Remembering wrong

Dr. Markman writes about the phenomena of remembering actions you saw someone else doing as actions you yourself did. I one study, participants were asked to preform various activities, such as shaking a bottle or tapping a pencil. Some of these actions they read about then preformed, some they just read about. Then they were shown videos of people preforming other actions, some that they had preformed, some that they had read about and some that had not been a part of the first half of the experiment at all. Two weeks later, the participants were shown lists of activities and asked which ones they themselves had preformed two week earlier. Their answers showed that they were more likely to have "remembered" preforming tasks they saw others preform than ones they hadn't seen. Markman cites the reason for this misremembering as "goal contagion," when you see someone preform a task, you take on the goals of the people you are watching. This is useful in group situations, because it enhances co-operation, but a side effect is this misremembering. Markman then makes the interesting point that this helps show that memory was not designed to be a high fidelity record of past events, but to help us know how to act in the future. I found this very interesting, because by looking at why memory exists from a new angle, it suddenly seems like a very different creature, and the gaps and misinformation that come with memory seem less unerving and more natural. The conventionally understood purpose of memory is that of a tool to create an accurate record of the past, which memory falls disappointingly short of doing. Memory's tendency to "fill in the gaps," to ommit information and to just plain "make things up" does not give it much solid value as an archival device. However, if viewed the way Markman suggests, as a tool to help you act in the future, memory seems a lot less flawed. Markman's final words are "It is only because our culture cares a lot about exactly who performed particular actions that this facet of memory is seen as an error rather than a benefit." Perhaps as a culture we are looking at memory all wrong, with things like "eyewitness testimonies" clearly bearing little relevance and "false memory implanting" being all too easy. If we were to rely on our memory is the way it was designed to be used, to help us but not give us verifiable recollections of the past, we would probably find the "shortcomings" of our memories a lot less disturbing.