Malleable Memories

How far back can you remember? What’s your earliest memory?

These questions might seem like easy no-brainers, but I want to challenge that idea just a little bit today, hopefully by way of a few examples.

One of my earliest memories has to be getting stung by a bee—maybe a yellow jacket. I might have been 5 years old, but maybe I was older. I distinctly remember feeling the pain of the sting, feeling it continue to hurt (a lot!) long after I had been stung.

I remember my uncle Bob pulling some tobacco out of a cigarette, and then putting a pinch on the sting. It seemed to make it hurt less. Tobacco doesn’t have any confirmed medical benefits for bee stings, but people have used this as a sort of folk remedy, probably for centuries.

I remember this scene happening… or do I?

Let me ask something you might not be thinking about just yet: what is a memory, really? How are memories made?

Even more so: how much of memory is accurate? Understanding the nature of memory isn't just about recalling the past; it's about how we construct our very identities.

It’s tempting to imagine that our minds work just like electronic devices we’re familiar with. We snap a photo of something with our smartphones, and that’s more or less precisely what we saw. The accuracy of the “memory”—the fidelity—is extremely high.

For most of my life, I assumed memory was sort of like this, but as I learned more and more about how the human brain works, I realized that I had been telling myself this story—of my earliest memory—and that it was just that: a story. I was recreating the imagery in my head, attempting to approximate what happened.

I had a kind of sketch of the event, and then my mind filled in the details as needed based on my current understanding of the world.

This concept is called the malleability of memory. Simply put, it refers to the idea that our memories are not static; they can change and be reshaped over time.

Think of a story from your own childhood. Every time you remember what happened, you’re going to do your best to reconstruct how that scene was in your mind’s eye. And, every time you tell the tale, a small detail might be different, or even completely inverted.

Memory isn’t anything like a photograph or video recording of an event. Keep that childhood memory conjured for a moment. Can you vividly see the objects around you, like you could if you were looking at a picture? If you’re anything like me, your brain uses little placeholders everywhere, and only focuses on the main event right in front of me.

Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. Photo: Mike Steele

As we think back on the past, we don’t really have something akin to a movie reel that plays from birth right up to the present day. We don’t have a really long YouTube video inside our brains, where we can just skip to the chapter on the bee sting in order to see what happened. We can’t rewind the videotape and watch it again.

No, our past is a lot more like a deck of cards. We can look at one card at a time, remembering an event, and maybe we can sort of string those events together, kind of like a flip-book I might have made as a child.

Only the flipbook isn’t really accurate, either. Sometimes the cards aren’t remembered in the order in which they happened, and the cards themselves aren’t necessarily completely accurate in the first place.

Memories are not exact replicas of our experiences, but instead they are reconstructions that evolve over time. Realizing this allows us to reflect on the very nature of our personal histories and how they shape our identities.

Thank you for providing me the space to be so introspective here!

It’s important to me to understand my own personal journey—where I came from and how I got here—so that I can understand the world better. I feel a strong obligation to you—the folks reading this—to really get this right, and I never imagined I would be sharing so much of my own story, but the math checks out.

Now, I want to flip the script and ask you: what’s your earliest memory?

How much of that memory is a narratives that you’ve created and recreated over the years, and how much of it is a faithful recollection of events?

What does the malleability of memory mean for the study of history and prehistory?