Professor Bridget Robinson-Riegler spoke with WCCO-TV about how humans recall their memories for the news station’s Good Question segment. Robinson-Riegler, who teaches in the College’s psychology department, explained to television viewers that its common for individuals to have mismemories. She commented that memories are not like tape recorders in that people replay them exactly as they happened. Instead, memories are reconstructed, so when the brain encodes memories, it encodes different pieces of different events.
“When we go to recall it, we piece together different aspects of events,” Robinson-Riegler said. “It’s not just the event that happened we’re trying to remember but other events similar to it.”
Watch “Good Question: How Do Our Memories Work?” to learn more.