WRONG MEMORIES

Yesterday, I posted this quote from Kathryn Schulz's fascinating book, Being Wrong: 

"A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessment of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient."

It is fascinating that one of the things she implies that people can possibly get wrong is "our memories". 

I looked through my Google photos the other day and started to delete some in an effort to free up some cloud memory (because I am too cheap to pay monthly for extra space). 

I look at these photos from even just five years ago and marvel how my only true and detailed memory of that recorded moment is the arrangement of pixels on the screen in front of me. 

Thus, I have a real hard time deleting even a blurry photo because I know that once it is gone from the cloud, it will be gone forever from EVERYWHERE. 

But I don't think Schulz has in mind "lost" memories as much as "found" memories. As often as we fail to remember things that actually happened, how common might it be for us to "remember" things that NEVER actually happened? 

(This is actually a scary thought in the context of false accusations.)

On a very small scale I have already experienced this twice in the first four weeks of a new school year: "Mr. Gross, how come I have a zero in the gradebook for this assignment? I KNOW I turned it in. I remember handing that paper to you!" 

I will search any small stacks of paper on my desk and in my computer bag and ask the student likewise to search his or her backpack. When I am lucky, the student eventually produces the missing assignment and hands it to me sheepishly ... for the first time.