Fallibility of memory

Now, from the NYTimes, this article supports some of our previous reading and work on reflection.  Some choices quotes:

• Yet scientists have long cautioned that the brain is not a filing cabinet, storing memories in a way that they can be pulled out, consulted and returned intact. Memory is not so much a record of the past as a rough sketch that can be modified even by the simple act of telling the story.
• Why is a witness’s account so often unreliable? Partly because the brain does not have a knack for retaining many specifics and is highly susceptible to suggestion. “Memory is weak in eyewitness situations because it’s overloaded,” said Barbara Tversky, a psychology professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York ... Hundreds of studies have cataloged a long list of circumstances that can affect how memories are recorded and replayed, including the emotion at the time of the event, the social pressures that taint its reconstruction, even flourishes unknowingly added after the fact ...While most of us tend to think memory works like a video recorder, it is actually more like a grainy slide show. Lost details, including imaginary ones, often are added later. 
• Sometimes we miss details because we weren’t paying attention, but sometimes we are concentrating too hard on something else. Nothing is as obvious as it seems.
• Whether in a story told in a courtroom or at a dinner table, the mind is sometimes prone to blur the distinction between reality and fantasy. Brain scans taken as people “recall” something they did not actually see have many similarities to the brain dwelling on an actual memory ... “That’s one of the striking findings of the studies,” said Daniel Schacter, a psychology professor at Harvard. Whether an event is real or imagined, “many structures involved in the coding and retrieving are the same" ... All this makes sense, he said, when you consider the purpose of memory. He and his colleagues believe that memory is designed not just to keep track of what has happened, but to offer a script for something that might.
• Because the brain uses memories for mental dress rehearsal, we are not wired to retain every facet of an event, scientists say. We don’t have to. A general framework is all that’s necessary to keep from getting lost, or find food, or know what to do when a storm is coming.