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Asked by anon-179125 to Maria, John, Amy on 15 Jun 2018.
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Amy Pearson answered on 15 Jun 2018:
Ooooh this is a good question. Honestly, our brains arent completely trustworthy. Without going too philosophical, we only experience our own thoughts, perceptions, etc, so it makes it hard to be able to really *know* whether what we are experiencing is the truest reflection. Even something like ‘the dress’ shows that there are individual differences in the way that people see and perceive things. Our brain just does the best it can at piecing together information and trying to make sense of it.
As scientists, what we can do is examine whether *most* people share similar ways of seeing things, which tells us a bit about what the ‘true’ experience of something is (i.e. most people experience the sky as blue).
Personally, its hard to really say what you can do- but just be aware that sometimes things like your memory may not be perfect. This doesnt make you faulty, it just makes you human.
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Maria Montefinese answered on 19 Jun 2018:
Hi Jamie! 🙂 That’s a really good point! Our brain is not so trustworthy as we think. For example, it has been shown that human memory is fallible. Indeed, there have been thousands of demonstrations of the unreliability of eyewitness testimony in forensic psychology. For example, it was discovered that some apparent memories of events are not just distorted memories, but they are for events that simply never took place at all. If you are interested in this matter, I recommend to watch this TED talk by Elizabeth Loftus.
She is one of the first researchers to talk about false memories.
To be aware that memory can be fallible doesn’t mean that we have to deny everything we have ever known, but only that we have to see to the past with more scepticisim because we can’t actually to be sure at 100% that all memories of our past are perfectly correct.
All the best,
Maria
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