Human Memory Reliability

Discussions center on the unreliability of human memory, including false memories, reconstructive processes, deficient autobiographical memory, and personal experiences with recall and forgetting.

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Keywords

EMDR www.bbc IMO ADHD wikipedia.org memories memory remember recall don remember childhood forget events intrusive experiences

Sample Comments

gdevenyi Jun 11, 2023 View on HN

Sounds like you have deficient autobiographical memory. Psychology discovered this was a thing only in the last 10 years. I have the same experience.https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181112-severely-deficie...

Casseres Feb 4, 2019 View on HN

People will "remember" things that didn't happen.

gameswithgo Nov 24, 2018 View on HN

how do you know these memories are real?

oblak Feb 22, 2022 View on HN

What if you just don't remember the experiences you've had during this moment? Not impossible, imho

em-bee Sep 15, 2019 View on HN

this also plays into memory and why we can have false memory about events that never happened. because we can't tell the difference.

vangelis Aug 31, 2019 View on HN

Damn, I didn't know people's memories could be archived and replayed.

danielbln Feb 18, 2025 View on HN

Memories are notoriously unreliable, pliable, subject to induction etc. You may absolutely have retained memories from that age, but it's just as likely that someone told you and your turned it into a memory.

roxolotl Sep 10, 2025 View on HN

I don’t know if this aligns with your thinking but there is a theory that memory is largely reconstructed every time it is remembered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstructive_memory

flashgordon Jun 18, 2025 View on HN

Is it possible that we dont remember them precisely because they are temporary (atleast in the grand scheme of things)?

shuzchen Jan 5, 2016 View on HN

Honestly memory is such an untrustworthy thing!