Think back to your time at school. Were you hard-working, popular, anxious? And what exam grades did you get? Now, imagine someone pulls out your school reports from that time. How closely would they match the results you just brought to mind?
If your recollections match exactly, you might congratulate yourself on having an excellent memory. But as a psychologist who has spent years researching what people remember – and misremember – my work often challenges the idea that the “best” memory is always the most accurate one.
In fact, some of the distortions commonly regarded as memory failures may be signs of a healthy and adaptive memory system. In many aspects of life, research suggests people misremember their past in predictable, self-protective ways, reshaping experiences to support their current, positive sense of self.
For example, a 1996 US study investigated how former pupils recalled 3,220 high-school grades. The study found they accurately remembered A grades 89% of the time, but D grades only 29%. Most of the errors saw grades misremembered as higher, suggesting many people carried with them an illusion of better academic performance.
Similarly, participants in a 2006 study underwent cholesterol screening, then were followed up months later to see how accurately they remembered the results. Most recalled having lower-than-reality cholesterol, especially those with the highest readings.
Positive memory biases such as these generally become more common as we get older. This is theorised to contribute to the well-documented positive relationship between age and wellbeing. And yet this kind of memory distortion is often regarded as a failure.
In law courts, hospitals and other high-stakes settings, of course, such errors can have serious consequences. For example, inaccurate eyewitness testimony is the leading contributor to wrongful convictions overturned by the Innocence Project.
But in everyday life, memory’s flexibility – and fallibility – are central to how it helps us survive and thrive. Memory is not a recording device. It is selective, reconstructive and shaped by what matters to us now.
So, what if today’s “total recall” technology is creating a memory system we do not need or benefit from?
The benefits of on imperfect memory
According to the late British psychologist Martin Conway’s self-memory system, autobiographical memory is not simply a storehouse of past events. It is a system that maintains a sense of self that is coherent, stable and generally positive.
Thus, when knowledge or feelings change over time, people often reconstruct memories to be more consistent with their present selves.
Psychologist Linda Levine and colleagues found this in a 2010 study of people’s memories of their reactions to the O.J. Simpson trial. As opinions about the killing changed over time, people tended to remember their original reactions as being closer to their current beliefs than they really were.
Many long-term relationships benefit from partners having imperfect, evolving memories. In a 20-year longitudinal study, satisfied spouses often remembered the earlier stages of their marriage as less happy than they had reported at the time, creating an illusion of improvement that predicted future relationship satisfaction. Certainly, long-term love would be difficult if couples retained every slight and badly phrased sentence in perfect detail.
Depression offers a revealing contrast. Compared with non-depressed individuals, people with depression often show less of the positive bias that characterises everyday remembering.
A memory system that is less inclined to soften failures, reinterpret setbacks or highlight positive experiences may be more faithful to the past. But it can also make it harder to maintain wellbeing and hope for the future.
A form of memory we may not want
This is why modern technology raises difficult questions. Much of our digital world is built on the assumption that more memory is better memory. Phones preserve thousands of images. Fitness watches record steps, sleep, heart rate and calories.
The arrival of AI assistants may further accelerate this shift, as systems that can instantly search, summarise and re-present years of messages and photographs influence how we remember.
There is some evidence that more remembering is not always better. People with the very rare condition of highly superior autobiographical memory can recall extraordinary detail from decades of their lives. However, many describe the experience as exhausting, with memories resurfacing vividly and involuntarily – making it much harder to move on from negative life events.
We are beginning to see examples of how technology-supported remembering can produce similar consequences, particularly in the context of grief, where platforms unexpectedly resurface photographs, birthdays or posts from people who have died.
AI systems can create intimate forms of digital remembering. Imagine asking an AI assistant what your relationship was like three years ago and receiving a summary generated from thousands of messages, photographs and calendar entries.
Humans have always used tools to remember, from diaries and monuments to photographs, songs and stories. The issue with today’s digital tools is that they are designed around a narrow philosophy of memory: preserve everything, quantify everything, resurface everything. But human memory did not evolve to preserve everything, or remember everything exactly as it happened.
This is not to say that technology should distort or rewrite the past. Most of us would not download a health app that invents flattering data for emotional convenience. But I believe we all need to give more consideration to the so-called imperfections of human memory – its selectivity, malleability, and capacity to soften, reorganise and reinterpret the past.
For centuries, people have designed technologies to compensate for memory’s weaknesses. We may now be building technologies that remove some of its strengths.
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Gillian Murphy’s research is currently funded by the European Research Council, Lero (the Irish Centre for Software Research) and Rinn AI. Gillian is co-author of Memory Lane: The Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember (Princeton University Press, 2025).
