When you go through an experience, it’s tempting to think that the events get stored in your brain and then, when you want to recall those events, you look up the memory and play it back, a little like a video recording of what happened.
However, psychologists have recognised for a long time that this isn’t how memory works.
Way back in the 1930s, the British psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett asked volunteers to recall a Native American story called The War of The Ghosts repeatedly over weeks and months.
He found that the story morphed on each re-telling, becoming less supernatural and more straightforward in its structure (more like a conventional Western-style story). By the end, the participants weren’t remembering the original story, but their memory of the story.
More modern research has backed this up. For instance, in one lab experiment, participants recalled the location of objects shown against a background on a computer screen.
Once they misremembered an object’s location on a new background, that error then became baked in. From that point on, they remembered it being in the mistaken position, even when tested against the first background.
The reason this happens is because memory is a reconstructive process, and during this period of reconstruction, the memory is highly malleable – or what psychologists call ‘labile’.
Each time you invoke a memory, you’re not simply taking a file out of an archive, you’re writing and editing that file anew – potentially incorporating new information or beliefs – and then it gets stored again. It becomes a memory of a memory, if you will.
Take an event like your memory of your first day of school. What this reconstructive process means is that when you recall that momentous day, your recollection is no longer based entirely on the original experience.
Any time you recalled that day previously, you may have unintentionally edited the memory – perhaps based on your later experiences at the school.
If you went on to have a wonderful time at the school, the memory of the first day might now be infused with rosy mood music; if you went on to hate the school, that might lend a foreboding atmosphere to that first-day memory.
The malleability of memory can be a little disconcerting to consider, but there’s also an upside, because it gives us an opportunity to edit distressing memories and to unlearn our fears.
For instance, there’s a process called ‘retrieval-induced forgetting’ which refers to the fact that when you recall a memory and you choose to focus on certain aspects of it, the parts that you neglect become weaker.
A study published in October 2025 showed how it’s possible to exploit this process to overcome fears based on past negative experiences.
Say you had a bad time at a job interview – by taking a moment to relive the experience but focusing only on the things that went well, you’ll weaken your memory of the bad bits, potentially boosting your confidence for next time.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Molly Tucker, Preston) 'Do we really remember and event, or just the memory of an event?'
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