I’m an avid listener of podcasts and Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History is a firm favourite. For 10 weeks of the year, he releases a new episode each week. Then the show goes back into hiding and I experience withdrawal.

Currently, he’s in the midst of season three and it’s as exceptional as ever.

In a recent episode, the show focused on memories and talked about the concept of “flashbulb memories”.

What’s a flashbulb memory?

The term was coined in 1977 by Brown and Kulik and refers to a memory we have about a very specific moment in time, because the event was so surprising, shocking, or consequential.  The memory we have is highly detailed, vivid, and feels incredibly accurate because of the circumstances.

It takes it’s name from the flashbulb of a camera, as it was hypothesised that circumstances create a permanent record of the details surrounding the experience.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 are considered a flashbulb moment. This is an event that was so shocking and unexpected, that it gets lodged in our memory. It’s one of those events that if you ask someone “where were you when you heard about 9/11?” they can give an account in detail and will feel certain in the accuracy of that memory.

But does this mean the memory is correct?

Well, we can actually answer this. Because every time an event like 9/11 happens, researchers rush out to test members of the public, so we can better understand better how memory works.

And that’s exactly what memory researcher William Hirst and his team did.

Within a week of the 9/11 attacks, Hirst and his team conducted their first survey at locations all around the United States. They asked 3,245 participants many questions about where and when they learned of the attack on the twin towers. They also asked about key details surrounding the event, like how many planes were involved.

The researcher team then followed up with the same group of respondents. First 11 months, then 35 months, then 119 months, and finally ten years afterward. They’d always do it one month before the anniversary of the attacks.

They’d also try and gauge people’s confidence in their memory. During each survey they would ask how confident they felt that they were remembering the events accurately?

What were the results?

Rather unsurprisingly, confidence stays high throughout each survey. Even ten years on, people believe that they are remembering the events in line with how they happened.

But in terms of accuracy, things are a little different. The responses given in the first survey were often different than the responses given in the second survey. 

Sometimes this was to such an extent, that when shown the original survey, respondents acknowledged that it is their handwriting, but were adamant that “I didn’t write that”.

Now I don’t want to oversell this, as most people didn’t have wholesale changes in their reporting of events. But for an event like 9/11, where most would feel they can accurately remember where they were and how they found out, our memory is surprisingly changeable.    

Memories Aren’t Like How We Think They Are

If you were asked to describe or simply conceptualise, what memory is like, I’d expect a number of examples would come up.

Often people describe it like a video camera, where a movie has been recorded of what happened during the event.

Others will use the computer file analogy. That memory is like a file stored on a hard drive and when you open the file (or search for the memory) it pops up, still in the same form as when it was saved.

But in reality, memory isn’t an exact representation, like a word file or a video. It’s something that is highly malleable and error-prone. It’s impacted on by perception, biases, and by us (unintentionally) adding and deleting information to the memory.

Stumbling On Happiness

As I was listening to Gladwell’s podcast, it made me think of the book Stumbling On Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. Gilbert is a social psychologist and a lot of his work focuses on affective forecasting, which is a prediction of one’s emotional state in the future.

Gilbert, like Gladwell, focuses on how inaccurate our memory is. That we fabricate details or remove information, distorting our version of events versus what actually happened. 

Interestingly, how you feel right now will impact on your memory of past events, because of how your current thoughts and feelings contaminate how we remember the past.

But Gilbert then takes this misrepresentation of the past and shows that we do the same thing when thinking about the future.

When we imagine some future scenario, irrespective of whether it’s positive or negative, we imagine our current self in that scenario.

Now it should be stated that most of the scenarios people travel to in their mind will never eventuate. There’s a quote attributed to Mark Twain (although given the internet, it’s probably made up) that says “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened”.

But even if the imagined scenario does happen, the person experiencing that scenario is different to your current self. The events that lead up to it and the new lived experience changes you.

Life Is Different To How We Imagine It

So often clients will mention how much better life will be when they are thinner. That they’ll be more confident, assertive, relaxed, funny, [fill in the blank].

Very often they’ve been at a lower weight before. And when I ask, did the lower weight change their personality like they are now describing, they’ll admit that it didn’t. Now, upon reflection, they felt very much the same despite the lower weight, and often much worse (ironically).

Other times, I’ll be working with women who are recovering from an eating disorder. They’ve put on weight. They tell me that where they are now is fine, but they don’t think they can cope if they get any heavier.

So I ask them to think back to when they were thinner and think about where they are now. Would they have imagined they’d be ok at this size? A resounding no.

Same thing with food intake. They’ve increased what they are eating, but struggle to see how it could increase further. When I ask them to think back to what it was like before and now think about the current situation, would they have believed they’d be able to do this? Again, a resounding no.

Change is hard.

We are creatures of habit and when we’re locked into a pattern of disordered eating or an eating disorder, this is especially the case.

Part of this is because our memory is fallible. When we think about “how things used to be,” what we remember is an edited version of what it was really like.

Part of this is because we are terrible judges of the future. Not just what the future holds, but of our capacity to change and deal with this new reality. 

But if we can start to see our own fallacies, biases and faulty logic, it can make the change process that little bit easier.

So next time you catch yourself chastising yourself over something from the past or worrying about the future, keep in mind that these memories or vision of the future are likely inaccurate and simply a reflection of your current thinking.

Getting Help On Your Recovery Journey

I’m a leading expert and advocate for full recovery. I’ve been working with clients for over 15 years and understand what needs to happen to recover.

I truly believe that you can reach a place where the eating disorder is a thing of the past and I want to help you get there. If you want to fully recover and drastically increase the quality of your life, I’d love to help.

Want to get a FREE online course created specifically for those wanting full recovery? Discover the first 5 steps to take in your eating disorder recovery. This course shows you how to take action and the exact step-by-step process. To get instant access, click the button below.