Source: Nuala Walsh
Who hasn’t forgotten their keys, wallet, passport, or password? Have you ever misremembered an important fact during a presentation or interview? Our brains are wired to misrecall, omit, and repress what matters. We even fabricate events that never happened. Yet, we trust our memory. What we may not realize is just how often salient images seduce us or the power of suggestion influences us.
Memories can be twisted, distorted, and manipulated, either by others or ourselves.
In today’s data-soaked, noisy world, it’s getting impossible to decode information accurately. It’s frightening. We discount this memory-based misinformation because it’s hidden, intangible, and uncomfortable. But it can spark a catalogue of human error that costs not only livelihoods but lives.
Five Reasons You Can’t Trust Your Memory
As processing capacity is finite, memory is recalled selectively in our neural networks. Studies show that up to 50 percent of our recollection is likely to be wrong, the result of “gist” memory. That’s a lot! Memory operates like your favorite movie but with missing scenes.
In my book Tune In: How to Make Smarter Decisions in a Noisy World, I devote a full chapter to neglected memory-based traps—traps that can derail decisions and prompt a rush to misjudgment. Here, I’ve identified several concepts that reveal how your memory lies to you.
1. The Forgetting Curve
When actions become automated, we don’t think about them. Forgetting your keys, wallet, and password is one thing. People also forget that guns are loaded, cigarettes stay burning, and children are left alone. According to KidsandCars.org, an average of 38 children die in hot cars each year in the U.S.
Hermann Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve suggests we forget information an hour after receiving it. Memory worsens over time in age-related cognitive dysfunction. Because we forget negative memories quicker, people also recall a rosier past than reality—an incorrect decision input.
Consider the common slip of the tongue. In the 2008 presidential campaign, Joe Biden called Barack Obama “Barack America.” In 2024, he introduced President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as President Putin, sealing his decision to quit. Even royalty fumbles. When Prince Charles delivered a speech in Canada, he announced the year as 1917, not 2017.
There is an upside, though. At times, forgetting trauma or bad memories can be positive for your mental health.
2. Remembering vs. Experiencing
A neglected source of misinformation lies in Daniel Kahneman’s “experiencing self” and “remembering self.’’ The experiencing self lives in the present moment, responding to immediate emotions and sensations whereas the remembering self summarizes past experiences. The result? What we experience isn’t always what we remember.
Consider your last holiday or a Taylor Swift concert. Did you enjoy it? We remember events more fondly afterwards. Memory feeds us information based on our experience that we distort later. It’s the misremembering self.
We also tend to recall peak moments and how an event ended rather than its duration. If Taylor Swift plays your favorite songs, the experience is positive. If you fight on the way home from a romantic weekend, those moments can ruin the whole experience.
3. Information Availability
Memories are triggered by ease of recall in availability bias. Fast-flowing information is misinterpreted as accurate. The risk is that we ignore what’s unfamiliar (e.g., famine), what’s hard to imagine (e.g., drowning), or what has low probability (e.g., crocodile attacks). The more vivid an image or idea, the easier the recall. Flashbulb memory suggests degradation occurs. For instance, survey participants were confident in their recall of 9/11 at 1, 6, and 32 weeks after the event, yet they significantly contradicted their original accounts.
The sequence of information also drives availability because we decide based on salience not relevance. For instance, the primacy effect describes a tendency to recall the first piece of information heard, like on a shopping list or agenda. In contrast, the recency effect reflects how we remember the last items heard.
4. Information Salience
Information repetition adds to salience and decision error. For instance, if fake news that the Pope endorses Kamala Harris for U.S. president goes viral, you’ll remember it. Psychologist Robert Zajonc found the more you’re exposed to a repeated ad or idea, the warmer you feel towards it and the more likely you think it is true—it’s the mere exposure effect.
Memory expert Elizabeth Loftus has warned about information salience and the misinformation effect in high-profile trials from Ted Bundy to Harvey Weinstein. As recall dilutes quickly, and especially under stress, evidence must be captured immediately. Italian investigators interviewed the 15 survivors of the Bayesian superyacht to avoid contamination. It’s the same in police investigations.
5. Suggestion and Distortion
Professionals such as retailers, politicians, and lawyers can manipulate memories through clever priming, idea planting, and the power of suggestion. The result is a false memory.
Certain psychologists explored whether people could recall specific ideas by implanting false information. These experiments started small, like getting lost in a shopping mall, releasing handbrakes, or spilling drinks at weddings. Over time, false ideas escalated in severity to near-drownings, punching others, or being attacked by animals. Subjects were convinced these fabricated events had occurred. Our memory tricks us.
You should consider memory-based misjudgment alongside other critical traps, such as time, identity, and story-based traps. Why? Memories of past decisions shape future decisions.
So, how do we minimize memory-based misjudgment?
At 58, John Basinger began studying Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” Eight years later, he had committed the entire 10,565 lines to memory, reciting it over three days—an exception that shows what’s possible.
You can preserve memory with regular practice. In high-stakes situations, verification makes sense with checklists, brainteasers, rhyming, and mnemonics. In business and in life, it’s our moral responsibility to make the right decisions and check input sources—especially if that source lies in the mirror. Don’t forget!
