how strange these lions are.
But why is this? The answer is the medieval European
painters spent a lot of time with architecture and with
people and with mountainscapes, but almost none of them had
ever been to Africa and therefore seen a real lion,
(02:14):
or for that matter, had been to India and seen
an asiatic lion. So they had the extremely tough challenge
of painting something they had never actually seen. Now, to
be clear, it's not that they had never seen a lion,
it's that they had never seen a real lion. All
they had ever seen were versions of lions painted by
(02:36):
other medieval painters, who presumably had seen pictures of lions
painted by other medieval painters, and so on back to
someone who had at some point seen a real lion,
and so This notion of what a lion looks like
gives us a visual example of the operator game. This
(02:56):
is also known as the telephone game or Russian scandal
or pass the secret. So you remember doing this as
a kid. One person whispers, let's say a word or
a little phrase in your ear, and then you whisper
it to the next person, and they whisper it to
the next person, and so on, and by the time
it gets to the last person, she shouts it out
(03:16):
and you all get to see if it's the same
word or phrase that the first person said. And the
joy of the game, of course, is that the message
gets distorted in transmission, and by the time it ends
up somewhere it can be very different from how it began.
So today and next week we're going to dive into
a strange question, how your own memories are like the
(03:41):
Operator game. In other words, we tend to erroneously believe
that when something happens, we record that in the brain.
It's written down in the brain as a memory, the
way that a computer might hold a little file. And
then every time we retrieve that memory, every time we
pull that back up, we are viewing that little movie again.
(04:03):
So it comes as a surprise that real human memory
in the brain is nothing like a movie, but much
more like the Operator game, wherein the message becomes increasingly distorted.
For example, let's say I show you a picture of
something that you're not super familiar with, like an old
Polynesian war mass with a sort of strange shape in
(04:24):
some different lines and circles on it, and then I
ask you to draw it. Later, your drawing will probably
drift from what you actually saw, and the next time
after that, when I ask you to draw it again,
your memory will presumably be influenced by what you drew
the last time. And if I ask you to do
this over and over again, let's say once a month,
(04:47):
there will be something of a steady progression from drawing
one to drawing ten, because you are playing the operator
game with yourself. Each time you retrieve the memory, it
is influenced by what you thought it was last time.
So to dig into this, we're going to start today's
episode with a short story. This is a Native American
(05:10):
folk story called the War of the Ghosts, and it's
read here by actor Sean Judge.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
War of the Ghosts. One night, two young men from
Eguilak went down to the river to hunt seals, and
while they were there it became foggy and calm. Then
they heard war cries and they thought maybe this is
a war party. They escaped to the shore and hid
behind a log. Now canoes came up, and they heard
(05:39):
the noise of paddles and saw one canoe coming up
to them. There were five men in the canoe, and
they said, what do you think we wish to take
you along. We are going up the river to make
war on the people. One of the young men said,
I have no arrows. Arrows are in the canoe. They said,
I will not go along. I might be killed. My
(06:01):
relatives do not know where I have gone. But you,
he said, turning to the other, may go with them.
So one of the young men went, but the other
returned home, and the warriors went on up the river
to a town on the other side of Kalama. The
people came down to the water and they began to fight,
and many were killed. But presently the young man heard
(06:24):
one of the warriors say, quick, let us go home.
That Indian has been hit. Now he thought, oh, they
are ghosts. He did not feel sick, but they said
he had been shot. So the canoes went back to Aguilak,
and the young man went ashore to his house and
made a fire, and he told everybody and said, behold,
(06:46):
I accompanied the ghosts, and we went to fight. Many
of our fellows were killed, and many of those who
attacked us were killed. They said, I was hit, but
I did not feel sick. He told it all, and
then he became quiet. When the sun rose, he fell down.
Something black came out of his mouth, his face became contorted.
(07:09):
The people jumped up and cried he was dead.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
This probably seems to you like a bit of a
weird story. It seems like it's not particularly well told
or clear. So given the strangeness of the story, why
did it become quite famous in the psychology community almost
a century ago in nineteen thirty two. It's because of
a researcher named Frederick Bartlett, who was a psychologist at
(07:36):
Cambridge University. He chose this story, the War of the Ghosts,
to examine the way that our memories change with time. Now,
he chose this particular folk tale because he wanted something
that wasn't crystal clear, so that it might be slightly
more susceptible to changes in the retelling. That way, he
(07:57):
could examine the way in which it changed in the retelling,
and the retelling after that, and so on into the future.
In other words, he used this story to see if
he could really shine a light on the constructive character
of memory. In other words, the way that recalling a
memory is something like reconstructing what happened your brain rebuilding
(08:22):
its best guess at a memory, rather than the way
a computer simply retrieves a file of zeros and ones
without loss. So in Bartlett's study, he had participants read
the War of the Ghosts. Then they were instructed to
recall and write down the story as perfectly as they could.
Now it's only been about a minute since you heard
(08:43):
the story, Think about how you would retell it now,
what details you would remember from that story. Not surprisingly,
Bartlett found that the story drifted from the original upon
the retelling. Here, for example, is a person who is
asked to remember and reproduce the story, and he did
this multiple times. Here he is on his tenth reproduction.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
War of the Ghosts. Two Indians were out fishing for
seals in the Bay of Manpapan when along came five
other Indians in a war canoe. They were going fighting.
Come with us, said five of the two, and fight.
I cannot come, was the answer of the one, for
I have an old mother at home who has dependent
on me. The other also said he could not come
(09:28):
because he had no arms. That is no difficulty. The
others replied, for we have plenty in the canoe with us.
So he got into the canoe and went with them
in a fight. Soon afterwards, this Indian received a mortal wound.
Finding that his hour was come, he cried out that
he was about to die. Nonsense, said one of the others.
(09:49):
You will not die, But he did now.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Bartlett also had other participants read the story and then
reproduce it at intervals very far apart. In some cases
this is over years. So here's another participant. This is
subject p on his first reproduction.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
War of the Ghosts. Two youths were standing by a
river about to start seal catching when a boat appeared
with five men in it. They were all armed for war.
The youths were at first frightened, but they were asked
by the men to come and help them fight some
enemies on the other bank. One youth said that he
could not come, as his relations would be anxious about him.
(10:29):
The other said he would go and entered the boat.
In the evening, he returned to his hut and told
his friends that he had been in a battle. A
great many had been slain, and he had been wounded
by an arrow. He had not felt any pain, he said.
They told him that he must have been fighting a
battle of ghosts. Then he remembered that it had been queer,
(10:52):
and he was very excited. In the morning, however, he
became ill, and his friends gathered round. He fell down
and his face became very pale. Then he writhed and shrieked,
and his friends were filled with terror. At last he
became calm. Something hard and black came out of his mouth,
(11:15):
and he lay contorted and dead.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
And here he is again when he's asked to reproduce
the story. After thirty months.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
War of the ghosts, some warriors went to wage war
against the ghosts. They fought all day, and one of
their number was wounded. They returned home in the evening
bearing their sick comrade. As the day drew to a close,
he became rapidly worse, and the villagers came round him.
As sunset, he sighed something black came out of his mouth.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
He was dead.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
So what he generally found is that the story became
shorter with each reproduction. But here was the key. He
realized that this was more than just the telephone game,
where a signal just becomes noisier each time it's repeated. Instead,
with the War of the Ghosts, he found there was
a pattern to the way the story changed. First of all,
(12:28):
it typically became more coherent to the speaker, as Bartlett wrote,
quote no trace of an odd or supernatural element is left.
We have a perfectly straightforward story of a fight and
a death end quote. So Bartlett studied the character of
the changes, and he found that these happened by transforming
(12:52):
details into things that are more familiar and conventional to
the person doing the remembering. Sometimes the order of events
would change, and things would commonly get omitted, like the
ghosts getting sliced out of the story pretty early on,
or the wound becoming a matter of flesh not spirit.
(13:13):
All in all, he was interested in the way that people,
through time made the parts grow more coherent for themselves.
In other words, the distortions were driven by a person's schema. Now,
what does that mean. It means that people morphed the
story to make it consistent with what's going on in
their heads. In other words, the changes you make to
(13:35):
the story are navigated by your internal model, or what
psychologists call your schema, your mental framework for organizing knowledge
and guiding perception. This is your brain's unique way of
seeing the world. So the way the story was distorted
in terms of the plot and characters and events is
(13:56):
different in your brain versus someone else's brain. There's a
lot of differences between individual schema, which is to say,
if you read the story to someone who's really into boats,
they might remember something differently than someone who's really into
Native American history, or someone who's a physician and thinks
about what causes a person to die. And by the way,
(14:18):
it's not just individual differences, but also your culture plays
a massive role in shaping the way that you interpret
and remember information. So as you recall a story, you
unconsciously mold it to align with your cultural background and
your beliefs and your expectations. So this all has to
(14:39):
do with the differences in internal models. Bartlet's study the
way that people can't label something until it is recognizable,
So transformations moved in the direction of the conventions in
their head. So I think about Bartlett's study all the time,
for example, and how we consume news. Any news story
(15:01):
we read this month is remembered differently by you than
by someone else who reads it through a different political lens.
Watch anything on the news, and then talk to anyone
you know who sees the world a little differently, and
you'll find that it's not impossible that they remember different
parts of the story than you did, and or they
(15:22):
remembered them differently. Their distortions in the story are not accidental,
and nor are yours. They are ways of making things
internally consistent. Now, psychologists have a lot of ways of
talking about this, like confirmation bias, which means we tend
to seek out and remember information that is consistent with
(15:45):
our internal models, and there are other ways of talking
about this. I recently did an episode on conspiracy theories,
and one of the things I highlighted is the way
that we are attracted to theories that reduce our cognitive
load or our cog of dissonance. In other words, we
prefer a clear and easy story, and all this is
(16:06):
consistent with what Bartlett found in nineteen thirty two. We
don't remember the story as it is presented to us,
but rather as our filters allow us to store it
and recall it. And when I think about the driftiness
of memory, there are other angles that need to be surfaced.
And here's the main thing that we're going to talk
(16:27):
about today. Rather than memory being an accurate video recording
of a moment in your life, it is a fragile
brain state from a bygone time that has to be
resurrected for you to remember. So here's an example. You're
at a restaurant with a couple that you know who
(16:48):
are visiting town, and everything you experience triggers particular patterns
of activity in your brain. For example, there's a particular
pattern of activity sparked into life by the conversation between
you and your friends. Another pattern is activated by the
smell of the coffee. Another pattern is activated by the
(17:09):
taste of a madeleine cookie. The fact that the waiter
is limping with a cast on his leg is another
memorable detail, and that's represented by a different configuration of
neurons firing. All of these constellations become linked with one another,
in a vast network of neurons that the hippocampus replays
(17:31):
over and over until the associations between these scattered neurons,
these distant points of light, this all becomes fixed into place.
The neurons that are active at the same time will
establish stronger connections between them. Sells that fire together wire together.
The resulting network is the unique signature of that event,
(17:55):
and it represents your memory of the dinner with them. Now,
let's imagine that six months later, you taste one of
those Madeleine cookies just like the one you tasted at
the dinner with the couple. This very specific key can
unlock the whole web of associations. The original constellation lights
(18:18):
up like the lights of a city coming online, and
suddenly your back in that memory. But although we don't
always realize it, the memory is not as rich as
you might have expected. You know that your two friends
were there, and he must have been wearing a button
up shirt because he always wears a button up shirt,
(18:39):
and she was wearing a blue dress, or maybe it
was purple, might have been green. If you really probe
the memory, you'll realize that you can't remember the details
of any of the other diners at the restaurant, even
though the place was full. So your memory of their
dinner visit has started to fade. Why well, you have
(19:01):
a finite number of neurons and they are each required
to multitask. Every neuron in your head participates in different
constellations at different times. Your neurons operate in a dynamic
matrix of shifting relationships, and heavy demand is always placed
on them to wire with others. So your memory of
(19:23):
the dinner has become muddied as the neurons involved have
become co opted to participate in other memory constellations. The
enemy of memory isn't time, it's other memories. Each new
event needs to establish new relationships among a finite number
(19:44):
of neurons. Now, the surprise is that a faded memory
doesn't feel faded to you. You assume, or at least
you into it, that the full picture is there. And
the situation is even worse than this, because because it's
not just that the memory is fading, it's actually drifting.
(20:05):
So imagine that in the intervening year since the dinner,
your two friends have broken up. Thinking back on the dinner,
you might now misremember sensing red flags. Wasn't he more
quiet than usual that night? Weren't there moments of awkward
silence between the two? Well, it'll be difficult to know
(20:27):
for certain, because the knowledge that's in your network now,
now that they've broken up, that changes the memory that
corresponds to. Then you can't help but have your present
color your past, so an event may be perceived somewhat
differently by you at different moments in your life now.
(20:50):
Psychologists have been studying the malleability of memory for many decades,
and one of the pioneers in the field is Elizabeth
Loftis at the University of California, Irvine. She transformed the
field of memory research by showing how susceptible memories are.
So one of her experiments goes like this. She has
people watch films of car crashes and then she asks
(21:14):
them a series of questions to test what they remembered.
And what she found is that just the way she
asks the question influences the answer she gets back. So
if she asks how fast were the cars going when
they hit each other, she gets an estimate of the speed.
But if she asks how fast were the cars going
(21:35):
when they smashed into each other, witnesses give a different estimate.
Not surprisingly, they believe the cars were going faster when
she uses the word smashed. Now, if you heard my
episode on eyewitness testimony, you know that these sorts of
problems are seen all the time in the legal system.
For example, there's a related issue known as the misinformation
(21:59):
of effect. If you witness an event, but then later
you're told something about that event in terms of what
happened at the scene, or who is there or what
they look like, that will become part of your memory too,
and you may not be able to distinguish what you've
been told from what actually happened. So Loftus and her
team study this, for example, by showing people a picture
(22:21):
of a car at a stop sign, and then afterwards,
after the picture is removed, they give a text description
of the same picture, but in the text they say
it was a yield sign. And then they have people
draw the picture as they remember it, and people tend
to draw the original scene with a yield sign. So
(22:42):
even after an memory is encoded, new information coming in
like that it was a yield sign will change the retrieval.
You'll believe that the whole time you saw a yield
sign there instead of a stop sign. Now all the
(23:13):
sounds surprising at first. You think I can distinguish my
own memory from something someone else said, But it turns
out we can't. And we'll dive more into this in
a quite shocking way in next week's episode. But I
want to give you a deeper sense of this now,
about the changeability of memories. So here's another problem. It's
(23:34):
a relative of the misinformation effect that psychologists and legal
theorists have studied, and this is the issue of cowitness contamination.
The idea is that if you see a crime and
I'm standing there and I see it too, and then
we start talking with one another about it, we can't
help but influence each other's memories. If you remember that
(23:58):
she had curly hair, but I say I'm pretty sure
she had straight hair. Or if you think she was unathletic,
but I say, no, she was really athletic, each of
our statements become part of each other's memory, and we
more and more come to believe things that we didn't originally.
And we see these kinds of memory problems all the time.
(24:19):
In police lineups. For starters, it's really difficult to remember
the face of a perpetrator in a crime scene. So
police and researchers have tried every which way for people
to have an easier time reconstructing a face. You maybe
describe it to an artist, or you reassemble the face
(24:39):
from a selection of different possible eyes and nose shapes
and mouths, and in the last decades you can do
this with three D avatars on a computer. But whatever
tech is introduced, it doesn't matter. People's performance is terrible.
Why because memories are not like photographs. So one issue
that researchers started noticing and studying in the nineteen sixties
(25:03):
was police suggestibility. So imagine you're shown a lineup with
several people and you have to decide which person you
saw doing the crime. But imagine that the police already
have their man in mind. They already think that it's Steve.
Whether or not that's correct, they believe it's Steve, and
they want you to say it's Steve. There are all
(25:24):
kinds of ways that they can suggest that to you,
even if it's unconscious on their part. So for example,
positive feedback. If you say I think that's the guy,
they say, yeah, good job, that's what we think. Also,
it turns out that the positive feedback influences the confidence
of the eyewitness, and then when the trial starts months later,
(25:46):
the eyewitness says, I'm absolutely certain that it was Steve,
even though he doesn't remember that. He was not certain
at all, but because of the positive feedback, which can
even be quite subtle, his confidence goes way up. And
decades of psychology studies in the laboratory have verified the
power of this kind of suggestibility. The main thing that
(26:08):
everybody's worried about with lineups is false identification. In other words,
if the perpetrator is in the lineup and you miss him,
that's one kind of problem, But the deeper problem is
sending an innocent person to prison with the false certainty
that you remember his face. Now, a particularly interesting study
(26:29):
was done by my colleague Elizabeth Phelps and her collaborators
at New York University. On September eleventh, two thousand and one,
Phelps saw the World Trade Center towers collapse from inside
her offices, and she, like everyone else in downtown New
York and around the nation, was completely horrified and thrown
off balance by the events. But Elizabeth is a neuroscientist,
(26:53):
and she started thinking about this issue of flashbulb memories. Now,
this is an idea that's been around for a while
that maybe really important, shocking public events get flashed into
the brain in a different way than normal memory, like
a flashbulb on an old camera that lights up a
room and captures the moment. And the idea of flashbulb
(27:15):
memories is that maybe them more consistent. But this sort
of thing is very difficult to test because you can't
give people genuinely horrifying experiences in the laboratory, so you
have to wait for something to happen in real life.
And Elizabeth and her colleagues realized that this might be
such a moment to be able to put this to
(27:36):
the test, So she and another researcher, John Gabrielli, rapidly
developed a survey, and within a week a whole group
of researchers from her lab were in the city surveying
people on what they remembered. And the important part is
that they conducted this survey one week after September eleventh,
(27:57):
But then they called up all these people again a
year later and gave them the same survey, And then
they did the same thing three years after the attack.
And eventually they did a follow up study ten years later,
and this involved more than three thousand participants. Now, the
key was these events from nine to eleven were highly emotional,
(28:17):
and in those cases you lay down memory on essentially
a secondary memory track controlled by the amygdala. So it's
not just your normal hippocampus mediated memories. These were flashball memories.
And the question is do emotional memories like this, Are
they unforgettable or in other words, are they less likely
to find themselves drifting with time. Well, I'll tell you
(28:39):
the results, but let's start with asking the question of
how confident are people in the accuracy of their memory.
It turns out that if the memory is emotional, you
have a much higher confidence in its accuracy, but it
turns out that doesn't necessarily improve the accuracy itself. What
the study found is that the accuracy of personal recollections
(29:02):
of nine to eleven decreased over time. So what you
measure is the consistency of the details, like does the
person tell the same story that they did originally, And
what they found was that the consistency was only sixty
three percent after one year and fifty seven percent after
three years. People's memories about their emotions were particularly inaccurate,
(29:28):
with only about forty percent consistency after one year. Despite
all this, confidence in these memories remained high. So here's
the thing. Participants were better at remembering factual details about
the attack which were supported by external reminders, So, for example,
the number of planes that were involved, that accuracy remains high. Why. Well,
(29:52):
it turns out this is because there are many facts
that you learned from all the news around an event,
and all this external corroboration corrects your memory. But other
things that are just about your own personal recall these
drift around in time. In other words, the researchers found
that they could predict the accuracy of memories just based
(30:15):
on how much media attention and ensuing conversation there was
around an event. So if you're asking how many planes
crashed into the towers, you might get a lot of
confusion and even misterymembering in the heat of the moment,
But after a while that all gets straightened out because
it's a fact that everybody has seen, and conversations and
(30:36):
news stories can come to eventually agree. In contrast, if
you have some flashball memory about where you were standing
and how you were feeling and what you were thinking
that might drift into inconsistency. There's no one there to
give you a firm correction on that, and therefore it
(30:58):
can keep on drifting off in its own direction. And
as we can extrapolate from Bartlett's War of the Ghost's study,
the story moves in a direction consistent with who you
think you are. And this is going to lead us
into part two. In next week's episode, I'm going to
talk about what all this means for our identities, as
(31:18):
most of that data about our personal lives never gets
correction from the outside. So let's wrap up. I want
you to take a moment to think about the War
of the Ghost's story and see what you really remember.
Take a moment to think about what was in the
original story, and then rewind to the beginning of this
episode to see if your memory was actually consistent. What
(31:43):
the War of the Ghost's Study highlights is the constructive
nature of memory and the impact of our own internal
model on the way that we remember narratives. The key
is that we build our memory, and we are simply
not built out of the right of machinery to track
events like perfect records. Instead, we are built of cells
(32:06):
which have a totally different algorithmic scheme than our computers,
and as a result, the past can only leave a
record by modifying the details of neurons and their genetic expression,
which is a mind blowingly ingenious property of these particular cells.
But it ain't a hard drive or a video recorder
(32:28):
that records things accurately, and that's why memory always drifts.
As I mentioned, in the next episode, we're going to
zoom in on our personal identity because, after all, who
we are, who we consider ourselves to be, is fundamentally
grounded in our memory. Where we've been, what we've done,
(32:50):
who we were with what happened to us. And this
is fascinating in the light of what we're talking about today,
because we've seen that memories are not simply a replaying
of the past, or not often that accurate. So please
tune into part two, where we're gonna understand whether our
notion of the self is based on a mountain of
(33:11):
narrative that continually drifts from what actually happened. Go to
Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to
find further reading. Send me an email at podcasts at
eagleman dot com with questions or discussion and check out
Subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each
(33:33):
episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman,
and we have been drifting together in the Inner Cosmos.
When you look at medieval European art, why do the
people look fine but the lions look so strange? And
what does this have to do with Native American folklore
or I witness memory of a car accident, or what
a person remembers three years after watching the nine to
(00:25):
eleven attack on the World Trade Center, And what does
any of this have to do with flashbulb memories or
misinformation or the telephone game that you played as a child.
Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a
neuroscientist and an author at Stanford, and in these episodes
(00:47):
we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand
why and how our lives look the way they do.
Today's episode is part one of a two parter about
memory and why it rifts. So I want to start
with this fascinating observation that you can notice if you
(01:08):
look across visual painting in Europe all through the Middle Ages.
Painters got better and better through time at painting architecture
and the human form and mountain scapes, but they were
absolutely terrible at painting lions. If you look at lions
in these medieval paintings, you'll see that they generally look
(01:30):
quite different from their real life counterparts. They have exaggerated
features like overly large heads and bodies that are too long,
and tufted tails that aren't really like actual lion tails,
and they often look more like large, fierce dogs or
mythical creatures. I'll put some pictures on eagleman dot com
(01:53):
slash podcasts so you can see how strange these lions are.
But why is this? The answer is the medieval European
painters spent a lot of time with architecture and with
people and with mountainscapes, but almost none of them had
ever been to Africa and therefore seen a real lion,
(02:14):
or for that matter, had been to India and seen
an asiatic lion. So they had the extremely tough challenge
of painting something they had never actually seen. Now, to
be clear, it's not that they had never seen a lion,
it's that they had never seen a real lion. All
they had ever seen were versions of lions painted by
(02:36):
other medieval painters, who presumably had seen pictures of lions
painted by other medieval painters, and so on back to
someone who had at some point seen a real lion,
and so This notion of what a lion looks like
gives us a visual example of the operator game. This
(02:56):
is also known as the telephone game or Russian scandal
or pass the secret. So you remember doing this as
a kid. One person whispers, let's say a word or
a little phrase in your ear, and then you whisper
it to the next person, and they whisper it to
the next person, and so on, and by the time
it gets to the last person, she shouts it out
(03:16):
and you all get to see if it's the same
word or phrase that the first person said. And the
joy of the game, of course, is that the message
gets distorted in transmission, and by the time it ends
up somewhere it can be very different from how it began.
So today and next week we're going to dive into
a strange question, how your own memories are like the
(03:41):
Operator game. In other words, we tend to erroneously believe
that when something happens, we record that in the brain.
It's written down in the brain as a memory, the
way that a computer might hold a little file. And
then every time we retrieve that memory, every time we
pull that back up, we are viewing that little movie again.
(04:03):
So it comes as a surprise that real human memory
in the brain is nothing like a movie, but much
more like the Operator game, wherein the message becomes increasingly distorted.
For example, let's say I show you a picture of
something that you're not super familiar with, like an old
Polynesian war mass with a sort of strange shape in
(04:24):
some different lines and circles on it, and then I
ask you to draw it. Later, your drawing will probably
drift from what you actually saw, and the next time
after that, when I ask you to draw it again,
your memory will presumably be influenced by what you drew
the last time. And if I ask you to do
this over and over again, let's say once a month,
(04:47):
there will be something of a steady progression from drawing
one to drawing ten, because you are playing the operator
game with yourself. Each time you retrieve the memory, it
is influenced by what you thought it was last time.
So to dig into this, we're going to start today's
episode with a short story. This is a Native American
(05:10):
folk story called the War of the Ghosts, and it's
read here by actor Sean Judge.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
War of the Ghosts. One night, two young men from
Eguilak went down to the river to hunt seals, and
while they were there it became foggy and calm. Then
they heard war cries and they thought maybe this is
a war party. They escaped to the shore and hid
behind a log. Now canoes came up, and they heard
(05:39):
the noise of paddles and saw one canoe coming up
to them. There were five men in the canoe, and
they said, what do you think we wish to take
you along. We are going up the river to make
war on the people. One of the young men said,
I have no arrows. Arrows are in the canoe. They said,
I will not go along. I might be killed. My
(06:01):
relatives do not know where I have gone. But you,
he said, turning to the other, may go with them.
So one of the young men went, but the other
returned home, and the warriors went on up the river
to a town on the other side of Kalama. The
people came down to the water and they began to fight,
and many were killed. But presently the young man heard
(06:24):
one of the warriors say, quick, let us go home.
That Indian has been hit. Now he thought, oh, they
are ghosts. He did not feel sick, but they said
he had been shot. So the canoes went back to Aguilak,
and the young man went ashore to his house and
made a fire, and he told everybody and said, behold,
(06:46):
I accompanied the ghosts, and we went to fight. Many
of our fellows were killed, and many of those who
attacked us were killed. They said, I was hit, but
I did not feel sick. He told it all, and
then he became quiet. When the sun rose, he fell down.
Something black came out of his mouth, his face became contorted.
(07:09):
The people jumped up and cried he was dead.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
This probably seems to you like a bit of a
weird story. It seems like it's not particularly well told
or clear. So given the strangeness of the story, why
did it become quite famous in the psychology community almost
a century ago in nineteen thirty two. It's because of
a researcher named Frederick Bartlett, who was a psychologist at
(07:36):
Cambridge University. He chose this story, the War of the Ghosts,
to examine the way that our memories change with time. Now,
he chose this particular folk tale because he wanted something
that wasn't crystal clear, so that it might be slightly
more susceptible to changes in the retelling. That way, he
(07:57):
could examine the way in which it changed in the retelling,
and the retelling after that, and so on into the future.
In other words, he used this story to see if
he could really shine a light on the constructive character
of memory. In other words, the way that recalling a
memory is something like reconstructing what happened your brain rebuilding
(08:22):
its best guess at a memory, rather than the way
a computer simply retrieves a file of zeros and ones
without loss. So in Bartlett's study, he had participants read
the War of the Ghosts. Then they were instructed to
recall and write down the story as perfectly as they could.
Now it's only been about a minute since you heard
(08:43):
the story, Think about how you would retell it now,
what details you would remember from that story. Not surprisingly,
Bartlett found that the story drifted from the original upon
the retelling. Here, for example, is a person who is
asked to remember and reproduce the story, and he did
this multiple times. Here he is on his tenth reproduction.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
War of the Ghosts. Two Indians were out fishing for
seals in the Bay of Manpapan when along came five
other Indians in a war canoe. They were going fighting.
Come with us, said five of the two, and fight.
I cannot come, was the answer of the one, for
I have an old mother at home who has dependent
on me. The other also said he could not come
(09:28):
because he had no arms. That is no difficulty. The
others replied, for we have plenty in the canoe with us.
So he got into the canoe and went with them
in a fight. Soon afterwards, this Indian received a mortal wound.
Finding that his hour was come, he cried out that
he was about to die. Nonsense, said one of the others.
(09:49):
You will not die, But he did now.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Bartlett also had other participants read the story and then
reproduce it at intervals very far apart. In some cases
this is over years. So here's another participant. This is
subject p on his first reproduction.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
War of the Ghosts. Two youths were standing by a
river about to start seal catching when a boat appeared
with five men in it. They were all armed for war.
The youths were at first frightened, but they were asked
by the men to come and help them fight some
enemies on the other bank. One youth said that he
could not come, as his relations would be anxious about him.
(10:29):
The other said he would go and entered the boat.
In the evening, he returned to his hut and told
his friends that he had been in a battle. A
great many had been slain, and he had been wounded
by an arrow. He had not felt any pain, he said.
They told him that he must have been fighting a
battle of ghosts. Then he remembered that it had been queer,
(10:52):
and he was very excited. In the morning, however, he
became ill, and his friends gathered round. He fell down
and his face became very pale. Then he writhed and shrieked,
and his friends were filled with terror. At last he
became calm. Something hard and black came out of his mouth,
(11:15):
and he lay contorted and dead.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
And here he is again when he's asked to reproduce
the story. After thirty months.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
War of the ghosts, some warriors went to wage war
against the ghosts. They fought all day, and one of
their number was wounded. They returned home in the evening
bearing their sick comrade. As the day drew to a close,
he became rapidly worse, and the villagers came round him.
As sunset, he sighed something black came out of his mouth.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
He was dead.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
So what he generally found is that the story became
shorter with each reproduction. But here was the key. He
realized that this was more than just the telephone game,
where a signal just becomes noisier each time it's repeated. Instead,
with the War of the Ghosts, he found there was
a pattern to the way the story changed. First of all,
(12:28):
it typically became more coherent to the speaker, as Bartlett wrote,
quote no trace of an odd or supernatural element is left.
We have a perfectly straightforward story of a fight and
a death end quote. So Bartlett studied the character of
the changes, and he found that these happened by transforming
(12:52):
details into things that are more familiar and conventional to
the person doing the remembering. Sometimes the order of events
would change, and things would commonly get omitted, like the
ghosts getting sliced out of the story pretty early on,
or the wound becoming a matter of flesh not spirit.
(13:13):
All in all, he was interested in the way that people,
through time made the parts grow more coherent for themselves.
In other words, the distortions were driven by a person's schema. Now,
what does that mean. It means that people morphed the
story to make it consistent with what's going on in
their heads. In other words, the changes you make to
(13:35):
the story are navigated by your internal model, or what
psychologists call your schema, your mental framework for organizing knowledge
and guiding perception. This is your brain's unique way of
seeing the world. So the way the story was distorted
in terms of the plot and characters and events is
(13:56):
different in your brain versus someone else's brain. There's a
lot of differences between individual schema, which is to say,
if you read the story to someone who's really into boats,
they might remember something differently than someone who's really into
Native American history, or someone who's a physician and thinks
about what causes a person to die. And by the way,
(14:18):
it's not just individual differences, but also your culture plays
a massive role in shaping the way that you interpret
and remember information. So as you recall a story, you
unconsciously mold it to align with your cultural background and
your beliefs and your expectations. So this all has to
(14:39):
do with the differences in internal models. Bartlet's study the
way that people can't label something until it is recognizable,
So transformations moved in the direction of the conventions in
their head. So I think about Bartlett's study all the time,
for example, and how we consume news. Any news story
(15:01):
we read this month is remembered differently by you than
by someone else who reads it through a different political lens.
Watch anything on the news, and then talk to anyone
you know who sees the world a little differently, and
you'll find that it's not impossible that they remember different
parts of the story than you did, and or they
(15:22):
remembered them differently. Their distortions in the story are not accidental,
and nor are yours. They are ways of making things
internally consistent. Now, psychologists have a lot of ways of
talking about this, like confirmation bias, which means we tend
to seek out and remember information that is consistent with
(15:45):
our internal models, and there are other ways of talking
about this. I recently did an episode on conspiracy theories,
and one of the things I highlighted is the way
that we are attracted to theories that reduce our cognitive
load or our cog of dissonance. In other words, we
prefer a clear and easy story, and all this is
(16:06):
consistent with what Bartlett found in nineteen thirty two. We
don't remember the story as it is presented to us,
but rather as our filters allow us to store it
and recall it. And when I think about the driftiness
of memory, there are other angles that need to be surfaced.
And here's the main thing that we're going to talk
(16:27):
about today. Rather than memory being an accurate video recording
of a moment in your life, it is a fragile
brain state from a bygone time that has to be
resurrected for you to remember. So here's an example. You're
at a restaurant with a couple that you know who
(16:48):
are visiting town, and everything you experience triggers particular patterns
of activity in your brain. For example, there's a particular
pattern of activity sparked into life by the conversation between
you and your friends. Another pattern is activated by the
smell of the coffee. Another pattern is activated by the
(17:09):
taste of a madeleine cookie. The fact that the waiter
is limping with a cast on his leg is another
memorable detail, and that's represented by a different configuration of
neurons firing. All of these constellations become linked with one another,
in a vast network of neurons that the hippocampus replays
(17:31):
over and over until the associations between these scattered neurons,
these distant points of light, this all becomes fixed into place.
The neurons that are active at the same time will
establish stronger connections between them. Sells that fire together wire together.
The resulting network is the unique signature of that event,
(17:55):
and it represents your memory of the dinner with them. Now,
let's imagine that six months later, you taste one of
those Madeleine cookies just like the one you tasted at
the dinner with the couple. This very specific key can
unlock the whole web of associations. The original constellation lights
(18:18):
up like the lights of a city coming online, and
suddenly your back in that memory. But although we don't
always realize it, the memory is not as rich as
you might have expected. You know that your two friends
were there, and he must have been wearing a button
up shirt because he always wears a button up shirt,
(18:39):
and she was wearing a blue dress, or maybe it
was purple, might have been green. If you really probe
the memory, you'll realize that you can't remember the details
of any of the other diners at the restaurant, even
though the place was full. So your memory of their
dinner visit has started to fade. Why well, you have
(19:01):
a finite number of neurons and they are each required
to multitask. Every neuron in your head participates in different
constellations at different times. Your neurons operate in a dynamic
matrix of shifting relationships, and heavy demand is always placed
on them to wire with others. So your memory of
(19:23):
the dinner has become muddied as the neurons involved have
become co opted to participate in other memory constellations. The
enemy of memory isn't time, it's other memories. Each new
event needs to establish new relationships among a finite number
(19:44):
of neurons. Now, the surprise is that a faded memory
doesn't feel faded to you. You assume, or at least
you into it, that the full picture is there. And
the situation is even worse than this, because because it's
not just that the memory is fading, it's actually drifting.
(20:05):
So imagine that in the intervening year since the dinner,
your two friends have broken up. Thinking back on the dinner,
you might now misremember sensing red flags. Wasn't he more
quiet than usual that night? Weren't there moments of awkward
silence between the two? Well, it'll be difficult to know
(20:27):
for certain, because the knowledge that's in your network now,
now that they've broken up, that changes the memory that
corresponds to. Then you can't help but have your present
color your past, so an event may be perceived somewhat
differently by you at different moments in your life now.
(20:50):
Psychologists have been studying the malleability of memory for many decades,
and one of the pioneers in the field is Elizabeth
Loftis at the University of California, Irvine. She transformed the
field of memory research by showing how susceptible memories are.
So one of her experiments goes like this. She has
people watch films of car crashes and then she asks
(21:14):
them a series of questions to test what they remembered.
And what she found is that just the way she
asks the question influences the answer she gets back. So
if she asks how fast were the cars going when
they hit each other, she gets an estimate of the speed.
But if she asks how fast were the cars going
(21:35):
when they smashed into each other, witnesses give a different estimate.
Not surprisingly, they believe the cars were going faster when
she uses the word smashed. Now, if you heard my
episode on eyewitness testimony, you know that these sorts of
problems are seen all the time in the legal system.
For example, there's a related issue known as the misinformation
(21:59):
of effect. If you witness an event, but then later
you're told something about that event in terms of what
happened at the scene, or who is there or what
they look like, that will become part of your memory too,
and you may not be able to distinguish what you've
been told from what actually happened. So Loftus and her
team study this, for example, by showing people a picture
(22:21):
of a car at a stop sign, and then afterwards,
after the picture is removed, they give a text description
of the same picture, but in the text they say
it was a yield sign. And then they have people
draw the picture as they remember it, and people tend
to draw the original scene with a yield sign. So
(22:42):
even after an memory is encoded, new information coming in
like that it was a yield sign will change the retrieval.
You'll believe that the whole time you saw a yield
sign there instead of a stop sign. Now all the
(23:13):
sounds surprising at first. You think I can distinguish my
own memory from something someone else said, But it turns
out we can't. And we'll dive more into this in
a quite shocking way in next week's episode. But I
want to give you a deeper sense of this now,
about the changeability of memories. So here's another problem. It's
(23:34):
a relative of the misinformation effect that psychologists and legal
theorists have studied, and this is the issue of cowitness contamination.
The idea is that if you see a crime and
I'm standing there and I see it too, and then
we start talking with one another about it, we can't
help but influence each other's memories. If you remember that
(23:58):
she had curly hair, but I say I'm pretty sure
she had straight hair. Or if you think she was unathletic,
but I say, no, she was really athletic, each of
our statements become part of each other's memory, and we
more and more come to believe things that we didn't originally.
And we see these kinds of memory problems all the time.
(24:19):
In police lineups. For starters, it's really difficult to remember
the face of a perpetrator in a crime scene. So
police and researchers have tried every which way for people
to have an easier time reconstructing a face. You maybe
describe it to an artist, or you reassemble the face
(24:39):
from a selection of different possible eyes and nose shapes
and mouths, and in the last decades you can do
this with three D avatars on a computer. But whatever
tech is introduced, it doesn't matter. People's performance is terrible.
Why because memories are not like photographs. So one issue
that researchers started noticing and studying in the nineteen sixties
(25:03):
was police suggestibility. So imagine you're shown a lineup with
several people and you have to decide which person you
saw doing the crime. But imagine that the police already
have their man in mind. They already think that it's Steve.
Whether or not that's correct, they believe it's Steve, and
they want you to say it's Steve. There are all
(25:24):
kinds of ways that they can suggest that to you,
even if it's unconscious on their part. So for example,
positive feedback. If you say I think that's the guy,
they say, yeah, good job, that's what we think. Also,
it turns out that the positive feedback influences the confidence
of the eyewitness, and then when the trial starts months later,
(25:46):
the eyewitness says, I'm absolutely certain that it was Steve,
even though he doesn't remember that. He was not certain
at all, but because of the positive feedback, which can
even be quite subtle, his confidence goes way up. And
decades of psychology studies in the laboratory have verified the
power of this kind of suggestibility. The main thing that
(26:08):
everybody's worried about with lineups is false identification. In other words,
if the perpetrator is in the lineup and you miss him,
that's one kind of problem, But the deeper problem is
sending an innocent person to prison with the false certainty
that you remember his face. Now, a particularly interesting study
(26:29):
was done by my colleague Elizabeth Phelps and her collaborators
at New York University. On September eleventh, two thousand and one,
Phelps saw the World Trade Center towers collapse from inside
her offices, and she, like everyone else in downtown New
York and around the nation, was completely horrified and thrown
off balance by the events. But Elizabeth is a neuroscientist,
(26:53):
and she started thinking about this issue of flashbulb memories. Now,
this is an idea that's been around for a while
that maybe really important, shocking public events get flashed into
the brain in a different way than normal memory, like
a flashbulb on an old camera that lights up a
room and captures the moment. And the idea of flashbulb
(27:15):
memories is that maybe them more consistent. But this sort
of thing is very difficult to test because you can't
give people genuinely horrifying experiences in the laboratory, so you
have to wait for something to happen in real life.
And Elizabeth and her colleagues realized that this might be
such a moment to be able to put this to
(27:36):
the test, So she and another researcher, John Gabrielli, rapidly
developed a survey, and within a week a whole group
of researchers from her lab were in the city surveying
people on what they remembered. And the important part is
that they conducted this survey one week after September eleventh,
(27:57):
But then they called up all these people again a
year later and gave them the same survey, And then
they did the same thing three years after the attack.
And eventually they did a follow up study ten years later,
and this involved more than three thousand participants. Now, the
key was these events from nine to eleven were highly emotional,
(28:17):
and in those cases you lay down memory on essentially
a secondary memory track controlled by the amygdala. So it's
not just your normal hippocampus mediated memories. These were flashball memories.
And the question is do emotional memories like this, Are
they unforgettable or in other words, are they less likely
to find themselves drifting with time. Well, I'll tell you
(28:39):
the results, but let's start with asking the question of
how confident are people in the accuracy of their memory.
It turns out that if the memory is emotional, you
have a much higher confidence in its accuracy, but it
turns out that doesn't necessarily improve the accuracy itself. What
the study found is that the accuracy of personal recollections
(29:02):
of nine to eleven decreased over time. So what you
measure is the consistency of the details, like does the
person tell the same story that they did originally, And
what they found was that the consistency was only sixty
three percent after one year and fifty seven percent after
three years. People's memories about their emotions were particularly inaccurate,
(29:28):
with only about forty percent consistency after one year. Despite
all this, confidence in these memories remained high. So here's
the thing. Participants were better at remembering factual details about
the attack which were supported by external reminders, So, for example,
the number of planes that were involved, that accuracy remains high. Why. Well,
(29:52):
it turns out this is because there are many facts
that you learned from all the news around an event,
and all this external corroboration corrects your memory. But other
things that are just about your own personal recall these
drift around in time. In other words, the researchers found
that they could predict the accuracy of memories just based
(30:15):
on how much media attention and ensuing conversation there was
around an event. So if you're asking how many planes
crashed into the towers, you might get a lot of
confusion and even misterymembering in the heat of the moment,
But after a while that all gets straightened out because
it's a fact that everybody has seen, and conversations and
(30:36):
news stories can come to eventually agree. In contrast, if
you have some flashball memory about where you were standing
and how you were feeling and what you were thinking
that might drift into inconsistency. There's no one there to
give you a firm correction on that, and therefore it
(30:58):
can keep on drifting off in its own direction. And
as we can extrapolate from Bartlett's War of the Ghost's study,
the story moves in a direction consistent with who you
think you are. And this is going to lead us
into part two. In next week's episode, I'm going to
talk about what all this means for our identities, as
(31:18):
most of that data about our personal lives never gets
correction from the outside. So let's wrap up. I want
you to take a moment to think about the War
of the Ghost's story and see what you really remember.
Take a moment to think about what was in the
original story, and then rewind to the beginning of this
episode to see if your memory was actually consistent. What
(31:43):
the War of the Ghost's Study highlights is the constructive
nature of memory and the impact of our own internal
model on the way that we remember narratives. The key
is that we build our memory, and we are simply
not built out of the right of machinery to track
events like perfect records. Instead, we are built of cells
(32:06):
which have a totally different algorithmic scheme than our computers,
and as a result, the past can only leave a
record by modifying the details of neurons and their genetic expression,
which is a mind blowingly ingenious property of these particular cells.
But it ain't a hard drive or a video recorder
(32:28):
that records things accurately, and that's why memory always drifts.
As I mentioned, in the next episode, we're going to
zoom in on our personal identity because, after all, who
we are, who we consider ourselves to be, is fundamentally
grounded in our memory. Where we've been, what we've done,
(32:50):
who we were with what happened to us. And this
is fascinating in the light of what we're talking about today,
because we've seen that memories are not simply a replaying
of the past, or not often that accurate. So please
tune into part two, where we're gonna understand whether our
notion of the self is based on a mountain of
(33:11):
narrative that continually drifts from what actually happened. Go to
Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to
find further reading. Send me an email at podcasts at
eagleman dot com with questions or discussion and check out
Subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each
(33:33):
episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman,
and we have been drifting together in the Inner Cosmos.
Host
David Eagleman
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