Mark Twain hasn’t been around in a while. He came here from 1835 to 1910. Swooped in with a comet and left by the same mode. But while he was here, he sure did say a lot of things.
One of those things was this:
“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”
This may or may not be right.
You would think it would be the very least we could do, telling the truth all the time.
But research has shown we might be slightly out of touch.
As it turns out, our memories are very similar to the “telephone game.”
Every time we remember an event from the past, our brain network changes in ways that can alter the later recall of that item. Thus, the next time we remember something, we might not recall the original event. Instead, we remember the way it happened as the last time we talked about it, with the details shifting this way and that.
A study done at Northwestern University shows this to be true.
The fish gets a little bigger. We hit the ball a little further. Both of our knees got scraped, and not just the one. There were twelve people at the dinner instead of ten.
The reason for the distortion is the fact that human memories are always adapting. Our memories adapt to our current situations and experiences. They shift. The more we experience the world, the more our memories move.
So, Mark was essentially right and wrong. Telling the truth is safer than conjuring a lie. But our ability to recount the facts may be distorted.
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This writing was from one of my Wordle Words I play each day with Linda Stowe. The following are her comments after reading my post on that day.
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Linda Stowe comments:
I read this last night and have been thinking about it ever since. When I was a little girl, I assured my grandmother that I could carry her macaroni and cheese casserole from her car into the house for a family celebration. Just as I passed under the grape arbor, a bee buzzed by my nose, which startled me, and I dropped the casserole onto the cement sidewalk. I have thought of that incident maybe a dozen times in the intervening years. Now that I think about this, the bee only appeared in the memory lately. Before that, the casserole was too heavy, and before that, it was too hot. Who knows why I dropped the casserole. The part that never changes in this memory is the pain I felt in letting my grandmother down. I guess my memory proves the point that “truth” changes. If I still had my diary from that time, I would know more about the incident, which goes to show the value of historical records.
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Polly here again.
So there we go. The good people that we are. Telling the truth all over the place.
Or. So we think.
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“A moment lasts all of a second, but the memory lives on forever.” – Unknown
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“Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.” – Oscar Wilde
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“Memory is the power to gather roses in winter.” – Unknown
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To tell the truth. The one we remember.
