Being an "aging brain" myself I can totally relate to this. I've been a relatively obsessive photographer (i.e. visual diary) since digital cameras were practical, i.e. over 25 years now. 238K photos in the collection so far, and I can actually find things in it.
And I've more than once found that an anecdote I've been telling has been incorrect, precisely in a "melded memories" kind of way. It happened at this sort of gathering which were usually held for that reason so X was involved... and then finally look at the old pictures and there's no sign of X. It is literally the brain invoking "lossy compression" to make it all fit, just like certain web services that let you upload pictures without limit might reduce old ones, that hardly anyone ever looks at any more, to lower quality to limit storage bloat.
Of course any married man can confirm that this only applies to men. Women's memories are flawless. If they claim that they remember a conversation exactly, word for word, 20 years later, who's to prove them wrong?
Can confirm. This "aging brain" regularly and vividly inserts my child into memories created before they existed.
I think that's because memories really are highly compressed, with the average complex memory (of a grand day out, for example) being compressed into at most a paragraph of text's worth of information. Everything else is made up of context.
For example, having no photographic memory, I can remember the general "feel" of the innards of an antique shortwave receiver I used to have as a kid. But almost all of that is context. I know what canned octal base vacuum tubes and big tuning capacitors look like, what sort of components were in the big band selector "sled" (for geeks: This was an NC2-40D) and so on. So I can "zoom in" on the coarse memory by just filling in details that are generic, not specific. And these details may be from different sources than the original memory too.
And so the brain needs to remember - if one is not faceblind, which in fact I am - just the overall geometry of someone's face, and all the other stuff can be filled in as needed (how they look when they smile or are anxious etc.) Compression, compression. We have a lot to learn from nature. Note that a faceblind person does this too, of course - just not with a geometrically exact visualization of that person's face, just one with the correct "feel".
And that's also why synthetic memories can be formed so easily. You really don't have to insert much. The brain infers the rest as needed.
Given the number of neurons, hash collisions are inevitable? /s
Our model of the world, and this includes "memories" is very highly compressed, and extremely lossy. We reconstruct everything from what neurons activate when we recall something, so it can also be like a corrupted zip, where we don't access everything required in the moment. This can be affected by sleep, stress, hormones, etc.
What is quite interesting is when we try and recall something and can't, but the subconscious processing continues and you recall it later.
This of course applies to my (sarcastic) description of women's memory too. A given conversation is compressed to a small amount of memory, a significant part of which is the "feel" of the conversation rather than the actual words. So of course the memory is not word-for-word exact. But, let's just say, a subset of persons, a majority of which may or may not be female, does not acknowledge this and insists that the (reconstructed) sequence of words is exactly what was said 20 years ago.
I went under for 2 different surgeries. One of them I had post surgery complications. Years later, we needed to know the year I had the complications. I remembered the surgery, simply look it up and ta-da I got the date.
Except, my wife thought it was the other surgery. And insisted. I was incredulous and angry. I literally nearly died during the complications. I think I would remember the surgery it was from. And it definitely wasn’t from my vasectomy. I decided to make a stand.
I found the oxygen sensor we purchased for the event. Found to manufacture date. It was after her event. So it was physically impossible have the o2 sensor before her event. Wasn’t good enough. Maybe the date was wrong.
I finally went to the hospital and got the records. I was right. My wife simply could not or would not acknowledge it.
I spent the majority of my marriage being “the forgetful one”. And here was a single case where I was right and she had memory issues. And she could not simply say “oops, I got it wrong”. I began to doubt her memory and thought maybe I was being gaslit sometimes.
It was a very influential event in the course of our marriage. I lost a lot of respect for her and began to wonder what our future would be like.
We were divorced within a year.
Not only this, but other things too. But this was a big part of it.
At the risk of sounding rude, ignorant, and insensitive... did you all get married young? That all sounds a bit narcissistic.
Life is too short to be miserable, and we don't celebrate divorce enough. I'm happy for you both, and hope you are too. It's just as much of a milestone as any other big life event.
I've never been married, but I have noticed some couples get sort of locked into the level of emotional maturity they were at when they got married. I've always assumed it was a lack of new experiences stunting personal growth.
Obviously, similar could be said about me since I've never been married. That too is a lack of experience. Though it is worth pointing out that it's stories like this and my own past relationships that have scared me away. Being emotionally stable and reasonably humble is underrated.
But did you see the gorilla?
EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness#Invisi...
as you say, everyone does this. you just have the evidence and the humility to admit it.
Perhaps the rate of occurrence changes, but everybody does this at every age. When even our experience is an interpretation of the real world, our memories are even less accurate.
Just throwing out an idea: I recently stumbled upon an old-school website where someone is uploading a photo of their day (almost) every single day since 1998.
Came across screen captures of the original Everquest (SO COOL) and other games, photos of anime/cosplay events, city shots, family, friends, etc. Really fun for them, and fun for people who like me who still enjoy surfing the web.
edit: Screencap of an Everquest screencap for funsies: https://imgur.com/a/HUqc6p5
When my mom was still alive and relatively new to a smartphone (at age 80) I decided to send her some sort of relevant picture every day via Whatsapp, to get her used to communicating that way. Sometimes it was a real stretch to come up with something. But yes, this forces you to evaluate your life from that viewpoint "surely something was interesting today? Let's keep a picture of it". Even if it's just what I'm having for lunch that day.
But she's gone now and so is that habit.
I'm not sure if you are in this demographic, but a lot of people I know born in 1999-2003 or so in the US used snapchat as a primary method of communication for many years, and a large part of it was keeping up "snap streaks" of sharing one photo a day with many different friends.
This is one thing for all of the pairs of genuine friends doing this, but I also have two friends who I introduced to each other exactly once, and who have never spoken since, who have a 6 year snap streak together, and both of whom have streaks like that with dozens of other people, many of whom are virtually strangers.
That is interesting. For a streak to count, do you have to both send out your own, and open incoming images? I wonder how much you could tell about someone if you had a 6 year snap streak with them. Would they be more like a friend, or an awkward relative with whom you seldom meet and have little in common?
Both of you have to send them to the other person as a specific recipient (so not just putting it on your story). I'm not sure about opening them.
For the two friends I'm thinking of, my impression is that they don't know each other any better through snapchat than they do from me knowing both of them and mentioning them to each other (they live 1000 miles apart and only met once). I guess the best I can say is that I would be comfortable seating them at the same table at my hypothetical wedding. Same vibe as my cousin I have on Facebook but have only really met twice in the last decade.
Well I knew someone who did this ritual and they would send black photos of their leg so close to the camera. So I'd imagine nothing and its classic number go up social media.
What a beautiful little habit to have with a parent
Everquest looked sooooo good back then. Man! No more Meridian 59!
Why did you have to destroy my memories? :)
It's like looking at the first DivX encoded movie that was soooooo good vs. VideoCD/LaserDisc. And then you look at it today and it's so damn blocky and also in that tiny resolution. Ugh!
> Of course any married man can confirm that this only applies to men.
My first read of this headline was to observe that people seem to get more comfortable stereotyping people different from them as they age. Thanks for the datum.
I don’t think the sexist comment at the end is appropriate for HN
>I don’t think the sexist comment at the end is appropriate for HN
I don't think the ageist comment in the headline is appropriate anywhere.
It is well known that memories and perceptions at every age are largely constructed more as "what makes sense" ("no, a gorilla did not run across the basketball court") than "as recorded" recordings.