The 4 types of memory failure

As the reader may remember from what was seen in the article "What are false memories and why do we suffer from them?"There is the possibility of partially remembering an event, conversation or situation, not remembering it or remembering it without having lived it.

Going deeper into it, there are numerous types of mistakes that can be made and it is important to share this information since these mistakes have made to break friends, ignore arguments, create major conflicts and other problems that, without a doubt, anyone will recognize by looking at behind.

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Memory failures

Next we will see several phenomena that make our memory not as reliable as it may seem.

Stress

One of the factors that conditions our memory is stress, understanding this, beyond an overload of work or a concern, as an activation at the level of alert that can be given by as many as different situations in which we are involved in daily.

Stress generates a corticosteroid discharge due to the excitation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HHs) axis. (Gómez-González, 2002) that

can improve or worsen the memory, depending on the processing phase influenced by stress hormones, and the nature or valence (positive or negative) of the encoded information.

Thus, there are numerous investigations that have revealed when stress levels are very high (ex: a heated family or couple discussion: a debate on a very controversial topic in the networks social; etc.) emotional memory is preserved or even improved, while memory of non-emotional information is affected.

How relevant is this? In a stressful situation such as those discussed in the previous paragraph, it is very likely that not only logic will be put aside, but because of this increased emotional arousal, attention (and therefore memory) is focused on aspects of the discussion, debate, or fact witnessed what else has aroused negative feelings.

This not only leads to an often irrational (understood as lacking in well-structured logic) and premature resolution, but that contributes to forming negative stereotypes about other people, forgetting aspects such as the coherence of their argument despite their lack of respect, the logic of an idea despite the misspellings, the intention of the communicator despite his mistake when expressing it, etc. Thus, accessing that memory later, these details are practically inaccessible.

• Related article: "Types of memory: how does the human brain store memories?"

More experiences with it, more reliable opinion?

We often believe that having experienced a situation more times or having had a discussion about a situation more times specific topic or with a specific person, makes us more "aware" of it or gives more reliability to our opinion. However, is that true?

Studies in behavioral sciences have shown that people who have experienced repeated similar situations (eg: event, discussion) with emotional charge, they tend to be less reliable than testimonies of events that have occurred only once, giving worse results in accuracy, integrity and consistency of the story (Smeets, Candel and Merckelbach, 2004).

So why do you feel so much more secure?

The phenomenon of confirmation bias

In psychology there is an extensive study and Experiments on Confirmation Bias. This bias is also known as selective information gathering. It is considered as an effect of information processing that makes people seek to confirm their hypotheses, confirm their expectations, reaffirm their stereotypes or even justify their decisions or styles of lifetime. Understand stereotype as a pattern of thought, without necessarily being negative (ex: The world is a beautiful place).

This search for confirmation is pre-conscious or unconscious (although it can be tried to avoid voluntarily if this effect is known) and it occurs regardless of the veracity or falsity of the information collected.

At the same time, this bias allows the “repetition” of information that was already considered true, making it more stable in one's own scheme of knowledge of the world, of others or of oneself. Information that does not seek to be falsified and that is stored as more true than the previous time it was processed.

Various explanations have been offered for the emergence of the confirmation bias shared by default (although I insist, it can be modulated or overcome) every human being. These explanations revolve around different factors, one of them is the so-called "cognitive economy" by which the brain tends to seek balance and patterns to use the minimum of energy when solving a problem or situation, a question that also partly explains the formation of stereotypes and schemes of knowledge.

The role of emotions in memories

Other explanations have focused more on emotional factors. It is not difficult to think that it is preferable (usually) to be correct than to be wrong, thus, the confirmation bias would allow avoid the cost or damage of the error and, instead of investigating the fact, argument or event in a neutral or scientific the parts that match the assumption are selected, are often magnified and the rest are neglected or diminished.

A good example of this can be found in the books of deductive reasoning or in manuals of thought psychology. Where different types of Fallacies are exposed that serve at the same time as to discredit arguments, to bias towards their own and to protect themselves from an unwanted change or damage in the self-esteem.

The role of fallacies

Ad hominem fallacy: it consists of taking for granted the falsehood of a statement taking as an argument who has made it. Trying to discredit the person who defends said idea pointing out a negative characteristic or action of the person, regardless of the idea. It should be noted that it is one of the most used fallacies today in the debates that are warmly maintained by social networks regarding current issues

Fallacia tu quoque: It consists of rejecting an argument or considering it false, alleging the inconsistency of the person proposing it. (Ex: How can you talk about corruption if when you ruled, there were also cases?). We know that an idea can actually be good or bad, regardless of whether the person who conveys this by preaching or not by example, however, if the idea does not like, this fallacy is often used to avoid it.

Thus, the confirmation bias distorts and selects information that is installed in our schematics. These schemes, which have been alluded to throughout the article, in cognitive science are understood as thought patterns, sets structured ideas, structure of representation of the world, structure of specific knowledge, mental frameworks of social knowledge, etc.

It is not the object of this article to describe them in detail, it will suffice to comment that they are the main responsible for our expectations.

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Cognitive schemas

Weren't we talking about memory? Yes, and we continue at it. By way of compilation, the emotional situation biases attention and recall, the confirmation bias selects parts of the information that benefit the ideas themselves, and these ideas are installed in our memory again in the form of diagrams.

These schemes contain stable and variable parts, the more the parts are repeated (confirmed), more stable they are and, in addition, they are the cause of our expectations, as our framework of knowledge.

Thus, with what was seen in this article where it was exposed that memory and imagination and projection of oneself and others in the future (expectations) share a neural network, it is clear that If these factors are not taken into account, they feed back to create a loop that hardly responds to any logic other than the personal.