Remember the game "telephone"? Someone starts by saying a
sentence to the person next to them. That person then turns to
someone else and repeats what they heard. Somehow, by the time
the sentence gets to the last person in line, it's all mixed up
and barely resembles the original. Apparently our memories
operate in the same way. A study published recently in the
Journal of Neuroscience looks at how we retrieve memories. It's
a well-known phenomenon that retrieval is good for memory - the
more you remember something, the longer you'll remember it for.
The catch, researchers have discovered, is that each time you
retrieve a memory you forget or add small things to it, and the
next time you recall the information, you'll remember what you
remembered. "Our memories aren't like a photograph," says lead
study author Donna Bridge. "We mix up details, we forget things.
We're likely to remember this incorrect information just as much
as we are the correct (memory)." In other words, the more you
recall an event, the m