Shared memories and the problems they cause

We tend to think of our memories as unique and personal, but they are in fact shaped – and even shared – by those close to us
Silhouettes, blurred, b&w
Photograph: Frederic Cirou/Getty Images/PhotoAlto

One of the joys of being a parent is getting a close-up view of the emergence of a self. Ask a three-year-old what she remembers of babyhood and you will find that she does not have much to say for herself. Children of that age typically struggle to place themselves at the centre of a life story, to do the kind of time-travelling that makes autobiographical memory possible. As their skills with language, narrative and social understanding improve, so too does their aptitude for telling the story of their own lives.

It turns out that parents have a big part to play in this process. One interesting paradox confronts those who study childhood memory: children start talking about the past some time before they can actually remember it. You can happily get a two-year-old involved in a conversation about an earlier trip to the zoo, but he is not likely to come up with coherent memories on his own. This has led researchers such as Robyn Fivush to propose that talking about the past can help children to get started with autobiographical memory. Parents draw children into conversations about the past that are initially very heavily structured, with the adult providing much of the detail and the toddler mostly tagging along. Over time, children become gradually more involved in filling in the details, until they can come up with their own autobiographical narratives at about the age of five.

Parents' attitudes to this process are crucial. Fivush's work has shown that mums and dads differ in how willing they are to expand on the topic of conversation. The kinds of elaborations that seem relevant to memory include "orienting" information (such as details of where the event happened and who was involved) and "evaluative" information (focusing on emotions and personal significance). Those parents who adopt an elaborative style have children who produce more sophisticated narratives later on. These impressive findings fit quite well with the idea that autobiographical memory functions through the medium of language. Talking about the past, to ourselves as well as to others, helps us to create richer representations of it, and these support richer memories.

Parents can easily put these findings into practice. When my kids were small, we used to play a game at bedtime called "what we did today". This simply involved us going over the day's events and trying to fill in the details of contexts and emotions, as well as the basic facts of what we had done. I have no idea whether it actually improved the children's memories, but we all enjoyed doing it.

A recent study by Fiona Jack and her colleagues at the University of Otago shows that the effects of parental elaboration can be long-lived. Adolescents who had been exposed to an elaborative conversational style in the preschool years produced earlier memories than those whose parents had tended just to repeat factual details. A certain kind of parental talk seems to make the past stick better in their children's minds.

Social processes

We don't stop talking about the past when we leave childhood behind. Memories are always being negotiated, fought over and shaped by the memories of others. The research on childhood memory shows that remembering is a fundamentally social process, and this doesn't change when we grow up. The term "social contagion" describes how we sometimes wrongly incorporate information that has been provided by other people into our own memories. We often feel pressure to fall in line with the memories of family, friends and colleagues. Much of the time we can resist it, but occasionally we fully believe other people's mistaken recollections of the past.

This leads to some fascinating dynamics in adults' relationships. In her book The Sister Knot, the psychologist Terri Apter describes how disagreements about childhood memories can be a source of rancour long into adulthood. One sister interviewed by Apter commented on her sibling's narrative of the past: "Her memories are so twisted … It's outrageous how unfair she can be." The more emotion is invested in the memory, the fiercer the battle can be. "Our memories become part of our identity," Apter told me. "If they are challenged, it's a challenge to the entire sense of who we are and how we stand in relation to other people. The person who's making a claim on my family story is telling me that I'm not who I think I am. It can be very disconcerting."

The novelist Tim Lott has thought a great deal about the long-term effects of memory disagreements. His latest novel, Under the Same Stars, tells the story of a pair of brothers whose failure to agree about the past has catastrophic repercussions. Lott explains that his relationship with his own brother is still informed by their disagreements over past events. "It's still a live issue," he tells me. "If you can't trust your memory, what can you trust?" I ask him why some siblings are able to reach agreements about the past where others can't. "I think it depends on how much your identity is linked to the memory," Lott says, "but also how sure you are of your own self. If your sense of self is slightly shaky, you're more determined to hang on to your own story."

As well as remembering things differently, siblings often fight over ownership of the same memory. A study by Mercedes Sheen and her colleagues from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand asked 20 pairs of twins independently to produce autobiographical memories in response to cue words. Fourteen of the pairs produced at least one memory that was claimed by both twins. A separate study showed that these disputed memories tended to be rated as more vivid and emotionally rich than the agreed-upon ones, possibly because of the imaginative effort that had gone into creating them. In a disputed memory, someone must always be making it up. Another feature of disputed memories is that they often serve to portray the self in a good or heroic light. If you remember what was actually your sibling being hurt in a childhood roller-skating accident, for example, you are more likely to erroneously claim the memory for yourself.

Remembering teams

When an ownership dispute comes to light, we can often change our minds about the reality of our wrongly claimed memory. But that doesn't mean that we won't keep experiencing it. In a study conducted at the universities of Hull and Windsor, Giuliana Mazzoni and her colleagues showed that "non-believed memories" – those which we no longer think are true but which we nevertheless keep experiencing as memories – are reported by more than a fifth of adults. We edit our memories all the time, relying on some of them more than others, and sometimes rejecting their veracity altogether. That's exactly what you would expect from a reconstructive memory system. Memories are shaped by the self who is doing the remembering, and when the person's beliefs and emotions change, so does the story.

But memory is not just about individual selves. The toddler who constructs a memory in collaboration with a parent is part of a remembering team. No single person is making the memory, although both individuals contribute. When adults get together in relationships, they too get busy constructing shared representations of the past. The disagreements that mark siblings' co-remembering are smoothed out by a more powerful imperative to share a story. When relationships fail, those negotiations can also collapse. One friend told me that an unexpected result of getting divorced was the breakdown of these shared memories. Versions of events that she and her husband had previously settled on were suddenly a cause for disagreement. While they were together as a married couple, there was an impetus to conform to each other's story which, all of a sudden, was gone.

You could argue that entire societies go in for this kind of negotiation. When we mark Remembrance Sunday, for example, or the anniversary of 9/11, we are engaging in collective remembering. We also have other, less formal ways of publicly remembering the past. It is often said that more people "remember" the Woodstock festival of 1969 than could possibly have been present, and the same could probably be said of more politically charged events like the 2010 tuition fee protests. A generation of people "remember" the events of the civil rights movement in the US, and those shared memories have been a powerful force for political change.

Memory collaborations can have both positive and negative effects. Other people's influence can diminish the accuracy of our memories, and groups of people sometimes remember things less effectively than the individuals, working separately, would have done. Psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists still have much to learn about how collaboration helps and hinders memory, and how communal memories are built up from individual ones. Social psychologists will keep inquiring about how collective memories for events, even those at which we weren't physically present, can come to shape the identity of a community. To say that we "remember" such events is not to misuse the term. Collective memory has an extraordinary power, and it stems from the collaborative, reconstructive nature of memory itself.

Today's best video

Today in pictures
