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at Let'sMakeaPlan.org. You're

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listening to Shortwave from

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NPR. Hey,

0:30

Shortwave-ers, Emily Kwang here. And riding

0:33

shotgun with me today is our

0:35

old pal and former Shortwave editor,

0:37

Gabriel Spitzer. Gabe, welcome back. Thanks,

0:40

Emily. I am happy to be back. All

0:43

right, well, Gabriel, what is the news today? What do you

0:45

got for us? Well, I and all of

0:47

my colleagues on the science desk have been

0:49

working on stories about the science of siblings.

0:51

So what I'm bringing you today has to

0:53

do with siblings and how they remember the

0:55

old days. You know what I mean? Like,

0:57

you have a sister, right? I do.

0:59

Yes, I call her my best friend. And

1:02

she used to call me

1:05

enemy, oddly. She

1:07

couldn't pronounce my name. Enemy

1:09

instead of Emily. Funny how Emily became

1:11

enemy, huh? What's her name? Amanda. Amanda,

1:13

okay. Have you and Amanda ever, like,

1:16

disagreed about a childhood memory? I don't know. Maybe

1:18

you want to be remembered as the other one

1:21

doesn't? Oh, yeah. There

1:23

is a memory. Okay, there was this

1:25

time in our childhood home,

1:27

there was some housework being done on the attic. And

1:30

I wanted to go up there to explore,

1:32

even though I had been told not to.

1:34

But no one had told me why. Okay.

1:36

So I go upstairs and in

1:40

Amanda's memory of the event, she

1:42

followed me up there and

1:44

witnessed as I fell through

1:46

the, like, plaster

1:48

drywall ceiling situation and

1:50

was, like, hanging

1:52

upside down from the ceiling in the living room,

1:55

caught it by my legs. It was very Mission Impossible. But

1:59

in my memory, Amanda. was not even

2:01

there and she just like heard the big

2:03

crash and we argue about it all the time.

2:05

This is something that a lot of siblings go

2:08

through. You might be like talking over the old

2:10

days or whatever and you find out that your

2:12

memories don't totally line up. And

2:14

so I wanted to introduce you to

2:17

this woman who has had some disagreements

2:19

with her identical twin sister. The

2:22

woman's name is Mercedes Sheen. The best example

2:24

is our first kiss. My first kiss, what

2:26

I perceived to be my first kiss and

2:28

I remember my twin, Mikala, would say, hey,

2:30

no, no, no, that happened to me. That

2:32

happened to me. We both felt

2:34

that it was 100% us when the event

2:36

could only have happened to one of us. This used

2:39

to drive her absolutely up the wall. I

2:41

bet. Like laying claim to the same first

2:43

kiss memory? Exactly. You know, sometimes

2:45

it cut kind of deep. You

2:47

know, our memories tie us to our personal past

2:49

or this is us and when someone kind

2:51

of steals, in fact, my thesis was called

2:53

stealing the past because it really feels

2:56

like someone's taking your history from you. One

2:58

could say that I took my arguments with my twin

3:00

to a great extent by doing a PhD on it.

3:04

The ultimate twin vengeance. But seriously, it is

3:06

a kind of identity theft when you claim

3:08

someone's memory is your own. But now I'm

3:10

wondering like, how do you even know whose memory

3:12

it is? If you're both confused. Right.

3:14

Right. And is it always the case that one

3:16

is right and one is wrong or, you know,

3:18

is there shades gray here? So

3:21

these days Mercedes Sheen's a professor

3:23

of psychology at Harriet Watt University

3:25

in Dubai. And for

3:27

that PhD thesis she talked about, she

3:29

designed this whole series of experiments with

3:31

identical twins to see if

3:34

other pairs have the same kind of arguments

3:36

that Mercedes and Michaela had. And

3:38

this would wind up leading to a whole new

3:40

framework for thinking about these kinds of memories that's

3:42

now, you know, widely used in the field.

3:45

We kind of created this new false

3:47

memory phenomenon had never been discovered before

3:49

or never been named as such. So

3:51

we called it disputed memories, disputed, like

3:54

disputed ownership of the memory as in

3:56

which twin did it happen to today

3:58

on the show. So what happens

4:01

when siblings disagree about who owns their

4:03

shared past? And what

4:05

that can tell us about how the human brain

4:08

remembers? You're listening

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5:01

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5:07

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go to cancer.org. Okay,

5:22

Gabriel Spitzer, you just introduced

5:24

us to psychologist Mercedes Sheen

5:26

and her kind

5:29

of analysis of this concept of

5:31

disputed memories. So she mentioned one

5:33

example of a disputed memory for

5:36

her with her first kiss in

5:39

dispute with her twin sister. Tell me you

5:41

got her to spill the tea on

5:43

this memory. She shared it

5:45

very willingly. I think she's still annoyed.

5:48

So we were at Camp

5:50

Summer Camp in Canada, New Brunswick. We

5:52

were walking up the hill and this guy called

5:54

Jeff Levitt who was the most gorgeous

5:56

guy at camp, he pulled me aside and pulled me into

5:59

a bush. and kiss me on the

6:01

lips like very briefly. No, all

6:03

of a sudden. All right, did she

6:05

like that? Yeah, she was into it. And

6:08

this was a really big deal for her. It was her first

6:10

kiss. And yet she did not

6:12

tell M'Kyla at first. When

6:14

I told her like six months later, she

6:16

said, that was me, that was me. And

6:18

I said, no, it wasn't, it was me.

6:20

It actually makes me worry that Jeff was

6:22

kissing both twins. Uh-huh, I wanted

6:24

the same thing. Mercedes said that they

6:26

actually stayed friends with Jeff for years

6:29

afterwards and that he only remembers smooching

6:31

one of them. Okay, well, which one?

6:33

They asked him and he said, I can't remember.

6:37

And one thing that is so wild about this,

6:39

Emily, is that both of them

6:41

were so sure. So you still don't

6:43

agree on whose memory it is? No. How

6:46

confident are you that it's yours? And

6:49

how about your sister? It's

6:53

kind of bizarre to think that you

6:55

have such a strong memory and like the sounds,

6:57

the smells. To

6:59

think that it didn't happen, it kind of makes you

7:02

think, wow, wow, so what is real? Here's

7:04

the thing, is I always kind of knew

7:06

memories were subjective, but this is like a

7:08

whole different realm. This is

7:11

like contested reality. Right,

7:13

that's exactly it. And because our memories

7:15

are such like an intimate part of

7:18

our identity, we can get really kind

7:20

of like defensive about it and

7:22

very attached to our own way of

7:24

thinking about it. And so, Mercedes, when

7:27

she was in graduate school and looking

7:29

to do her PhD, she wound up

7:31

going out to lunch with this researcher

7:33

named David Rubin. She mentioned to

7:36

him that she was an identical twin and he

7:38

was like, oh, do you have any like weird

7:40

memory things between twins? And she said, aha, as

7:42

a matter of fact, I do. So

7:44

what she did was first she recruited

7:47

a bunch of identical twins and she

7:49

figured out different ways to ask them,

7:51

do you have any memories that you don't agree

7:53

who's it is? I used I think 20 or

7:55

30 Q words that sort

7:58

of would cue everyday experience. Like

8:00

birthday you Mcdonalds road trip and just

8:02

by asking them both Map. Of the

8:04

memories in response to those keywords,

8:07

They just happen spontaneously. So.

8:09

Once they found a disputed memory, the researchers

8:11

would ask all these details Questions like this

8:13

will remember, seeing what do you remember hearing,

8:15

do you see the memory from your own

8:18

point of view or in observers and found

8:20

that in most cases both twins were equally

8:22

credible even though the event could only have

8:24

happened to one of them. I'm just

8:26

imagining all these twins leaving the research lab

8:28

and fighting with each other. Like

8:31

the study study earlier.

8:33

you're not wrong. It's

8:35

really interesting. Way the arguments came

8:38

out and they all had the same types

8:40

of arguments that I had have with my

8:42

twin. says you like know you always do

8:44

This is still my memories. So how common

8:46

this among twins and also just like among

8:48

siblings. Sure well as gifts that

8:50

was strongest between identical twins would

8:53

Mercedes and and Macfarlane but Mercedes didn't.

8:55

Experiments later that showed that fraternal

8:57

twins experience this to to a lesser

8:59

stance as do non twins, same sex

9:02

siblings like you in your sister, Amanda

9:04

and and another thing that they found

9:06

was the disputed memories tend to be

9:09

self aggrandizing like between the remember in

9:11

a positive light or or at

9:13

that the main character of the story.

9:15

Our memories are selectively, our memories are

9:18

not. I'm file. That we pick out

9:20

my brain. their reconstruction. I'm interested in this

9:22

idea. Can you say more? Like A or memory isn't a

9:24

file We pick. Out from our brain was you

9:26

mean by that Yeah it's a this idea

9:28

takes a little getting used to. I think

9:31

it as I talk to another psychologist named

9:33

Charles Thirty House at at Durham University in

9:35

the Uk and he said making long term

9:37

memories is is like a really complicated construction

9:39

project. My dad used to say to me

9:42

she could a machine with many moving parts

9:44

for he car or whatever the so many

9:46

more ways it can go wrong and memories

9:48

one of those machines with many moving parts.

9:51

but what kind of moving parts are we

9:53

talking about Or Charles's it Memories. Are made

9:55

up of different kinds of information. There's like

9:57

what actually happened and then there's all you

9:59

said. The active sensory information like what

10:01

you saw, what you heard and then

10:04

there's something called scientific knowledge meaning knowledge

10:06

of how the world works and all

10:08

these things are run by different neural

10:10

networks. In the bring it takes over

10:13

is different kinds of information spread across

10:15

all those different bits of the brain

10:17

and it puts them together right here.

10:20

Right now when you're being asked to

10:22

remember, it reconstructs a version of the

10:24

past according to the demands of the

10:26

present. Most. Of his his is

10:28

completely unconscious, but there's this tendency depending

10:31

on what the context is, that you're

10:33

remembering the thing and. Is. It would

10:35

benefit you to remember to certain ways

10:37

and that's the safe the memory often

10:39

takes. We are such unreliable narrators. cities.

10:42

And I cannot see why On a neurological

10:44

level the brain might get it wrong. Sometimes

10:46

if you're saying this is all happening through.

10:48

Different Neural networks. It's almost like not

10:50

our fault it is very much about

10:52

that the architecture of our brain and it's

10:54

not your stats him in each time

10:56

you go through the process when your

10:58

brains whole like Rube Goldberg machine gets going

11:00

and you reconstruct a memory is a

11:02

different cells that remembering each time so

11:04

the result to be a little different so.

11:07

If. We. Tend to remember things

11:09

incorrectly are no way that suits our best interests

11:11

and we can beat so certain and our minds

11:13

can tell the difference. I mean it just makes

11:15

me. Think about

11:17

all the controversy over like core

11:19

erm testimony and how reliable people's

11:22

memories actually are. Even if they're

11:24

completely sincere that that is what

11:26

they remember, they could be totally

11:28

wrong. That was really apt comparison,

11:30

Emily. And it's actually one of the reasons

11:32

why Mercedes work is so important to think

11:35

about eyewitness. Testimony there are the most

11:37

convincing and court is. I remember at

11:39

I remember looking his hair, I member

11:41

seeing it and they're often incorrect right?

11:44

These like sensory details are what crop

11:46

up even if they're. Not.

11:48

Sure, Exactly. And And there's decades of research

11:51

by Miss Know. And these are the

11:53

qualities and twins often used to. To say,

11:55

this is my memory. I remember ice cream

11:57

melting in my hair. I remember the humiliation.

11:59

Remember. the sound it made, or the

12:01

smell of fire burning, and all these qualities

12:04

that are used in eyewitness testimony are also

12:06

used between twins when they want to argue

12:08

about their memories. That's hilarious. It's also very

12:10

unnerving, just like, you know, human to human.

12:12

Right. I mean, it's like Mercedes said earlier,

12:14

you know, what is real? And

12:17

really, it goes even further through the looking

12:19

glass. I did a study

12:21

once on the confusion between real

12:23

and dreamt experiences. And actually, people

12:25

can sometimes think of you dream something, because

12:27

you have so much imagery involved with dreams,

12:29

you can actually remember it as a real

12:31

event. So good at all of this. And

12:34

like, what can we hold on to when

12:36

it comes to memory? I think the

12:38

first step is kind of letting go of this

12:41

idea that memory is just like, you

12:43

know, pulling a file from an archive. That

12:45

researcher from the UK, Charles Fernihoe, made this

12:48

point. People often, including me,

12:50

get really confused about whether they're remembering

12:52

an event, or whether they're

12:54

remembering seeing a photograph of an event. And

12:57

that's the problem with memory. We're never remembering

12:59

the thing pure and simple. We're always remembering

13:01

a version of a version. It's always a

13:03

memory of a memory. Everyone

13:06

misremembers, and we all should stand

13:08

to remember that. One nice

13:10

thing is that like, all the complexity

13:12

that is at fault for those

13:15

mistakes is actually the result

13:17

of a long, like evolutionary journey that gets

13:19

us to a place where our brains are

13:21

pretty good, remembering the important stuff, or at

13:24

least the gist of it. Gabriel Spitzer, thank

13:26

you so much for coming on the show. Emily,

13:28

it was my pleasure. Gabriel

13:30

Spitzer edits and reports for NPR's Science

13:32

Desk and is the former senior editor of

13:35

Shorewave. You can hear his story

13:37

about another pair of sisters with mismatched memories

13:39

and the rest of NPR's

13:41

incredible series on the science of

13:43

siblings at the link in our episode

13:45

notes. Scroll, scroll, scroll, and click on that. This

13:48

episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and

13:51

Burley McCoy. It was

13:53

edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez,

13:55

and fact-checked by Gabriel Spitzer. Robert

13:58

Rodriguez was the audio engineer. I'm

14:00

Emily Quar. Thank you for listening to shortwave

14:03

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