One of my earliest memories is of being teased on my first day of school for speaking with a Dutch accent. I blamed my mother for this humiliation and returned home furious. “It’s three, not tree. Th-ree!” I told her. The strange thing about this memory is that it is probably false. My mother swears it was my brother who did this.
This kind of confusion is common in families. As stories are told and retold, they take on a life of their own. Details fade and change. It becomes easy to swap one child for another, or to confuse a familiar tale with a personal memory. My recollection feels vivid, but the details become blurrier on closer examination: where was my mother standing when I spoke to her? What was she wearing? I couldn’t say.
I was four at the time. Most adults cannot remember anything of their lives before the age of three or four, a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia. Scientists have suggested that this early forgetting is related to two aspects of cognitive development. First, cementing autobiographical memory requires language: it is harder to retain something when you lack the words to express it. Second, it requires a coherent sense of self, the ability to distinguish between “this happened” and “this happened to me”.
In other words, to remember our life we need to be able to narrate it, to impose order and meaning on to the chaos of existence by turning it into a story, and one that positions us as the central character. In this way, we tell ourselves into being.
In the six years since I became a mother, I have been watching this process up close. Two of my three children are still so young that in future years they may be unable to recall a single event of their lives so far. The older ones love to look at photos of themselves as babies and hear stories about when they were “little”. With time, some of these may start to feel like personal memories. And even if they don’t, the stories will shape how they come to narrate their own lives in a profound way.
Parents wield formidable power over their children’s memories, creating the first stories they tell themselves about who they are and where they come from, stories that might be shed like snakeskin or come to define them for ever. Some of these narratives may embellish the truth, and some may be complete fabrications. In a small but influential study from 1995, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus showed that when a relative was tasked with telling a trial participant a fictional but plausible story of how they had got lost in a mall as a young child, six out of 24 participants developed a false memory as a result.
The study of false memories has become politically incendiary, having sparked debates about whether therapists can implant memories of childhood sexual abuse, or whether women sometimes misremember consensual sex as rape. When I argue that personal memories are closer to fiction than fact, I am thinking less of the specific ways that we can – or can’t – manipulate other people’s memories, than of the nature of memory more generally. The science is clear: our minds don’t function like a hard drive or a video recorder. Memories are not physical things, stored somewhere in the brain, but rather creative reconstructions. They change constantly because we do. We edit our pasts to better serve our present needs.
Maybe you have a vivid memory of 23 March 2020, the day the UK first went into lockdown. Maybe you remember clearly how you felt as you listened to Boris Johnson’s announcement, and what exactly you did next. These details might feel seared into your memory – but chances are, some of them are wrong. A study of so-called “flashbulb” memories of 9/11 – the unusually vivid memories people retain of significant events – found that one year on, almost 40% of people had changed parts of what they recalled about that day.
Our memories are also often self-aggrandising and self-serving. One study that compared students’ remembered grades with their transcripts found that they were much better at recalling As than Ds. Another found that when students performed better than expected in exams, they remembered feeling more anxious beforehand, amplifying their sense of success. Even (or especially) when our memory is faulty – by which I mean, factually inaccurate – it serves us well, helping us to feel like the hero in our own life story.
We all know how our autobiographies will end. We will die, and so will everyone we love. “The cure for the horror is story,” Will Storr wrote in his 2019 book, The Science of Storytelling. “Our brains distract us from this terrible truth by filling our lives with hopeful goals and encouraging us to strive for them … it gives us the illusion of meaning.” Since my children were born, I have become obsessed with documenting their childhoods, taking endless photos, keeping endless notes, driven by a fear of forgetting that is a form of anticipatory grief, a heightened awareness of loss.
This means that my children – like most children today – will enter adulthood with more documentary evidence of their early years than any generation before. We are, almost effortlessly and often unwittingly, amassing a huge digital archive that means more of our memories can be corroborated. Our pasts have never been so readily accessible, through social media posts, emails and text messages, photos and screenshots, cookie trails and browser histories. But I have found that looking through email correspondence from almost two decades ago, or cringe-reading early Facebook posts, feels more like eavesdropping on an alien than encountering a past self. The writer doesn’t feel like me. Which version is more real?
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In my hunger to document my children’s lives, am I restricting their ability to write their own life story? In the digital age, we’re all still renegotiating our relationship with the past. Computers, unlike humans, offer perfect recall – but we must not forget that there is freedom and power in misremembering, in revising our past, in writing ourselves into fictions we can live with.
Further reading
How the Mind Forgets and Remembers: The Seven Sins of Memory by Daniel L Schacter (Mariner, £15.99)
Pieces of Light: The New Science of Memory by Charles Fernyhough (Profile, £12.99)
The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory by Dr Julia Shaw (Cornerstone, £9.99)