Disclaimer: This is a story about memory loss. But in a good way. I first became aware something was up around six months ago.
I was catching up with college friends at a reunion over spring break when my MIT undergrad buddy Josh brought up “The Great Acid Neutralization Panic of 2008.” He reminded me that I had inadvertently combined two incompatible chemicals in our shared bathroom sink years earlier and caused a reaction so great we ended up evacuating the entire dorm at 3 AM.
“I thought it was you!” I protested. “Those weird gas bubbles from your model rocket were what set off the sprinklers.
Don’t you remember? The fire marshal arrested us in the hallway with all those melted MacGyvers!”
Josh looked at me like I’d accused him of believing H₂O is not actually composed of hydrogen and oxygen. “Jamie, I have photographic evidence of you exiting our dormitory in the possession of a neutralizer while loudly telling the dorm supervisor that you ‘had it under control.’”
He pulled up the picture on his phone.
There I was, much younger and considerably paleer than I am now, clutching—undeniably—a box of baking soda like it was my lifeline. My standard undergraduate neutralizer. But the memory came flooding back.
How could it not? Why had it omitted all these other details? I could still feel my sinuses burning that night.
I vaguely remember the campus cop asking me if I was “conducting another experiment for Professor Maxwell.” And Josh had clearly been away at his girlfriend’s that evening. This was creepy. I’m a scientist, damn it.
My powers of observation should not be this flawed. Why were points of objective data—I mean, memories—that I could recall so vividly changing without my knowledge or consent? What else was getting mutated quietly in there?
Fast forward six months. Mei has now bestowed upon me the title of “memory obsession phase,” and added it to her catalog of my phases (#6 at last check. Previous titles include: “the sourdough enzyme kinetics optimization phase” and “you wasted $400 on a microscope just to prove that pizza has the mathematical properties of a perfectly miraculous substance.”).
I started journaling about it. Scientifically. If my memories were changing without my consent, how?
Was it possible they were evolving? And if they were evolving, like any biological system subject to selective pressures, were they hanging on to variations that better promoted my personal sense of accomplishment while less desirable realities were slowly forgotten? Ok, ok.
Obviously we know memory is flawed. People forget things all the time. Ever since Frederic Bartlett documented reconstructive memory processes back in the 1930s we’ve known that remembering isn’t like pulling audio recordings from a hard drive.
What I wanted to know was if this natural reconstructive process was truly random—or if my memory was better at preserving some types of variations over others. Here’s what I decided was my working hypothesis: memories changed to better suit my self-image. Memories that made me look or feel bad about myself had a lower “survival rate” than memories that made me feel like Nigel Hawthorne in Gosford Park.
Time to gather some evidence. Step one: make a list of every rememberable moment I could think of and fact-check myself. I built a Google Sheet of every major event in my life that I could fact-check using independently sourced information.
Of course this was going to be subjective to some degree, but I made columns for things like:
• My version of events (documented in as much detail as possible AFTER evidence-gathering)
• Evidence (pictures, emails, journal articles, credible witnesses)
• Was it good or bad? (How did this make me feel about myself?) • Time since event
I dragged everyone I knew through this.
My parents, in particular, seemed to take great delight in disproving my memory. (“Jamie, we did NOT ‘run some really cool chemistry experiments’ in our garage that day. You melted down the garage floor and ruined the washing machine!”) Mei chimed in dozens of instances of experiments gone wrong all over our apartment from dates she’d apparently preserved like extra memories just for this occasion.
Some she could give me exact timestamps for; others she only had pictures of aftermath. To say the results were underwhelming would be an understatement. I found major alterations to my memory’s representation of events 167 out of 243 times.
That’s 68.7%! But here’s the kicker—in instances where I failed at something scientific, accidentally damaged property, or embarrassed myself in some way, my memory altered my version of events 82.3% of the time. But if the memory was of something scientific that worked, or made me sound smart?
Only a 31.2% change rate. But get this. When I graphed magnitude of change versus time, I found a significant positive correlation between the two (r=0.78, p<0.001).
Memories that happened further in the past had changed, on average, MORE to help me sound like less of an idiot/help me remember achieving something awesome/uncover my hidden insurance policy. In essence, I had inadvertently created a longitudinal study on memory and natural selection without realizing it. See, when you have a memory loss, your brain just kind of… evolves it for you.
Take, for example, my infamous childhood hydrogen peroxide incident. According to my present-day-memory-of-the-event (created before checking any evidence), I had been performing some nascent experiment about surface area and decomposition rates on Todd’s chewed-up algebra homework when a catalyst was accidentally introduced that triggered a neutralization reaction. The real story, printed out on pink stationery in a letter my mom apparently typed up and sent to my third grade science teacher while I was recovering at home?
I dumped every chemically-laden liquid and reactant I could find into our kitchen sink and turned on the bubbly soap stuff while wearing goggles like a Scientist. (“SAFE-TYYYY!”)
Or how about the time I gave a seminar to my department as a postdoc? My memory likes to believe that my radical new ideas about hair cells being able to hear rock music were received with awe-inspired curiosity and follow-up questions that spurred hours-long debates.
The truth, according to email exchanges my advisor had with me after the meeting? I got so frustrated with one elderly professor about my technique that our department chair had to physically remove me from his office. It didn’t matter if we’re talking about professional settings, my PhDwork, or situations from grade school.
Whenever I did something that didn’t paint me in the best light, my memory evolved a story about what actually happened. Failures became “learning experiences.” Errors were “guiding you towards the right answer.” Explosions? “Unexpected reactions.”
If an apes-dominated planet could adapt their limbs to their environment, surely my brain could adapt my memories to help me forget my extensive history of destructive scientific incompetence?
Admittedly, I’m sort of geeking out about how tidy of an example of natural selection this is for me personally. I knew about these parallels between evolutionary biology and things like neurology going in. I studied enough science to know that there were cool patterns repeating themselves on macro and micro levels across ecosystems.
I just didn’t know that I was storing such a perfect (read: ego-protective) example in my brain until now. My memory isn’t file footage of my life. It’s more like natural selection happening among interesting phrases and half-truths to better adapt me to listening to myself tell the story over and over again.
To dig even deeper, I even took Mei’s advice and started journaling experiences IMMEDIATELY after they happened to get a baseline of “truth.” I wrote about 50 different events within an hour of them happening. Some were mundane. Some were fires I intentionally started while learning about the specific heat capacity of various cooking oils in our kitchen.
I then set calendar reminders to come back and document these memories one week, one month, and three months later WITHOUT looking at my original entry. It was the weirdest thing to watch scientifically notable events of my life just… evolve under my own eyes. Knocked over a pot on the stove and caught it with my hand?
Three months later, my memory version of events had me purposefully performing a “hand-core frying pan experiment” that yielded “interesting results about dermal heat transfer” despite “damaging my equipment.” Got_into_an_argument_with_Mei_about_how_music_really_doesn’t_have_the_same_consistent_mathematical_underpinnings_as_everything_else_in_the_universe? Clearly, my memory altered the story to make me sound like I “raised several valid questions about operational methodology that others may have not considered” and therefore “initiated a productive department discussion.”
If memories that made me sound competent or in control had better “evolutionary fitness” than ones that suggested I may intermittently be a hazard to myself, my apartment, and anyone within miles who had to hear me lecture, they were more likely to be preserved. The crazy part is—I’m not lying to myself about these memories.
At least, not intentionally. My brain isn’t consciously saying “You know that time you set your apartment on fire? Cool story, but let’s change it to where you were performing a science experiment instead.” It’s changing them without me noticing.
And in doing so, it’s naturally selecting for memory mutations that better help me forget that I’m sort of an unwitting destroyer of worlds who also happens to have a PhD. Of course this makes sense. We as humans have every reason to want to view ourselves in a positive light.
Those who evolved memories that allowed them to forget their failures, learn from their mistakes, and feel good about themselves were probably better hunters, had more mating opportunities, and raised more offspring who thought their dads were awesome. We are the literal descendants of people who were good at remembering just how great they were. Think of the possibilities here.
If my lived experience can evolve under natural selection right out of grad school, what’s stopping these natural psychological defenses from occurring in anyone? How many of our so-called “breakthroughs” were positive mutations that just happened to help us remember the future better? I even keep better lab notes now as a result of my own little experiment.
Since nearly every memory I had was warped to better reflect how I wanted my life to have gone in some way, I make sure now to jot down how I’m feeling about my experiments as I go. We literally have security cameras in our kitchen because I used to rely ON MEMORY to give me notes about how I made stuff that now needed photographic evidence and timestamps. Mei’s now started double-checking my stories at dinner parties.
(“Actually we got home at 11PM, Jamie, you’re remembering the ice storm WRONG.”)
The experiment isn’t over. Now I’m tracking how memories get influenced by others (do they change less if someone else validates them?) and whether emotional responses to memories help preserve their original details.
So far it seems like memories with high embarrassment factors but high emotional investment show STRONG resistance to favorable memory mutations. Honestly, I still screw up in lab all the time. Last week I almost burned our kitchen down in my quest to determine the acoustic properties of water vs.
other cooking oils as they reach boiling temperature. But at least now I know my memory of that event will one day evolve to where I remember setting out to collect valuable data on steam pressure variables intentionally.
And not, you know, actually saying “I think something’s wrong with this burner!” just before our entire apartment caught on fire (per Mei’s notes from the night it happened).
You learn something new every day, right? Darwin saw finches and made one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time. I did some ugly kitchen fires and discovered that every time I tell myself a story about my past, I’m only remembering the ones that let me feel like Jamie, the hero of the story.
So next time you find yourself telling an anecdote with yourself as the suddenly-sharp protagonist, just remember: your memory has been evolving that story to make you sound awesome for years. It’s been naturally selecting your memories’ variants based on how well they make you sound like you don’t deserve the job you have or how smart you are.
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