Personal memory: Is it personal, is it memory?

Recollection of personal events is a major activity of the human mind and is considered essential for maintaining the cohesiveness of the self-concept. Yet evidence from cognitive psychology and brain research converge to raise doubts concerning the veridicality of the events recalled. Furthermore, even information encoded and recalled correctly seems to be prone to significant and long-lasting distortion by exposure to new input at the time of retrieval. A major source of such new input is inter-personal. From early infancy, we tend to look to others as a primary source of information and may reevaluate our own perceptions, preferences, and memories when they contradict a larger consensus. Circuits in our brain can modify our memory in response to such information even under conditions in which our original memory is accurate and our confidence is strong. Part of what we believe we know is in fact a product of the amalgamation of the internal representations originating in multiple brains. Personal memory may hence be considered conceptually as a node in a highly distributed multi-dimensional memory space, in which the contribution of the individual is only part of an informational syncytium that transcends the personal. This may provide our species with a phylogenetic advantage ensuring that, on one hand, accumulated information can be fitted to the real-time requirements of the locale, but on the other hand, that the storage capacity and availability of information markedly exceeds the capacity and the life span of the individual brain. In consequence, however, individuals may be unreliable narrators of their own history.