Our memories are funny. On one hand they have the ability to record petabytes of data, and on the other hand we forget most of what happens to us during the day. In this video I discuss five ways in which our memories let us down, and some suggestions from the world of science on how we can improve them.

Click the link below if you'd like to access resources for teaching and learning critical thinking skills in the science classroom:

Critical Thinking Resources - https://www.thesciencelens.com/resour...

Or this link if you'd like to know more about the services that I offer - https://www.thesciencelens.com/servic...

Special thanks go to Khalil and @PascoCountyLibraries for all of the help and resources they provided for this video. You’re providing a wonderful service to your community!

Notes and Additional Resources:

Here are some sites that go over the idea of how we can improve our memories using brain training:

Scientific American - https://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...
New Scientist - https://www.newscientist.com/round-up...|NSNS|2018-inlinelink_intro&utm_medium=PAC&utm_source=NSNS&utm_campaign=inlinelink_intro
Psychology Today - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/bl...

I’ve found The Decision Lab an incredibly useful resource when it comes to cognitive biases. Here are the pages that helped me with today’s video but I recommend you spend a good bit of time going through their site:

Source Confusion - https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/sou...
Hindsight Bias - https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/hin...
Rosy Retrospection - https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/ros...
The Google Effect - https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/goo...

This site has an example of when source confusion played a role in a witness providing false testimony - https://www.spring.org.uk/2023/01/mis...
Another piece on the effect of source confusion on eyewitness testimony - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8064252/

Some other sources on how our memories are unreliable:

Psychology Today - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/bl....
CNN - https://www.cnn.com/2013/05/18/health...
Very Well Mind - https://www.verywellmind.com/how-do-f...
Scientific American - https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...
Another from Scientific American - https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...
New Scientist - https://www.newscientist.com/article/...

Even though I misspoke in the video and said that they were ‘all’ of the ways that memory is unreliable, there are many, many more. Check out this source for a list of others:
https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontop...

And finally, just to balance things out a touch, here is an article about how our memories are in some ways better than we might think - https://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...

Music Credits

‘Inspirational Background’ Music by Denys Kyshchuk from Pixabay -https://pixabay.com/users/audiocoffee...

‘Irreducible’ Music by ComaStudio from Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/users/comastudio-... If you like the intro track, you should consider signing up to Yrii Semchyshyn's Patreon at -   / yuriisemchyshyn  

Background Video Clip

‘Space’ Video by Tomislav Jakupec from Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/users/tommyvideo-...