Those Memories of Disney World

Remember your childhood visit to Disney World?

Cinderella's castle glistening, the cartoon characters laughing, grouping for photos, the many rides with their height requirements, the smells of freshly cooked food, and Bugs Bunny shaking your hand?  As you bring that experience to mind, you may have the feeling you are reliving it, seeing your childhood pass through your mind's eye, much like reviewing a videotape.

But the way human memory works is very different from that of a video tape recorder—our memories are actually reconstructions of bits and pieces of information we have obtained over time.

Sometimes those reconstructions are very similar to what we experienced; other times we are "tricked" and remember things differently than how they actually happened.

In Fact, Most of what you recall didn't happen. 

False Brain Information and Your Diet Plan

A while back I wrote up a post about the Malable Variance of Time, where I showed how inaccurate our minds can be on a given topic which -- for the most part-- has been exactly the same from the day we were born. We have a ton of awareness experience with time, and it would seem on the surface that we should be pretty good at guessing how long we have been waiting for an event to occur. But we're not. We suck at recalling amounts of time something has been going ont, or how long we have been waiting on it to happen, or how long it has been since it happened last.

In this post we are going to look at how easy it is for our minds to tell us that what we are eating is just fine, and that simply putting a beer into a short round mug, instead of a tall thin mug wouldn't possibly be a factor in consuming nearly twice as much as we think we did. That would be silly. Right?  --- At least you can be of comfort in knowing that I'm just as suseptable to this as you are. Because Knowing about it won't stop it from happening to you.