False Memory

There is a state of mind known within the field of Psychiatry as confabulation.  This state of mind is characterized by altered memories.  I have written about the nature of Nostalgia and the impact it can have on our memory where it paints over the cracks, confabulation takes this idea to a greater extreme.  Where nostalgia can be seen simply as a reminiscence over past events that idealizes those events, confabulation on the other hand actually alters the memory itself.  Where nostalgia discards the negatives over time and retains some truth of the original experience, confabulation rewrites the memory in part or entirely.  The negatives alone no longer become the elements which change, but the memory as a whole changes.

There can be many triggers and reasons why confabulation occurs, but the key requirement is that it be involuntary.  In other words it has to be an alteration of memory that manifests itself not because the individual actively sought to rewrite their memory.  There is therefore no intended deceit as there would be if you were to lie about something you recalled.  The other conclusion that can be drawn from this requirement is that the original memory is then lost as any recollection of the original would countermand the confabulation.

There are physical and physiological conditions that can lead to confabulation, there are also neurological conditions that can also lead to it.  This means that it is almost always a symptom of another condition.  What is interesting about this state of mind is that although it often indicates an underlying condition, it doesn't imply there has to be one.  Like a headache or a cough, these symptoms often indicate some underlying condition but in certain scenarios they can manifest in perfectly healthy individuals given their environment or some other mitigating factor.

What's scary about this state of mind is that it is hard to diagnose.  Not only because verifying the original experience is difficult, but also because those who exhibit confabulation often have no idea whatsoever that their memories have been altered.  Secondary memories can lead us to conclude that things we recall never actually happened the way we recall them.  For example if our primary memory of focus is a given event happening on a set date which we can't verify, then recollection of secondary memories not even linked to the first but pertaining to dates that we can verify can prove the primary memory is inaccurate.

False memory detection is not only difficult, it poses an ethical question for those who treat patients that exhibit false memories - this question is whether or not the true memory should be recovered if possible.  You might think the obvious answer to this question is yes it should, however this answer relies on faith in the Psychiatric field to be able to adequately handle whatever is revealed.  There are some things that cannot be tackled, either because the patient is unable or unwilling to tackle them, or because the impact they have on the patient can't be treated.

Despite the moniker often given to antidepressants as "happy pills" they are anything but.  Antidepressants simply disable the part of the brain, or more accurately they repress the part of the brain that deals with emotional extremes in an attempt to keep the patient "level" as long as possible.  Antidepressants do not make you happy, but they don't make you sad either.  They don't change anything in the long run and there is evidence that the body can build a resistance to them.  A condition known as Treatment Resistant Depression can develop, for some patients this is their starting point before taking any antidepressants at all - they don't work for everyone.

If you possessed a memory that was altered over time, there is likely a reason why it was altered.  It is often more prudent to try and discern why a memory may have been altered first before deciding to try and restore it.  To use an analogy, if there is a vault that has clearly been damaged intentionally to prevent it from being opened, it would be wise to try and figure out why whoever damaged it did not want it to be opened, before you try to open it yourself.  We can say that our unconscious mind is an arbiter when it comes to our memories.  They do not remain in our conscious or our subconscious for very long unless they are something we fixate on.  The long term location of our memory is deep within our unconscious mind where it is processed near constantly when the unconscious mind is playing out scenarios attempting to predict the outcome.  It is therefore a reasonable conclusion that any memory it had to alter was therefore having a significant impact on its ability to function and that it became necessary to alter the memory in order to create more accurate models.

It is easy to make the argument that you alone can't talk yourself down from every edge, that you can't logic or reason your way out of every problem.  It becomes necessary to engage with other people who possess knowledge and insight that we do not.  It is also easy therefore to argue that the only reason the unconscious mind would alter a memory is because it was something you alone could not process.  If that is the case then it is reasonable to conclude that whether or not you could overcome it once revealed would entirely depend on who you engage with now and whether or not it would be something they could process.  Again this comes back to a question of faith, whether you believe the person who wants to help you restore the memory could actually "fix" whatever problems arise because of it being restored.

The fact that those with false memories are often completely unaware of that fact brings up an interesting question.  You sit reading this post and have memories of your life.  If any of those memories turned out to be untrue, altered long ago by your unconscious mind, would you actually want to know what the real memory was?