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Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Behavioural Processes
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/behavproc

Seven myths of memory

⁎
Nicola S. Clayton , Clive Wilkins
Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EB, UK

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: In this paper we highlight seven myths about memory, which centre around the fact that memories, as we
Episodic memory experience them, are not only about the past, they are also prospective. Although episodic memory provides the
Mental time travel template for future scenarios, it can be reassessed each time it is recalled, and in part is dependent on the
Future planning sequence in which events unfold. We explore seven myths about memory, and the relationship between memory
‘The Captured Thought’
and experience. We refer to ‘The Moustachio Quartet’, a series of novels, which highlight themes and ideas
‘The Moustachio Quartet’
relevant to our argument, and ‘The Creatures in the Night’, a picture book of paintings that explore the passage
of time. We integrate evidence from science and the arts to explore the subjective nature of memory and mental
time travel, arguing that our capacity to juggle multiple perspectives evolved for the act of prospection, as an aid
to move time forward to the advantage of our species by imagining future scenarios.

1. Introduction
A number of psychologists have suggested that there is something
special about the number seven. The classic is Miller’s “Magic Number
7” (Miller, 1956), which focused on the supposed limit to the number of
items to be held in short-term working memory. A seminal book is
Schacter’s “Seven Sins of Memory” (Schacter, 2001), which argues that
memory malfunctions can be divided into seven fundamental trans-
gressions or “sins”, namely transience, absent-mindedness, blocking,
misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. Most recently
published is Budson and O’Conner’s book “Seven Steps to Managing
Your Memory” (Budson and O’Conner, 2017), which provides advice
and relevant case studies about how to monitor and manage age-related
memory loss.
Of most relevance to our thesis about memory, which is inspired by
integrating a scientific approach with evidence from the arts, comes
from the arguments developed by Surprenant and Neath (2009) in their
book “Principles of Memory. Essays in cognitive psychology”. These
authors outline seven principles that apply to all aspects of human
memory, irrespective of the type of information to be remembered, the
type of information processing, and the time scale over which the in-
formation is stored. For example The Cue Driven Principle states that
the act of remembering always begins with a cue which initiates the
retrieval process, and The Cue Overload Principle accounts for the fact
that the cues can become associated with more and more items at
various encoding opportunities, thereby reducing their effectiveness at
the time of memory retrieval. The main thrust of their argument is that
memories are inherently constructive and that episodic memories will
be reconstructed differently each time they are recollected because
people recruit and use a wide variety of information and processes, and
the more distinct the information the less likely it will be vulnerable to
interference or forgetting.
In our paper, we will focus specifically on episodic memory
(Tulving, 1983), which allows us to draw upon our autobiographical
experiences to recall and relive events, experiences and emotions that
happened to us in the past. The process to which we refer is mental time
travel, the ability to reverse and advance time in the mind’s eye in order
to revisit the past and imagine future scenarios (Suddendorf and
Corballis, 1997). By gathering evidences from our science-arts colla-
boration, and our knowledge of the literature on memory and mental
time travel, we shall propose seven fundamental myths. We will argue
that each of these myths about episodic memory∼ or assumptions we
make and quirks we discover about the way in which the process works,
arise because this type of memory has evolved with the future in mind.
Our thesis will draw upon evidence from both science and the arts to
explore the complex relationships between episodic memory and
human experience, examining converging ideas from disparate sources
to illuminate mental time travel in action, with and without words (see
Clayton and Wilkins, 2017a; which considers three sources of con-
vergent evidence). Outside of science these things can be observed in
our art, literature, dance and culture (see Laland et al., 2015). In-
tegrating science and the arts allows us to focus on the common de-
nominator of our expertise, namely memory and mental time travel.
The comparison with animals provides a perspective on these abilities

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: nsc22@cam.ac.uk (N.S. Clayton).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2017.12.018
Received 15 November 2017; Received in revised form 19 December 2017; Accepted 19 December 2017
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N.S. Clayton, C. Wilkins
in the absence of words and shows how recent research on episodic
memory can be interpreted in terms of overt behaviour, in the absence
of making any assumptions about the phenomenological awareness of
the projection of self in time that appears to accompany episodic
memory in humans.
Tulving (1983) coined the term episodic memory to emphasise that
our ability to experientially remember the past engages a psychologi-
cally different process from other forms of memory. There are other
facets of memory that involve, for example, the acquisition of new skills
and retention of old habits (procedural memory) as well as declarative
knowledge of facts about the world (semantic memory), but these kinds
of memory are rooted in the here and now (Squire, 1992). By contrast
episodic memory relies on mental time travel. In so doing it allows us to
peer back through time, and unlike a physical journey it does not de-
pend on the distance travelled: we can go back to times long gone as
quickly as we can to events that happened only yesterday, although the
details may be fuzzier. Mental time travel also allows us to use the past
to create the future, and to contextualise the present and the future
within the scaffold of what we already know about the past. For what is
the benefit of recalling what happened in the past unless that in-
formation can be used to make informed decisions about the future?
(Boeckle and Clayton, 2017).
Episodic memory does not exist in a vacuum, however. It is, for
example, embedded within a semantic memory framework. Indeed the
semantic scaffolding hypothesis argues that semantic memory provides
a crucial scaffold in which to embed the subjective experiences, and in
so doing it creates a framework with which to evaluate and con-
textualise the episodic contribution to both the past and the future (e.g.
Irish et al., 2012; Irish and Piquet, 2013, Michaelian et al., 2012,
Clayton and Wilkins, 2017a). Episodic memory also informs implicit
body memory and vice versa. In terms of procedural memory, the no-
tion is that remembering is also doing∼ in that moment in the present
when the action is performed the memory is the action, and conse-
quently from that perspective, the present and the past are one and the
same (e.g. Caldwell, 2012; Fuchs, 2012; Koch et al., 2013).
It is thought that a unique feature of the episodic memory system is
that it evolved for thinking about the future not the past, in other words
that there was selective pressure for this form of memory to become
forward-looking not backward-looking. According to the so-called
Constructive Episodic Simulation Hypothesis (Schacter et al., 2007, 2008,
2012), the brain’s crucial function is to use past experiences that have
been acquired by the episodic memory system in order to anticipate
possible future scenarios and use this episodic foresight to plan for
them. In other words, the function of episodic memory lies primarily in
its constructive rather than its reconstructive ability, and hence to be-
come forward-looking as opposed to backward-looking. The system
evolved to mentally simulate multiple future scenarios by flexibly re-
combining details of the events that have happened to us in the past
without having to physically engage in the actual behaviour. There is a
trade-off between flexibility and stability, however, and therefore the
cost of using the episodic memory system is that it is much more vul-
nerable than the semantic memory system to errors such as mis-
attribution and false recognition because of its creative nature (see also
Clayton and Wilkins, 2016, 2017b). This explains why our episodic
memories are surprisingly inaccurate compared to our semantic mem-
ories, and why they are more fragile and more labile—for each time we
revisit these memories using our episodic system we recreate them. This
does not happen with the semantic memory system, devoid as it is of a
creative time-travelling self. Indeed, it is this ability to project the self in
mental time, by transcending physical time, that allows us to imagine
things that have never happened.
Support for the Constructive Episodic Simulation Hypothesis comes
from at least four sources. Firstly, functional magnetic resonance ima-
ging studies show that in healthy human adults the areas of the brain
that are active during the recall of episodic memories are also activated
when asked to create future scenarios (e.g. Hassabis and Maquire, 2007;

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Hassabis et al., 2007; Schacter et al., 2007, 2008, 2012). We also know
that just as our memories fade and so details of memories of long ago
may be less accurate than ones we made recently, the same fuzziness is
encountered when we imagine the future: it is much harder to imagine
an event in the distant future than one expected to take place soon (e.g.
Benoit et al., 2011; Boyer, 2008).
The second source of evidence for the Constructive Episodic
Simulation Hypothesis comes from developmental cognition. Episodic
memory and episodic future thinking show the same developmental
time trajectory in humans: young children fail tests of episodic memory
and future thinking when they are three years of age, they show a
transitional state of performance at four years of age, and they pass
such tests by the time they are five years of age (see Clayton, 2014).
The third source of evidence comes from comparative studies of
what is termed episodic-like memory, namely the ability to remember
what happened where and how long ago (Clayton and Dickinson,
1998). This approach provides a way of measuring the overt properties
of episodic memory in animals in the absence of agreed behavioural
markers of the phenomenological characteristics of episodic memory
(an awareness of the projection of self in time) in non-verbal subjects
(Griffiths et al., 1999; Clayton et al., 2003), as well as applications of
these tasks for both young children (e.g. Cheke and Clayton, 2015) and
adult humans (Cheke et al., 2016; Cheke et al., in press). Research on a
variety of animals shows that corvids, rodents and great apes can re-
member the what, where and when of unique past episodes, and that, at
least in the case of corvids and apes, they can also execute plans for
future events (see recent reviews by Clayton, 2017; Jelbert and Clayton,
2017).
Perhaps the clearest evidence for the concomitant relationship be-
tween episodic memory and episodic foresight, however, comes from
studies of patients such as the late Kent Cochrane (KC; Rosenbaum
et al., 2005; Craver et al., 2014) and DB who is still alive (Klein et al.,
2002), both of whom received damage to the hippocampus and sur-
rounding areas of the medial temporal lobe as a result of brain trauma.
Both have exhibited deficits specifically in episodic cognition as op-
posed to semantic cognition, and these impairments are seen retro-
spectively and prospectively. Although KC and DB were capable of
acquiring factual knowledge about the past and could also make se-
mantic conjectures about their knowledge of the future, they could not
directly experience it. It is as if they were not physically present at the
event, but merely told the facts about it afterwards. Interestingly, when
prompted to remember the specifics of an event in the past or to ima-
gine future ones they would report the same feeling of blankness.
Without mental time travel, they were, and in the case of DB are, unable
to recall or imagine subjective experiences about themselves.
2. From Seven Sins to Seven Myths
So what are the implications of using the mental time travel system
for memory? In “Seven Sins of Memory” Schacter (2001) argues that,
rather like the seven deadly sins, memory malfunctions can be cate-
gorized into seven fundamental transgressions or “sins”, namely tran-
sience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility,
bias, and persistence and that by trying to avoid committing these sins
our memories are less susceptible to errors. Interestingly, he also argues
that these features of human memory are good and bad in equal mea-
sure, for they can serve a useful purpose in memory as well as being a
hindrance. For instance, the downside of persistence is that it can lead
to post traumatic stress syndrome and highly superior autobiographical
memory, but the upside is that it is essential for long-term memory. We
adopt a similar approach in considering seven myths about episodic
memory, inspired by our science-arts collaboration. Beneath each myth
described in bold type, we offer a rebuttal, an alternative point of view
in italics. We argue that each of these false assumptions about memory
arises precisely because episodic memory has evolved with the future in
mind.
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2.1. Myth 1. Episodic memories are accurate objective reflections of what

happened

Memories are subjective and depend on our point of view at the

time
It is very easy to make the assumption that what we perceive and
how we remember are accurate and objective reflections of reality.
Many of our greatest deceptions evolve out of such faulty supposition.
Visual illusions and magic effects capitalize on these aspects of memory
and perception, as do various forms of high art, including the visual
arts, literature, music and dance. This eminently human quandary is
delightfully expressed in the Guardian commercial, Points of View
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3h-T3KQNxU). It first ap-
peared in 1986 and has now become infamous. This short, but very
powerful, black and white film consists of four shots of the same scene
taken from different viewpoints, each approximately 6 s in length. The
first shot is of a man starting to run. The next shot pans from behind the
man to the right, following his run and showing his deliberate and
seemingly aggressive collision with an older man in a bowler hat. The
third view is taken from a higher vantage point, and shows that con-
struction materials are falling from above. The scenario unfolds in such
a way that various points of view are revealed in a manner that con-
sciously delays the moment where the cause of these events becomes
apparent. The full significance of the action, namely a younger man
saving an older gentleman from the hazard rapidly falling into his path
becomes clear only at the eleventh hour. Freeze frame images and black
transitions between shots provide the necessary tension to enhance the
scene setting and crucial detail in the action. The images are supple-
mented by short voice over commentary “an event, seen from one point
of view, gives one impression. Seen from another point of view, it gives
quite a different impression. But it’s only when you get the whole
Fig. 1. The Alienated Man taken from Wilkins (2008) The Creatures in the Night explores
picture, you can fully understand what is going on.” The final screen the reconstructive nature of memory by portraying a character from within the narrative
shot is silent. The point being made is that a more objective form of who is desperately attempting to understand the nature of the reality that surrounds him.
story telling gives a better idea of what has actually happened. By as-
sociating the name of The Guardian with this sequence, the suggestion
2.2. Myth 2. Memories are a permanent record of the past
to the audience is that this newspaper values objectivity and, by im-
plication, questions the subjective nature of experience by highlighting
Actually, memories are not set in stone. they are malleable because
the constraints this imposes on our perception and memory, and on our
memory is as much about construction as it is about reconstruction
ability to use these processes to anticipate the future.
Our memories, our thoughts about what we think happened, are
In short our memories are not an accurate objective repository of
transformed over time, and can be changed each time we revisit them.
what happened in the past, and our thoughts of the future are often
They do not only depend on our current point of view but also on the
equally inaccurate and ill-conceived because of these constraints on
order in which the events unfold and the way in which the story can be
perception and memory, and yet we still find ourselves believing that
accommodated in what we already know. This in turn depend on our
they are. “You don’t remember what happened. What you remember
memories of what we think has gone before as well as what we cur-
becomes what happened”, as Green (2006) so aptly wrote in his
rently experience in the present moment.
amusing novel, An Abundance of Katherines. Thanks to mental time
The reconstructive nature of memory has its scientific origins in the
travel, our lives are full of stories, both real and imagined. Our mem-
work of Barlett (1932). In his famous book Remembering, he describes a
ories of life events rely heavily on the sequence and manner in which
study in which he asked participants to read and then retell a North
the stories unfold and this colours the way in which we interpret our
American Indian folktale “The War of the Ghosts” involving a battle
perceptions and our memories. It is this process that allows them to be
between ghostly warriors under a range of different conditions. What
reassessed and altered each time we revisit them.
Bartlett found was that people distorted the story to fit in with their pre-
So this leads us to the second myth, namely that we think that our
existing knowledge structures: they omitted the parts of the story that
perceptions and memories are fixed entities∼ a permanent record of
seemed irrelevant to them, and changed the emphasis and structure of
the past. They are not∼ they can shimmer and change. These alter-
the story to be consistent with their own experiences.
native realities are constrained not only by the fact that we do not
The point being made here is that our thoughts and perceptions of
objectively see and remember all that can be seen, but also by the very
the past and future are transformed through time. Sometimes these
nature of the reconstructive process of memory. We have the ability to
transformations can be so extreme that it is possible to create a false
make sense of events and the jumble of disparate objects we encounter
memory of something that never actually happened. Loftus’ seminal
by developing stories that unify our experiences into a coherent whole.
studies have demonstrated how easy it is to manipulate memory recall
We can do this with and without words, using combinations of fact and
using language, overriding the perceptual feedback of the event itself
fantasy. Fig. 1, The Alientated Man, depicts a character desperately
(Loftus, 1974, 1975, 2005). When participants were asked to view vi-
trying to make sense of a complex world by investing miscellaneous
deos of a car accident with collisions at 20, 30 and 40 miles an hour
objects with meaning, which in turn, are destined to become signposts
respectively, and then asked to judge how fast the cars were going when
for memory (Wilkins, 2008).
the accident happened, their responses were influenced mainly by the
verbal description of the event, for example the use of the word


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“smashed” as opposed to “bumped”, irrespective of the perceived speed

at which the cars were actually travelling. When participants were
asked to provide additional details about the event, for example,
whether or not they had seen broken glass at the scene, they were much
more likely to report the presence of broken glass if the descriptor was
“smashed” not “bumped” (Loftus, 1974). Taken together, these evi-
dences reveal just how malleable our episodic memories can be: they
are often reconstructed but in some cases they are even misconstructed
or at least misconstrued. Magic effects illustrate how easily this can
occur in successfully disorientating and obscuring not only our per-
ception of what we thought we saw but also our ability to remember
what actually happened.

2.3. Myth 3. We remember the scenes we actually saw

In truth, we over extend the boundaries of events that we experi-

ence. we fill in missing gaps even if they did not actually happen
The errors that magic effects and other illusions induce in our per-
ceptions are interesting precisely because they are systematic and
therefore reveal fundamental features of our perception. As Gilbert
(2006) so eloquently states “they are not silly mistakes but clever
mistakes, ones that allow those of us who understand them to glimpse
the elegant design and inner workings of the mind”. The mistakes we
make when we try to imagine our personal futures and reflect upon our
treasured memories are also systematic and they too have a pattern that
tells us about the powers and limitations of using mental time travel to
explore the world.
We use our eyes to look into space, and we rely on our memory to
circumnavigate space and time. Just as our eyes sometimes lead us into
seeing things as they are not, our episodic cognition can lead us to
remember things falsely and foresee things as they will not be.
Fig. 2. Masquerade Creatures taken from Wilkins (2008) The Creatures in the Night in-
‘Boundary extension’ is a classic case in point. This is the phenomenon
vestigates the nature of time passing as can be seen from the hour-glass, the clock without
whereby people consistently perceive and imagine a greater expanse of hands, as well as the phases of the moon being juggled in the background. We also
a scene than the one they were actually shown, and fill in the missing glimpse the nature of boundary extension in the figure looking through a picture frame.
gaps at the edges of the image (Intraub and Richardson, 1989). In es-
sence, it is an error of commission in which people think they remember
what the reality portrayed is all about, a vital clue to seeing is provided
seeing a surrounding region of a scene that was not visible in the ori-
by the character who looks through the frame of the picture, as if they
ginal view. There are two points worth noting about these findings. The
too are aware that boundary extension is a necessary and essential pre-
first is that boundary extension does not occur in response to all pic-
requisite to making sense of a complex set of circumstances. The point
tures, only those that convey scene structure. The second is that it does
being made here is that viewer invents more of the world and the story
not occur for all of the boundaries within a scene, only those boundaries
of that world than originally shown. Indeed, in a similar vein the
that form the exterior to the view (Gottesman and Intraub, 2002, 2003).
theatrical proscenium arch allows the audience to suspend disbelief in
In other words it is those very boundaries that lead to continuity that
the imaginative or artificial worlds they experience. Although the arch
we choose to extend, a point to which we shall return.
describes the edge of the stage it does not describe the edge of our
Interestingly, not all human minds are subject to boundary exten-
imagination.
sion. It is well established that patients with selective hippocampal
In short, when we envision scenes, just as when we recall our
damage cannot imagine complex spatially coherent scenes any more
memories, we fill in the gaps and extend the boundaries. We do so
than they can remember previously experienced ones (Hassabis and
visuospatially with pictures and images of two-dimensional scenes, and
Maquire, 2007, Hassabis et al., 2007). Intriguingly, these amnesiacs do
that is where the majority of the current scientific enquiry and eva-
not show the boundary extension error (Mullally et al., 2012), pre-
luation is focused. Life is a movie, however, not a series of static images
sumably because they lack the constructive and reconstructive nature of
and consequently we also extend the boundaries of time as well as
episodic memory.
space. We do so with sounds and with our other senses too; the process
Painters and photographers who work within a picture plane that
is not constrained to visual perception. The point being made here is
has a defined edge and limit have been well aware of the phenomenon
that we naturally extend and exaggerate the boundaries of the present
of boundary extension for centuries. The art of composition and
moment in space and in time, and this occurs always as the edges of our
knowledge of where to finish an image is crucial to the communication
imagination∼ the unfinished line that needs to be continued, to be
of an idea. Artists know that in order to make sense of an image the
extended into the unseen.
viewer will imagine what went on moments before, will conjecture
Those imagined edges that belong to boundary extension are where
what is coming next, and will attempt to infer what lies beyond the
we build convergence into our worlds, by evaluating what has gone
boundary. In Fig. 2, Masquerade Creatures (Wilkins, 2008), a series of
before and by developing responses to the ideas and treasured mem-
puzzling events demand the viewer makes sense of an atypical reality.
ories that we find pertinent. They provide signposts to our futures. It is
Clues are provided in order to explain something about the nature of
this very process that lies at the heart of creativity. Such ideas are most
the image and the subject matter being dealt with using metaphor and
poignantly expressed by artists, as evidenced in the following quote
symbolism. We might notice a number of references to time in the
from The Moustachio Quartet (Wilkins, 2015, pp. 72–73), in which the
passing phases of the moon, the clock without hands, and the hour
protagonist is reflecting on how to make sense and reinterpret a series
glass. The image is heavily cryptic, inviting the audience to conjecture


N.S. Clayton, C. Wilkins
of unfolding events in his memory and imagination.
“Years pass by and experiences, myriad moments, and un-sum-
moned influences in various measures, impose themselves on the
retina and in the memory of living persons. Memories, by virtue of
their nature, will seem significant and often support earlier re-
membrances beyond themselves∼ or may even support experiences
of memories yet to come. Long forgotten thoughts rise up again,
when the need arises. What a rich tapestry of moments a person
becomes over a lifetime! If nothing else, life is poignant.”
“Memories are markers. They can be isolated, but should not be.
Intervening times are the real measure; they are stranger and more
significant than the memories themselves. I tell myself they are
notable and have been important. I tell myself that maybe the in-
tervening times should become cherished more than the memories.”
“The space between two memories is where I remember real life to
have taken place, where life was lived unadorned, devoid of
flourish, hubris and ostentation. The true complexion of how times
pass is to be found here∼ between two such points within a living
memory. The measure can be quantified in easy stages∼ this was
my former self, when young, and then I grew into this∼ each en-
suing year a stepping-stone to the next new self, all individually
recalled but seldom assessed, often forgotten and lost! A life is the
space between one’s earliest memory and where you find yourself
now. That time that passes∼ what does it all mean? How does one
quantify the significance, effect or complexion of so many years?
Why does it have to make sense? Why do I feel it has to make
sense?”
“It becomes a kind of madness to think of such things∼ and it is in
any case impossible to quantify a life in such a way. Who can make
sense of everything, as if attempting to see the thread and the line
that time follows?”
In seeking to understand the process of episodic memory, the pro-
tagonist in this extract is seeking to make sense of their living ex-
perience with the aim of seeing further and seeing more. It is not
enough to simply understand what has happened. The challenge is
to know how to reinterpret memory for future use.
2.4. Myth 4. Memory consists of a series of one-off snap shots of what
happened
To be an episodic memory, the event needs to be relived
There is a second point being made in the previous quotation from
The Moustachio Quartet. In spite of our assumption that memory con-
sists of a series of single snap shots that capture what happened, this is
not the way memory works. Memories are not one-off snap shots. They
need to be relived if they are to be believed. That is to say, in order for
the perception, the thought, to become an episodic memory, to be
capable of being recalled whenever we so choose, it must be experi-
enced more than once. Indeed, in recalling the way in which events
have unfolded we constantly make comparisons and in so doing we
form judgments about the present with regard to the past. The very
process of comparing the present with the past, both defines the present
and changes the past. The process is not a one-off event, it is on-going∼
like a train travelling a track, it can never be in the same place twice!
Although we are aware of the continuity of time, we only have the
capacity to sample its passing. We chunk the unfolding moments into a
series of snap shots of events. It’s not what happened, merely the short
hand of our thinking process. In acknowledgement of this we search for
ways to connect the snap shots, to join the missing dots, in an attempt
to regain the continuity, to recapture what happened, or more accu-
rately, to recapture and reconsolidate our memory of what happened.
One aspect of the unfolding remit of art is to unravel these issues
about our captured thoughts, to throw light onto the edges of our

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perception, illuminating the constraints on cognition. For example, the
dichotomy of what is and what might be is explored in René Magritte’s
‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’. The image and text deliberately contradict
themselves in order that we reflect upon what we see and how language
describes reality. The artwork requires we question and reflect upon the
conflict between what we see and what we know, and how we might
alter our perception to take on board alternative ways of seeing in the
quest to see further (Berger, 1972).
Seeing does not only involve the three dimensions of space. Time is
critical too. This leads us to our last three myths about memory, which
revolve around the assumptions we make about the way in which the
time-travelling self mentally traverses time.
2.5. Myth 5. We travel backwards in the mind’s eye to relive the past
We don’t reverse time mentally. We jump back to a specific point in
time and then play the memory forwards again
Physical time only appears to move in one direction, forwards∼ for
there is no way of unbreaking an egg. By contrast, mental time travel
moves bi-directionally. Despite this, the mental time travelling patterns
are different when we think about the future and when we think about
the past. We assume that we can play our memories backwards and
forwards in a continual fashion, in much the same way as we would
rewind a videotape or a film. This, however, is a misnomer. When we
revisit a memory we do not play it backwards in a continual fashion: we
jump back to a particular point in time and thereafter play the memory
forwards, not backwards (Clayton and Wilkins, 2017a). This is in con-
trast to the gradual unfolding of events that occur as we mentally travel
forwards into a future that has not yet happened and may never happen
in quite the way we envisage. In fact, we have great difficulty reverse-
engineering information: language is unintelligible played backwards,
and even attempting simple tasks such as counting backwards from one
hundred, say, in intervals of seven quickly causes cognitive overload
(Corballis, 2014)
When we visualize time, we tend to think of the past as behind us, at
least in the Western world, presumably as a reflection of the fact that
we have already encountered the past (e.g. Corballis, 2015). One might
question whether the metaphor is helpful, however, for it is the future
that has yet to be seen, not the past, and for this reason one might argue
that we should view the past as being in front of us rather than behind.
Yet, we tend to conceptualise time as a line that moves forwards along a
horizontal plane into the future, and that the distance travelled thus far
represents the past we have experienced. We think of memory as a tool
that is used to record the past, which leads us to myth number six. It
reveals another anomaly in our thinking about time. For the past has
already arrived∼ surely it is the present and the future that we need to
focus on.
2.6. Myth 6. Memory is only used to recall the past
Surely not! The past is history. It’s the future that demands our
attention
Most commonly our mental anchors are in the past. If, as we are
arguing, however, it is the future that is so important might it not be the
case that those anchors commonly associated with our memories should
lie ahead of us not behind us (see Clayton and Wilkins, 2017a). For
surely the adaptive function of episodic memory is for its use in con-
trolling future behavior (Tulving, 2005). The concept is a difficult one,
as we shall elaborate when we reach myth number seven. To whet your
appetite for the potential of this idea we offer the following extract
taken from The Moustachio Quartet (Wilkins, 2017, pp. 231).
“Eissenstrom felt his past was constantly misremembered and was
not him at all∼ he had become detached from his memories; they were
the knowledge of an outsider who was like him, but not the person he
experienced. He lived with the sense that something familiar had be-
come alien. It was as if a common word, although well known, might
N.S. Clayton, C. Wilkins
suddenly turn strange, a familiar person on a new day, be reinvented,
made fresh and as if newly born, not from out of time, but the im-
mediate result of circumstance. Time and space, Freya discovered, only
truly existed for him in the moment. It was only ever evident in the
cradle of light before him, in that instant. If the present he occupied had
reference to anything, and had arrived from anywhere at all, it was from
out of a once-glimpsed blueprint for an imaginative fiction he had
dimly heard of, and only discerned theoretically. Unlike others∼ the
‘we’ who are representative of the human experience of time passing∼
his anchor was always before him. Whereas most sentient beings
emerge out of a past, replete with the baggage that is their personal
history, into the moment they find themselves, he existed, constantly
facing the direction he moved in, tied to a thread, the end of which he
could not see, desperately attempting to anticipate the next ‘sentence’
he would become tied to, and the essence of evolving realities that
dragged his spirit unremittingly into the future. This was the space that
was relentlessly, eternally and continuously before him, demanding of
all his concentration, lest he should fall.”
The previous passage explores the contradiction between time as an
anchor and time as process that inevitably traverses space and time, a
journey that demands a relativity point, a device we seem loathe to give
up or abandon completely (Corballis, 2015). A better understanding of
ourselves in time might demand the development of such a device in
order to liberate thinking from the shackles of the past. This extract
from ‘The Moustachio Quartet’ attempts to anticipate new ways of
thinking about the future without the traditional impediment and re-
strictions of times past. This is an idea we return to and explore in the
final section of this paper.
2.7. Myth 7 We think the future will be more like the past and the present
than it will ever really be
In our anticipation of the future, we overvalue the self in the here
and now
The final myth about episodic memory, and our egocentrism with
respect to time, is that we overvalue the self in the present moment.
This leads us to a number of biases that concern how we evaluate the
self in time, and specifically the judgements we make about our future
self. We suffer from an enduring propensity to think that the future will
be much more like the present than it ever really will be. Gilbert (2006)
describes this temporal myopia, or short sightedness when it comes to
envisioning futures. For example, in his wonderfully inspiring book
Stumbling on Happiness, he convincingly demonstrates that peoples’
choices of what they think they will want to eat tomorrow will be
heavily influenced by their current motivational state, irrespective of
whether or not those states will be experienced tomorrow (see also
Cheke et al., 2016; Cheke et al., in press). For most of us this is a fa-
miliar experience: it’s seldom a good idea to go grocery shopping when
hungry∼ that’s when we make ill-informed dietary choices because of
our inability to dissociate current needs from possible future ones.
“Never go shopping when you are hungry” is good advice. Although
overbuying can be reduced when specifically imagining oneself in the
future, this is achievable only when we can think about, and separate,
present-self from future-self. The easiest way to do so is to think about
what another self wants∼ by dissociating the I from the me, the eye not
only becomes more objective but also less temporally myopic. This is
substantiated by recent psychological findings that show that by dis-
sociating current self from future values, adequate performance in fu-
ture planning increases (Kwan et al., 2012).
3. Conclusions
A fundamental feature of the human mind is our obsession with the
future. Memory is no exception, as we have argued in this paper. The
fact that memory evolved to be forward looking is reflected in our
approach to creativity, wherein we allow ourselves the opportunity to

%HKDYLRXUDO3URFHVVHV[[[[[[[[[[²[[[
mix and match and juxtapose aspects of the past to develop and explore
new futures. The idea was beautifully in Burnt Norton “time past and
time present are both present in time future, and time future contained
in time past” (Elliot, 1936).
We assume the future will be more like the past and the present than
it will ever actually be, as Gilbert (2006) argued so eloquently in his
book “Stumbling on Happiness”. This leads to a number of erroneous
assumptions when making choices for the future self (e.g. Gilbert, 2006;
Cheke et al., in press). In a post modernist world, society has also been
constrained by a retrospective approach to innovation as well as deci-
sion making. This is the overriding dilemma of the first part of the 21st
century. Our propensity in the absence of innovation is to imagine the
future will be more like the present, or even the immediate past, than it
ever will be. Such temporal myopia and the inability to generate new
thought may be the primary stumbling block of the times in which we
live. Despite our clever mechanisms for circumventing our own lim-
itations we find it difficult to see as far as we would like. By avoiding
erroneous assumptions we move ourselves closer to a clearer view of
the future.
We constantly strive to search for new ways of seeing (Berger,
1972). Although we cannot see the unseen we can make ourselves
aware of our blind spots.
Acknowledgements
We thank Chris Podlesnik for inviting us to speak at the Society for
Quantitative Analyses of Behaviour in 2017. This paper evolved out of
our talk at the meeting.
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