Our brains are meaning machines. What we understand as “meaning” is generated by the associations our brain makes between two or more experiences. We press a button, then we see a light go on; we assume the button caused the light to go on. This, at its core, is the basis of meaning. Button, light; light, button. We see a chair. We note that it’s gray. Our brain then draws the association between the color (gray) and the object (chair) and forms meaning: “The chair is gray.”
Our minds are constantly whirring, generating more and more associations to help us understand and control the environment around us. Everything about our experiences, both external and internal, generates new associations and connections within our minds. Everything from the words on this page, to the grammatical concepts you use to decipher them, to the dirty thoughts your mind wanders into when my writing becomes boring or repetitive—each of these thoughts, impulses, and perceptions is composed of thousands upon thousands of neural connections, firing in conjunction, alighting your mind in a blaze of knowledge and understanding.
But there are two problems. First, the brain is imperfect. We mistake things we see and hear. We forget things or misinterpret events quite easily.
Second, once we create meaning for ourselves, our brains are designed to hold on to that meaning. We are biased toward the meaning our mind has made, and we don’t want to let go of it. Even if we see evidence that contradicts the meaning we created, we often ignore it and keep on believing anyway.
The comedian Emo Philips once said, “I used to think the human brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.” The unfortunate fact is, most of what we come to “know” and believe is the product of the innate inaccuracies and biases present in our brains. Many or even most of our values are products of events that are not representative of the world at large, or are the result of a totally misconceived past.
The result of all this? Most of our beliefs are wrong. Or, to be more exact, all beliefs are wrong—some are just less wrong than others. The human mind is a jumble of inaccuracy. And while this may make you uncomfortable, it’s an incredibly important concept to accept, as we’ll see.
Be Careful What You Believe
In 1988, while in therapy, the journalist and feminist author Meredith Maran came to a startling realization: her father had sexually abused her as a child. It was a shock to her, a repressed memory she had spent most of her adult life oblivious to. But at the age of thirty-seven, she confronted her father and also told her family what had happened.
Meredith’s news horrified her entire family. Her father immediately denied having done anything. Some family members sided with Meredith. Others sided with her father. The family tree was split in two. And the pain that had defined Meredith’s relationship with her father since long before her accusation now spread like a mold across its branches. It tore everyone apart.
Then, in 1996, Meredith came to another startling realization: her father actually hadn’t sexually abused her. (I know: oops.) She, with the help of a well-intentioned therapist, had actually invented the memory. Consumed by guilt, she spent the rest of her father’s life attempting to reconcile with him and other family members through constant apologizing and explaining. But it was too late. Her father passed away and her family would never be the same.
It turned out Meredith wasn’t alone. As she describes in her autobiography, My Lie: A True Story of False Memory, throughout the 1980s, many women accused male family members of sexual abuse only to turn around and recant years later. Similarly, there was a whole swath of people who claimed during that same decade that there were satanic cults abusing children, yet despite police investigations in dozens of cities, police never found any evidence of the crazy practices described.
Why were people suddenly inventing memories of horrible abuse in families and cults? And why was it all happening then, in the 1980s?
Ever play the telephone game as a kid? You know, you say something in one person’s ear and it gets passed through like ten people, and what the last person hears is completely unrelated to what you started with? That’s basically how our memories work.
We experience something. Then we remember it slightly differently a few days later, as if it had been whispered and misheard. Then we tell somebody about it and have to fill in a couple of the plot holes with our own embellishments to make sure everything makes sense and we’re not crazy. And then we come to believe those little filled-in mental gaps, and so we tell those the next time too. Except they’re not real, so we get them a little bit wrong. And we’re drunk one night a year later when we tell the story, so we embellish it a little bit more—okay, let’s be honest, we completely make up about one-third of it. But when we’re sober the next week, we don’t want to admit that we’re a big fat liar, so we go along with the revised and newly expanded drunkard version of our story. And five years later, our absolutely, swear-to-god, swear-on-my-mother’s-grave, truer-than-true story is at most 50 percent true.
We all do this. You do. I do. No matter how honest and well-intentioned we are, we’re in a perpetual state of misleading ourselves and others for no other reason than that our brain is designed to be efficient, not accurate.
Not only does our memory suck—suck to the point that eyewitness testimony isn’t necessarily taken seriously in court cases—but our brain functions in a horribly biased way.
How so? Well, our brain is always trying to make sense of our current situation based on what we already believe and have already experienced. Every new piece of information is measured against the values and conclusions we already have. As a result, our brain is always biased toward what we feel to be true in that moment. So when we have a great relationship with our sister, we’ll interpret most of our memories about her in a positive light. But when the relationship sours, we’ll often come to see those exact same memories differently, reinventing them in such a way as to explain our present-day anger toward her. That sweet gift she gave us last Christmas is now remembered as patronizing and condescending. That time she forgot to invite us to her lake house is now seen not as an innocent mistake but as horrible negligence.
Meredith’s fake abuse story makes far more sense when we understand the values in which her beliefs arose. First of all, Meredith had had a strained and difficult relationship with her father throughout most of her life. Second, Meredith had had a series of failed intimate relationships with men, including a failed marriage.
So already, in terms of her values, “close relationships with men” weren’t doing so hot.
Then, in the early 1980s, Meredith became a radical feminist and began doing research into child abuse. She was confronted with horrific story after horrific story of abuse, and she dealt with incest survivors—usually little girls—for years on end. She also reported extensively on a number of inaccurate studies that came out around that time—studies that it later turned out grossly overestimated the prevalence of child molestation. (The most famous study reported that a third of adult women had been sexually molested as children, a number that has since been shown to be false.)