Stealing The Past': A Spat Between Twins Leads To A Theory Of Disputed Memories

This episode explores the phenomenon of disputed memories among siblings, particularly focusing on identical twins, and how these disagreements can shape personal identity.

1. Disputed memories are a common phenomenon, especially among identical twins.
2. Memories are not static files retrieved from our brains but are reconstructed and can be influenced by current needs or contexts.
3. The concept of disputed memories has significant implications for fields like psychology and legal studies, particularly in how eyewitness testimonies are viewed.
4. Personal memories play a crucial role in shaping our identities and interpersonal relationships.
5. Understanding the fluid nature of memory can help in mitigating conflicts and improving self-awareness.

1: Introduction

Emily Kwong introduces the topic of disputed memories among siblings, particularly focusing on twins. She shares a personal anecdote involving her sister, setting the stage for the discussion.
Emily Kwong: "And she used to call me enemy. Oddly, she couldn't pronounce my name, enemy instead of Emily."

2: Mercedes Sheen's Research

Gabriel Spitzer outlines Mercedes Sheen's academic journey and her research into disputed memories, explaining how she developed a new framework for understanding these phenomena.
Gabriel Spitzer: "These days, Mercedes Sheen's a professor of psychology at Harriet Watt University in Dubai."

3: Exploring Memory Mechanics

The episode delves into the mechanics of memory, explaining how memories are constructed and the role of various neural networks.
Charles Ferniho: "It takes all those different kinds of information spread across all those different bits of the brain, and it puts them together right here, right now."

4: Implications of Disputed Memories

Discussion on how the understanding of disputed memories impacts broader psychological and legal perspectives, emphasizing the fallibility of human memory.
Mercedes Sheen: "You think about eyewitness testimony. They're the most convincing in court... And they're often incorrect."

1. Recognize the Subjectivity of Memories: Understand that memories are subjective and can differ between individuals experiencing the same event.
2. Embrace Memory Flexibility: Accept that memories are reconstructed, not replayed, which can help in resolving disputes.
3. Communicate Openly: Encourage open discussions about differing memories without asserting one's version as the absolute truth.
4. Document Important Events: Keep journals or photos which can help anchor memories and provide a reference point for shared events.
5. Consult Professionals if Needed: In cases of frequent or distressful memory disputes, consider consulting a psychological expert.

It's not unusual for siblings to quibble over ownership of something — a cherished toy, a coveted seat in the car — or whose fault something is. If you're Mercedes Sheen, you not only spent your childhood squabbling with your sister over your memories, you then turn it into your research career. Mercedes studies disputed memories, where it's unclear who an event happened to. It turns out these memories can tell us a lot about people — they tend to be self-aggrandizing — and how the human brain remembers things.

People

Mercedes Sheen, Emily Kwong, Gabriel Spitzer, Charles Ferniho

Companies

Harriet Watt University

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

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Emily Kwong
You're listening to short wave from NPR.

Hey, shortwavers. Emily Kwong here. And riding shotgun with me today is our old pal and former shortwave editor, Gabriel Spitzer. Gabe, welcome back.

Gabriel Spitzer
Thanks, Emily. I am happy to be back.

Emily Kwong
All right, well, Gabriel, what is the news today? What do you got for us?

Gabriel Spitzer
Well, I and all of my colleagues on the science desk have been working on stories about the science of siblings. So what I'm bringing you today has to do with siblings and how they remember the old days. You know what I mean? Like, you have a sister, right?

Emily Kwong
I do, yes. I call her my best friend. Aw.

And she used to call me enemy. Oddly, she couldn't pronounce my name, enemy instead of Emily. Funny how Emily became enemy, huh?

Gabriel Spitzer
What's her name?

Emily Kwong
Amanda.

Gabriel Spitzer
Amanda. Okay. Have you and Amanda ever disagreed about a childhood memory? I don't know. Maybe one of you remembers and the other one doesn't or.

Emily Kwong
Oh, yeah, there is a memory. Okay. There was this time in our childhood home. There was some housework being done on the attic, and I wanted to go up there to explore, even though I had been told not to, but no one had told me why. Okay, so I go upstairs, and in Amanda's memory of the event, she followed me up there and witnessed as I fell through the, like, plaster drywall ceiling situation and was, like, hanging upside down from the ceiling in the living room. Caught it by my legs. It was very mission impossible.

But in my memory, Amanda was not even there. And she just heard the big crash. And we argue about it all the time.

Gabriel Spitzer
This is something that a lot of siblings go through. You might be, like, talking over the old days or whatever, and you find out that your memories don't totally line up. And so I wanted to introduce you to this woman who has had some disagreements with her identical twin sister.

The woman's name is Mercedes Sheen.

Mercedes Sheen
The best example is our first kiss. My first kiss. What I perceived to be my first kiss. And I remember my twin, michaela, would say, hey, no, no, no. That happened to me. That happened to me. We both felt that it was 100% us when the event could only have happened to one of us.

Gabriel Spitzer
This used to drive her absolutely up the wall, I bet.

Emily Kwong
Like laying claim to the same first kiss memory.

Gabriel Spitzer
Exactly. You know, sometimes it cut kind of deep.

Mercedes Sheen
You know, our memories tie us to our personal past.

This is us. And when someone kind of steals, in fact, my thesis was called stealing the past because it really feels like someone's taking your history from you. One could say that I took my arguments with my twin to a great extent by doing a PhD on it.

Emily Kwong
The ultimate twin vengeance. But seriously, it is a kind of identity theft when you claim someone's memory as your own. But now I'm wondering, like, how do you even know whose memory it is if you're both confused?

Gabriel Spitzer
Right. Right. And is it always the case that one is right and one is wrong? Or, you know, is there shades of gray here?

Charles Ferniho
Interesting.

Emily Kwong
Yeah.

Gabriel Spitzer
These days, Mercedes Sheen's a professor of psychology at Harriet Watt University in Dubai. And for that PhD thesis she talked about, she designed this whole series of experiments with identical twins to see if other pairs had the same kind of arguments that Mercedes and Mikyla had. And this would wind up leading to a whole new framework for thinking about these kinds of memories that's now widely used in the field.

Mercedes Sheen
We kind of created this new false memory phenomenon, never been discovered before or never been named as such. So we called it disputed memories.

Gabriel Spitzer
Disputed like disputed ownership of the memory, as in which twin did it happen to?

Emily Kwong
Today on the show, what happens when siblings disagree about who owns their shared past and what that can tell us about how the human brain remembers?

You're listening to shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

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Emily Kwong
Introduced us to psychologist Mercedes Sheen and her kind of analysis of this concept of disputed memories. So she mentioned one example of a disputed memory for her. Was her first kiss in dispute with her twin sister? Tell me you got her to spill the tea on this memory.

Gabriel Spitzer
She shared it very willingly. I think she's still annoyed.

Mercedes Sheen
So we were at summer camp in Canada, New Brunswick. We were walking up the hill, and this guy called Jeff Levitt, who was the camp catch, the most gorgeous guy at camp. He pulled me aside and pulled me into a bush and kissed me on the lips, like, very briefly.

Emily Kwong
Oh, all of a sudden. All right. Did she like that?

Gabriel Spitzer
Yeah, she was into it. And this was a really big deal for her. You know, it was her first kiss, and yet she did not tell Mikyla at first.

Mercedes Sheen
When I told her, like, six months later, she said, that was me. That was me. And I said, no, it wasn't. It was me.

Emily Kwong
It actually makes me worry that Jeff was kissing both twins.

Gabriel Spitzer
Uh huh. I wondered the same thing. Mercedes said that they actually stayed friends with Jeff for years afterwards and that he only remembers smooching one of them.

Emily Kwong
Okay, well, which one?

Mercedes Sheen
We asked him, and he said, I can't remember.

Gabriel Spitzer
And one thing that is so wild about this, Emily, is that both of them were so sure. So you still don't agree on whose memory it is?

Mercedes Sheen
No.

Gabriel Spitzer
How confident are you that it's yours?

Mercedes Sheen
100%.

Gabriel Spitzer
And how about your sister?

Mercedes Sheen
100%.

It's kind of bizarre to think that you have such a strong memory and, like, the sounds, the smells, and to think that it didn't happen, it kind of makes you think, well, wow. So what is real?

Emily Kwong
Well, here's the thing is, I always kind of knew memories were subjective, but this is like a whole different realm. This is like contested reality, you know?

Gabriel Spitzer
Right. That's exactly it. And because our memories are such, like, intimate part of our identity, we can get really kind of, like, defensive about it and very attached to our own way of thinking about it. And so Mercedes, when she was in graduate school and looking to do her PhD, she wound up going out to lunch with this researcher named David Rubin. She mentioned to him that she was an identical twin, and he was like, oh, do you have any weird memory things between twins? And she said, aha. As a matter of fact, I do. So what she did was, first she recruited a bunch of identical twins, and she figured out different ways to ask them. Do you have any memories that you don't agree whose it is?

Emily Kwong
I used.

Mercedes Sheen
I think 20 or 30 cue words. That sort of would cue everyday experiences like birthday, McDonald's, road trip. And just by asking them both to come up with a memory in response to those cue words, they just happened spontaneously.

Gabriel Spitzer
So once they found a disputed memory, the researchers would ask all these detailed questions, like, what do you remember seeing? What do you remember hearing? Do you see the memory from your own point of view or an observer's? And they found that in most cases, both twins were equally credible, even though the event could only have happened to one of them.

Emily Kwong
I'm just imagining all these twins leaving the research lab and fighting with each other, like, no, you messed up the study. No, you messed up the study, Emily.

Gabriel Spitzer
You're not wrong.

Mercedes Sheen
It's really interesting the way the arguments came out. And they all had the same types of arguments that I had had with my twin. So it was really like, no, you always do this. You steal my memories.

Emily Kwong
So how common is this among twins? And also just like, among siblings?

Gabriel Spitzer
Sure. Well, the effect was strongest between identical twins like Mercedes and Mikyla. But Mercedes did experiments later that showed that fraternal twins experienced this too, to a lesser extent, as do non twin, same sex siblings like you and your sister Amanda. And another thing that they found was that disputed memories tend to be self aggrandizing, like they paint the rememberer in a positive light or as the main character of the story.

Mercedes Sheen
Our memories are selective. Our memories are not a file that we pick out from our brain, they're reconstructions.

Emily Kwong
I'm interested in this idea. Can you say more like, our memory isn't a file we pick out from our brain? What's she mean by that?

Gabriel Spitzer
Yeah, this idea takes a little getting used to, I think. So I talked to another psychologist named Charles Ferniho at Durham University in the UK, and he said making long term memories is like a really complicated construction project.

Charles Ferniho
My dad used to say to me, if you've got a machine with many moving parts, like a car or whatever, there's just so many more ways it can go wrong. And memory is one of those machines with many moving parts.

Emily Kwong
But what kind of moving parts are we talking about?

Gabriel Spitzer
Well, Charles says that memories are made up of different kinds of information. There's, like, what actually happened? And then there's all your subjective sensory information, like what you saw, what you heard. And then there's something called semantic knowledge, meaning knowledge of how the world works. And all these things are run by different neural networks in the brain.

Charles Ferniho
It takes all those different kinds of information spread across all those different bits of the brain, and it puts them together right here, right now. When you're being asked to remember, it reconstructs a version of the past according to the demands of the present.

Gabriel Spitzer
Most of this is completely unconscious, but there's this tendency, depending on what the context is, that you're remembering the thing in. If it would benefit you to remember it a certain way, then that's the shape the memory often takes.

Emily Kwong
We are such unreliable narrators.

Gabriel Spitzer
Indeed.

Emily Kwong
And I can now see why, on a neurological level, the brain might get it wrong sometimes. If you're saying this is all happening through different neural networks, it's almost like not our fault.

Gabriel Spitzer
It is very much about the architecture of our brain, and it's not your fault. I mean, each time you go through the process, when your brain's whole, like, Rube Goldberg machine gets going and you reconstruct a memory, it's a different self that's remembering each time. So the result could be a little different.

Emily Kwong
So if we tend to remember things incorrectly or in a way that suits our best interests, and we can be so certain and our minds can't tell the difference, I mean, it just makes me think about all the controversy over, like, courtroom testimony, right, and how reliable people's memories actually are. Even if they're completely sincere, that that is what they remember. They could be totally wrong.

Gabriel Spitzer
That is a really apt comparison, Emily. And it's actually one of the reasons why Mercedes work is so important.

Mercedes Sheen
You think about eyewitness testimony. They're the most convincing in court. You say, I remember it. I remember looking at his hair. I remember seeing it. And they're often incorrect.

Emily Kwong
Right. These, like, sensory details are what crop up even if they're not true.

Gabriel Spitzer
Exactly. And there's decades of research behind this now.

Mercedes Sheen
And these are the qualities that twins often use to say, this is my memory. I remember ice cream melting in my hair. I remember the humiliation. I remember the sound it made or the smell of fire burning. All these qualities that are used in eyewitness testimony are also used between twins when they want to argue about their memories.

Emily Kwong
That's hilarious. It's also very unnerving. Just like, you know, human to human, right?

Gabriel Spitzer
I mean, it's like Mercedes said earlier, you know, what is real? And really, it goes even further through the looking glass.

Mercedes Sheen
I did a study once on the confusion between real and dreamt experiences. And actually, people can sometimes think you dream something because you have so much imagery involved with dreams, you can actually remember it as a real event.

Emily Kwong
So given all of this. And like, what can we hold, hold onto? When it comes to memory?

Gabriel Spitzer
I think the first step is kind of letting go of this idea that memory is just like pulling a file from an archive. That researcher from the UK, Charles Ferniho, made this point.

Charles Ferniho
People often, including me, get really confused about whether they're remembering an event or whether they're remembering seeing a photograph of an event.

And that's the problem with memory. We're never remembering the thing, pure and simple. We're always remembering a version of a version. It's always a memory of a memory.

Emily Kwong
Everyone misremembers, and we all should stand to remember that.

Gabriel Spitzer
One nice thing is that all the complexity that is at fault for those mistakes is actually the result of a long evolutionary journey that gets us to a place where our brains are pretty good at remembering the important stuff, or at least the gist of it.

Emily Kwong
Gabriel Spitzer, thank you so much for.

Gabriel Spitzer
Coming on the show, Emily. It was my pleasure.

Emily Kwong
Gabriel Spitzer edits and reports for NPR's Science desk and is the former senior editor of Shorewave. You can hear his story about another pair of sisters with mismatched memories and the rest of NPR's incredible series on the science of siblings. At the link in our episode notes, scroll, scroll, scroll and click on that.

This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and Burleigh McCoy. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and fact checked by Gabriel Spitzer. Robert Rodriguez was the audio engineer. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to short wave from NPR.

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Mercedes Sheen
I really felt like the cloud in my brain kind of dissipated once I started realizing what a difference these little bricks were making. There's no turning back from me.

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