Chinese Whispers

P-s-s-s-t...how's it going, eh? Whisper in my ear. Then help yourself to some coffee and a virtual treat before someone else grabs the exact one you have your eye one. I hate that, don't you? Hey...remember the Chinese Whispers game where people take turns whispering a message into the ear of the next person in line? By the time the last person speaks it out loud, the message has radically changed. It's been altered with each retelling. You may know it as the Telephone Game or other name.

Turns out your memory is a lot like that game, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study.

Every time you remember an event from the past, your brain networks change in ways that can alter the later recall of the event. Thus, the next time you remember it, you might recall not the original event but what you remembered the previous time. The Northwestern study is the first to show this.

"A memory is not simply an image produced by time traveling back to the original event. Your memory of an event can grow less precise even to the point of being totally false with each retrieval."

The findings have implications for witnesses giving testimony in criminal trials, Bridge noted. "Maybe a witness remembers something fairly accurately the first time because his memories aren't that distorted," she said. "After that it keeps going downhill."

The published study reports on Bridge's work with 12 participants, but she has run several variations of the study with a total of 70 people. "Every single person has shown this effect," she said. "It's really huge."

"When someone tells me they are sure they remember exactly the way something happened, I just laugh," Bridge said.

The reason for the distortion, Bridge said, is the fact that human memories are always adapting.

"Memories aren't static," she noted. "If you remember something in the context of a new environment and time, or if you are even in a different mood, your memories might integrate the new information."

"This study shows how memories normally change over time, sometimes becoming distorted," Paller noted. "When you think back to an event that happened to you long ago -- say your first day at school -- you actually may be recalling information you retrieved about that event at some later time, not the original event."

I remember it as though it was yesterday...or the day before...

See ya, eh!

Bob