* No doubt you are still making a great improvement compared to simply relying on your memory.
* Although the experimental result is framed in terms of "false memories", I interpret it as "seeing what your brain expected to see". This is nothing new!
* It is worth recording your perceptions even if they're clouded by your expectations and preconceptions. You're recording your conscious experience. This is a valuable thing.
* The act of sitting down and writing out thoughts, feelings or memories is a mindful, peaceful and fulfilling experience that cannot easily be replaced. Simply putting words on a page (digitally or physically) often causes me to instinctively take a braoder perspective of them.
I resolved to try and not live in my own world so much... After I shredded my old diary entries.
I would be extremely cautious drawing that conclusion just on the basis of this study. They were experimenting with recalling letters. Further research needs to be done to see what kinds of memories are affected by this and how. I still think writing a diary is important and valuable, it's just maybe not an infallible perfect record. It's certainly 100000% better than whatever phantom you now retain as a memory of an event 20 years later.
For me, it implies that we need to be aware of our biases and how they can affect how we interpret and remember an event. So instead of not writing a diary at all, I'd suggest continuing to write a diary and when writing also reflecting on your possible preconceptions/biases.
> Of course, this is only one study, involving a piece of knowledge that’s strongly reinforced throughout our lives (letters). So Otten and her team hope to keep testing the fallibility of short-term memory in other ways.
> Do the expectations that we have about people based on, for example, their gender, almost immediately start shaping what we remember about, say, their voice or facial expression? Or do I after only a few seconds start slightly misremembering certain data-representations, because it does not fit my beliefs about, say, climate change?” she said. “This is obviously a bit more complicated to explore than just asking people to look at a display of 6 letterlike items, but I look forward to exploring this further.”
I don't understand why people take one study and then use that as absolute truth about a general thing even though that single study only studied a tiny part of it.
It can still mitigate some of it, of course, but I still find it a bit unnerving that even my short term memory is prone to making stuff up. Before, I had always imagined that this phenomenon was strictly related to the retrieval process of long term memories, and could therefore be avoided by writing things down the day they happened.