The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Do you believe your memories?

Sounds like a trick question, right.  Of course, you believe what you remember to be true.

Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive psychologist who studies false memory, says that most people think their memory works like a tape recorder -- we simply record the sights and sounds around us and then recall those memories, verbatim, in the future.

Makes sense to me.  But, it's false.  

As humans, we do two things:

1. We tend to reconstruct memories when recalling an event.

Dr. McGaugh, a professor on autobiographical memory at UC Irvine, explains that:

 "All memory is colored with bits of life experiences.  When people recall, they are often reconstructing.  It doesn't mean it’s totally false. It means that they’re telling a story about themselves and they’re integrating things they really do remember in detail, with things that are generally true." 

2. We tend to change or distort our memories when fed misinformation.

For example, Elizabeth Loftus ran an experiment in the 1980s where she was able to plant a false memory that they were lost in a shopping mall as a child in 25% of the participants .  Her study is one of many along a similar line -- convincing people that they were attacked by a vicious animal or that they witnessed demonic possession as a child.

We are malleable creatures.  We can make our memories match our current situation.

What does that mean if we can change our memories and thereby, change our life stories?

In the podcast "How I Got Into College" by This American Life, Michael Lewis interviews Emir Kamenica on his life story.  He was a Bosnian refuge that eventually made his way to a tough neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia as a teenager with his widowed mother.  Emir describes himself as having trouble in school due to his terrible English and feeling very isolated from the other students.  One day, a peppy substitute teacher, Ms. Ames, asked the students in Emir's class to write an essay about a photo -- she gave Emir one of a young boy with a haunted expression on his face.

Emir went home and plagiarized a passage from a favorite Bosnian book, The Fortress, translating it from his native tongue into English.  Based on his memory, the teacher liked the essay so much that she brought Emir along on an interview to a fancy prep school nearby.  

Eventually, he gets to go to the prep school on scholarship and magically goes from there to Harvard undergrad to a Harvard doctorate program in Economics to a professorship at the University of Chicago.

Emir believes that the copied essay saved him.  
That Ms. Ames was his guardian angel.  
That his success is all luck...

"I mean, it is by far the-- in everyone's life there are many forks. This is by far the biggest one. This is what made the most difference. There's no doubt that my life got onto a very different kind of a track. And I'm pretty sure that if it hadn't been for her, I would've stayed in Clarkston High School. I wouldn't have thought to apply to a private school. I most certainly wouldn't have gone to Harvard.And if you gave me a piece of paper and a pen 10 years ago and said, OK, describe what you think of as the most wonderful life, I think I'd come up with something less good than what it actually is."

That's a nice, feel good story, right?  Except, it's false.

Halfway during the podcast, they brought on Ms. Ames (who took a long time to track down).  It turns out that she was actually his permanent teacher (not a substitute) and was repeatedly impressed by Emir's "genius" in her classroom.

When recalling the moment she decided to help Emir, she said:

"Well, actually, I think it was the day that he diagrammed sentences for me on the blackboard for the rest of the students. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to make them learn it. And it was just mind-numbingly boring. 

And Emir said to me, I really think I can explain this. And they'll understand it. So he took over, and it was a great class. And he did a wonderful job. And it just occurred to me, right there on the spot, this kid is just capable of so much more than this school can offer him."

She couldn't recall the essay.

And,  it wasn't pure luck.  Emir was exceptionally talented.  In fact, Ms. Ames said Emir would have been successful even if he had stayed at Clarkson High School.  

Even after Emir discovered the truth from Ms. Ames on the podcast, it didn't seem like he was going to change his story.

And, why would he? Emir's wife describes him as the happiest person she has ever met. 

Michael Lewis describes a possible reason for this happiness:

"Now, there is no obvious connection between a person's happiness and the way he tells stories about himself. But I think there's a not-so-obvious one. When you insist, the way that Emir does, that you're both lucky and indebted to other people, well, you're sort of prepared to see life as a happy accident, aren't you? 

It's just very different than if you tell yourself that you simply deserve all the good stuff that happens to you. Because you happened to be born a genius or suffered so much or worked so hard-- that way of telling the story-- well, it's what you hear from every miserable bond trader at Goldman Sachs, or for that matter, every other a-hole who ever walked the earth."

What if we all told ourself stories more like Emir?  

Stories that make us grateful.
Stories that make us indebted.
Stories that make the world seem like a happy accident, despite turmoil.

Or, you can always do the opposite and be this guy: