New Insight Into How Mistakes Are Remembered

Your brain strives to put mistakes like infidelity in the past.In a clever little study that answers the question of how does one live with oneself after cheating on a spouse or committing some other moral indiscretion, researchers have found that the mind tries to put distance between us and our mistakes. The new research in the journal Emotion (which frankly sounds like one of the only medical journals worth keeping on the bedside table) manages to catch people's memories in the act of revision. In the study, people dated their moral failings 10 years earlier on average than their good deeds. 

“People honestly view their past in a morally critical light, but at the same time they tend to emphasize that they have been improving,” the authors concluded.

Other researchers have recorded similar mind tricks. Students who did poorly on an exam tend to sense the experience as further in the past than tests on which they did well and took at about the same time. Future selves tend to be the best of all. The unwritten potential of a future self scores consistently higher on a moral scale than either a present or past self image. This has been called the "ascending-toward-heaven autobiography."

“We can’t make up the past, but the brain has difficulty placing events in time, and we’re able to shift elements around,” Anne E. Wilson, a social psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, told The New York Times in an article about the study. “The result is that we can create a personal history that, if not perfect, makes us feel we’re getting better and better.”