Have you ever been accused of having selective memory? Has your spouse ever asked you to do something that slips your mind, and they accuse you of deliberately ignoring that task? Have you ever thought back on a relationship and remembered it differently than the reality? It is very common for us to look back on events and remember them differently (\u201cIt was raining!\u201d \u201cNo, it was sunny!\u201d), or not remember things that happened to us at all! For some reason, the stories we tell tend to get better or worse each time we recount them. If you\u2019ve ever fallen down and gotten a small scrape, chances are you told all your friends you got injured saving a dog<\/a> from getting hit by a car. And then that you single-handedly lifted the car up in the air. And then you threw the car all the way down the street. Too much? Maybe. But that doesn\u2019t change the fact that we all have the tendency to remember things inaccurately. \u00a0Perhaps Paul Simon said it best in his song Kodachrome<\/em><\/strong>:<\/span><\/p>\n If you took all the girls I knew When I was younger, I used to have warts on my hands (I wish I didn\u2019t remember that, I actually used to get them one at a time maybe once a year<\/em>). One day while I was playing nose tackle in varsity football my sophomore year, my hand wart and all\u2014got caught in the face mask of the center. The guy, (who by the way used to give me rides until I was legal to drive), bit off one of my warts with his teeth. I know, I know, it was disgusting. He was spitting and choking, but when he recovered we had two sides to a great story. In his, he almost bit off my hand he was so mean, in mine he ate my wart and they have not come back since. We told that story to every single person we knew, and to many people we didn\u2019t. The story changed a little, but we both had gotten the maximum laugh from it. About 30 years later when I went back to my hometown and saw this guy again, he said to me, \u201cHey Gary, remember that time you bit a wart off of my hand?\u201d He actually believed this version of the story\u2014to him, that was exactly what happened. I mean, you definitely can\u2019t blame the guy for trying to change the story in this direction, but what made him do this? Why do we change our memories to fit our needs? And, more interestingly, how<\/em> do we manage to get away with doing something like this? Don\u2019t let the truth get in the way of a good story, but how do we get to the point that we actually start to believe that the good story is the truth?<\/span><\/p>\n There are a number of different reasons we can force Another reason memories tend to get changed or forgotten is due to repression. When something extremely embarrassing happens to us or rattles our cage a little, we may feel like it\u2019s the end of the world, but in reality, the acute embarrassment or shock fades and is often forgotten. That is called repression. If we repress a memory often enough, our minds will actually throw it away, in a sense, permanently erasing it from our memory store. It does this either as a defense mechanism, or because there is so much going on in this world,<\/a> that we need to get rid of some information if we want to engage in any higher cognition<\/a>. Think of it as a spring-cleaning\u2014your brain periodically throws away some things that are just don\u2019t sit well or clutter your mind. You need to be extremely careful with this one though: sometimes repressing or removing memories is good for your mental health (in fact, we use this in police psychology<\/strong> to help cops deal with police stress<\/strong>), but if it gets to the point that you become avoidant, that can lead to some really detrimental long-term consequences.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"memory](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/policepsychologyblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/memory-dementia.jpg\")
<\/a> Buzzfeed<\/a> recently made a video<\/a> about this: one girl who was telling her friend how happy she had been when her ex-boyfriend had taken her on a hike and told her, \u201cI love you\u201d for the first time. The friend quickly reminded her that they had only made it to the entrance of the hike before the ex insisted they turn around, and he had actually said, \u201cLove ya.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n
\nWhen I was single
\nAnd brought them all together
\nFor one night
\nI know they\u2019d never match
\nMy sweet imagination
\nEverything looks worse
\nIn black and white.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\nFootball Days of Youth<\/h2>\n
Police Psychology | The Power of Reconsolidation and Repression<\/h2>\n
![\"figure](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/policepsychologyblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/figure-with-ribbon.jpg?resize=170%2C170\")
<\/a>ourselves to forget or alter a memory, and we often aren\u2019t even aware of doing this. One such way is through embellishment. When we retell a story, essentially we are recalling it from the place we stored it in our long-term memory. And yet each time we recall the story and recount it, we are only recalling a facsimile of the actual event, a mere picture of the episode. Thus each time we tell the story, it tends to be slightly different than the reality. Further, every time something happens to us, the \u201cevent\u201d travels from our short-term memory into our long-term memory in a process called consolidation. If something interrupts this consolidation process, the event will never make it all the way to our long-term memory. Think of it like a train that gets derailed or sidetracked, and never ends up back at the station. Importantly, recent studies on memory have shown that every time you recall a memory (either in your own mind, or in order to recount it to someone else) and then put it back in your long-term memory, your memory re<\/em>consolidates. And when this reconsolidation process occurs, any emotion or feeling that you are experiencing in this moment tends to get stuck to the memory. Thus, the next time you recall this memory, not only are you remembering a facsimile of the original memory, but you are also remembering bits and pieces of the last time you brought up this memory, and the time before that. It\u2019s like an internal game of telephone. So, even if we don\u2019t embellish a story on purpose, and tell it often enough that we start confusing it with reality, our minds will automatically adjust the memory slightly every time we recall it. Of course, in police psychology<\/strong>, cops are known as the great embellishers to make stories funny or more poignant, except the incident that gets to them and that gets us to our next change.<\/span><\/p>\nPolice Psychology | Cognitive Dissonance<\/h3>\n
![\"Police](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/policepsychologyblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/procrastination2.png?resize=235%2C109\")
<\/a>Three Steps to Using this Material<\/h3>\n