Imperfect memory benefits may help protect well-being, psychologist says

Imperfect memory benefits may include more than forgetting awkward moments, psychologist Gillian Murphy wrote in The Conversation. Murphy, who studies what people remember and misremember, argues that some everyday distortions help people preserve a stable, positive sense of self.

The point matters as phones, wearables and AI assistants make it easier to store, search and resurface years of personal data. Murphy says human memory is selective and reconstructive, while many digital tools are built around preserving and presenting as much as possible.

Why can imperfect memory be helpful?

Imperfect memory can be helpful because people often reshape past experiences in ways that fit who they are now and protect well-being, according to Murphy. That does not make memory errors harmless in every setting, but it suggests accuracy is not the only useful feature of remembering.

Murphy points to a 1996 U.S. study of former students asked to recall 3,220 high school grades. The study found A grades were remembered accurately 89% of the time, while D grades were remembered accurately 29% of the time; when people made errors, they usually recalled the grades as better than they were.

A 2006 study found a similar pattern after cholesterol screening, Murphy wrote. Months later, many participants remembered lower cholesterol readings than they had received, especially those whose actual results had been highest.

Murphy says positive memory biases tend to become more common with age and may help explain research linking older age with higher well-being. Courts, hospitals and other high-stakes settings are different: inaccurate eyewitness testimony is the leading factor in wrongful convictions later overturned by the Innocence Project, she noted.

How memory supports identity

Murphy cites the late British psychologist Martin Conway’s self-memory system, which describes autobiographical memory as a system that helps maintain a coherent and generally positive identity. Under that view, memory is not a mental archive that stores events unchanged; it is rebuilt around current beliefs, goals and feelings.

Psychologist Linda Levine and colleagues found evidence for that process in a 2010 study of memories about reactions to the O.J. Simpson trial, according to Murphy. As people’s views of the killing shifted, they tended to remember their earlier reactions as closer to their current beliefs than they had been.

Relationships may also benefit from memory’s flexibility. Murphy cites a 20-year longitudinal study in which satisfied spouses often remembered the early years of their marriages as less happy than they had reported at the time, creating a sense that the relationship had improved; that pattern predicted later relationship satisfaction.

Depression shows the other side of the pattern, Murphy wrote. Research suggests people with depression often show less of the positive bias seen in everyday remembering, which may make their memories more faithful to past events but less supportive of hope and well-being.

What does AI change about remembering?

Murphy says modern memory tools raise new questions because they can preserve and resurface material that human memory might otherwise soften or let fade. Phones store large photo collections, fitness watches record health and activity data, and AI assistants can search and summarize years of messages, images and calendar entries.

She also points to highly superior autobiographical memory, a rare condition in which people can recall decades of life in unusual detail. Some people with the condition describe vivid, involuntary remembering as exhausting and say it can make negative experiences harder to leave behind, Murphy wrote.

Technology can produce a related problem in grief, she added, when platforms unexpectedly show photos, birthdays or posts connected to someone who has died. Murphy does not argue that apps should rewrite the past, but says designers and users should give more weight to the strengths of human memory’s selectivity, including its ability to reorganize experience over time.

This story draws on original reporting from Medical Xpress.