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Memories of your own life help give you a sense of who you are, yet they are not fixed recordings. Each time you recall an event the brain rebuilds it, and later knowledge and feelings can reshape the story without you noticing.

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Psychologists call this store of events from one's own life autobiographical memory. The British psychologist Frederic Bartlett showed in his 1932 book Remembering that recall is reconstruction, not replay: when people retold an unfamiliar Native American folk tale, “The War of the Ghosts”, they gradually reshaped it to fit their own expectations. A striking modern example followed the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986. The morning after, Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch asked students to write down how they had heard the news, then asked again two and a half years later. Many accounts had changed a great deal, yet the students were confident in their new versions. Memory is also tied to identity. When older adults look back, they recall an unusually large share of events from between about 10 and 30, the years when a sense of self takes shape; this is called the reminiscence bump.

Türkçe oku
Kendi hayatımıza dair anılar, kim olduğumuzu anlamamıza yardım eder; ama bu anılar sabit kayıtlar değildir. Bir olayı her hatırlayışımızda beyin onu yeniden kurar; sonradan öğrendiklerimiz ve hissettiklerimiz de biz fark etmeden hikâyeyi değiştirebilir.

Psikolojide insanın kendi hayatındaki olaylara dair anılarına otobiyografik bellek denir. İngiliz psikolog Frederic Bartlett, 1932'de yayımlanan Remembering (Hatırlama) adlı kitabında hatırlamanın bir kaydı geri sarıp oynatmak değil, geçmişi yeniden kurmak olduğunu gösterdi: Katılımcılar, bilmedikleri bir Kuzey Amerika yerli masalını, “Hayaletlerin Savaşı”nı yeniden anlattıkça onu kendi beklentilerine uyduruyordu. Çarpıcı bir örnek, 1986'daki Challenger uzay mekiği faciasıyla ilgili bir araştırmadır. Facianın ertesi sabahı Ulric Neisser ve Nicole Harsch, öğrencilerden haberi nasıl aldıklarını yazmalarını istedi; iki buçuk yıl sonra aynı soruyu yeniden sordular. Pek çok anlatı büyük ölçüde değişmişti, ama öğrenciler yeni anlatılarının doğruluğundan emindi. Anılar kimliğimizle de iç içedir. Hayatlarına dönüp bakan yaşlı insanlar, 10 ile 30 yaş arasından beklenenden çok daha fazla olay hatırlar. Benlik duygusunun biçimlendiği bu yıllardaki yoğunlaşmaya “anımsama tümseği” denir.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Autobiographical memory
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The idea that the face can feed back into feelings, called the facial feedback hypothesis, goes back to Charles Darwin and William James. In a famous 1988 experiment, Fritz Strack and colleagues had people hold a pen in their teeth, which forces a smile, or between their lips, which prevents one, and those in the first group rated cartoons as funnier. In 2016, seventeen laboratories repeated that experiment exactly and found no effect. A 2019 review of 138 studies concluded that the effect is real but small and varies from study to study. The 2022 Many Smiles Collaboration, led by Nicholas Coles and designed jointly by supporters and sceptics of the idea, found that deliberate smiling could both strengthen and start feelings of happiness, while the pen method remained inconclusive.

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Your gut and brain communicate through nerves, hormones, immune signals and microbes, which is why stress and digestion can affect each other.

Scientists call this link the gut–brain axis. The gut has its own network of about 500 million nerve cells, the enteric nervous system, sometimes called the “second brain”, which can run digestion largely by itself. It is connected to the brain mainly through the vagus nerve, a long nerve running from the brainstem down to the abdomen, and most of its fibres carry messages upwards, from the gut to the brain. More than 90 per cent of the body's serotonin, a chemical messenger, is found in the gut. Gut bacteria play a part too: in a 2004 Japanese study, mice raised entirely free of germs overreacted to stress. Stress can speed up or slow down the gut, one reason it often worsens irritable bowel syndrome, a common gut disorder. Most research on the microbes' role has been in animals, and human evidence is still limited.

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A placebo is a dummy treatment, such as a sugar pill. In pain studies, placebos can reduce the pain people report and also dampen activity in the brain areas that process pain, even though they contain no active drug.

The word placebo is Latin for “I shall please”. One of the first clues that the effect is physical came in 1978, when Jon Levine and colleagues studied patients recovering from wisdom tooth removal. They gave them a placebo and naloxone, a drug that blocks the effect of endorphins, the body's own painkilling chemicals. In patients who had responded to the placebo, naloxone increased the pain, which suggested that the placebo relief came from endorphins. In 2004 Tor Wager and colleagues used brain scans to show that a placebo painkiller reduced activity in pain-processing regions during a painful stimulus. Expectation works the other way too: in the nocebo effect, from the Latin for “I shall harm”, expecting harm makes symptoms worse. None of this means the pain was imaginary, or that placebos can replace effective treatment.

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Memory does not work like a recording. Each time we recall an event, the brain rebuilds it from stored fragments, filling gaps with what we know and what we have heard since, so a memory can change without our noticing.

Psychologists call this reconstructive memory. In his 1932 book Remembering, the British psychologist Frederic Bartlett described asking people to retell “The War of the Ghosts”, a Native American folk tale unfamiliar to them; each retelling drifted towards what felt familiar in their own culture. In 1974 Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer showed people films of car accidents and asked how fast the cars were going when they “hit” or “smashed” into each other. Those asked with “smashed” gave higher speeds, and a week later were more likely to remember broken glass that was never there. This is known as the misinformation effect. It matters in court: according to the Innocence Project, mistaken eyewitness identification played a part in most US convictions later overturned by DNA evidence.

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The idea goes back to the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, who argued in the 1860s that seeing involves “unconscious inference”: the brain fills in what the eyes cannot fully tell it. In 1999 the researchers Rajesh Rao and Dana Ballard turned this into a computer model of vision. Higher brain areas send predictions down, and lower areas send back only the difference between prediction and input, called the prediction error. The philosopher Andy Clark and the neuroscientist Karl Friston later helped develop it into a broad theory of the mind. A well-known illustration is the hollow-mask illusion: the inside of a mask still looks like a face bulging outwards, because the brain's expectation of a normal face outweighs the evidence. The theory is widely used but still debated, and critics ask how some of its claims could be tested.

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