Why we sometimes see ourselves from outside in memories
Think of a specific event that happened the last two weeks. Here’s mine: I’m in a coffee shop near Coventry station with my colleague, and I’m searching for the paper towels as I’ve just made a minor spill with my drink.
Now think of a specific event from your childhood. I’ve chosen my earliest memory: standing in the kitchen at my gran’s house, which was next door to my childhood home. I am looking out of the window with my gran and my mother as a digger removes earth from the garden of my house, creating a slope that allows more light to come into the windows at the back of the kitchen.
OK, got two memories firmly in mind? What is your point of view for each of these memories?
In the recent memory, I see it as I would have done when I was experiencing it, from inside my own body, but the early memory as though I am above and behind my body, almost as though I am on the ceiling looking down. Over time, that recent memory will probably change so that I view it, too, from a different perspective. Whether I want to be or not, the way my memory works turns me into the lead actor in a TV show that’s only available in my own mind – let’s call it Clare’s Life Experiences.
Last time on Clare’s Life Experiences
From comparing recent and older memories, researchers know that the time that’s passed since the event occurred makes a difference – the older the memory, the more likely it is to be in the third person (that is, seen from the outside) rather than the first person (that is, seen as though from inside your own body). Emotion plays a role, so highly negative and traumatic experiences are much more likely to be recalled in the first person than highly positive experiences. The specific content of the memory is also important, as we typically recall certain events from certain perspectives:
Having a conversation is most likely to be recalled in the first person.
Being in a group performance is most likely to be recalled as though we are watching ourselves from the front.
Studying is most likely to be recalled as though seen from above.
Seeing yourself in your memories is a very common experience, though not everyone does it, and we certainly don’t all do it to the same degree. For example, it’s totally possible to experience one part of a memory in the first person and one part in the third person.
Wheee, perspective shift!
There seems to be an element of culture to the perspectives we take in memories – for example, people in Western countries like Greece or Canada are more likely to see memories in the first person, while people in Eastern countries like Bangladesh or the Philippines are more likely to see memories in the third person. However, as is often the case with psychology, much of the research that’s been done has been on the WEIRD population, so please bear in mind that what I tell you about memory in this blog may not be universally applicable.
Beyond cultural norms, there are aspects of the person who is doing the recalling that can make a difference in the perspective that a memory is recalled from. We tend to use the third-person perspective when we are recalling memories of things that conflict with how we’re currently thinking of ourselves. For example, if we’re thinking of ourselves in the context of our families, then we tend to recall family-related events in the first person and friend-related events in the third person – and the opposite is true if we’re thinking about ourselves in the context of our friends. Similarly, if you’re prompted to think of yourself as a relatively religious person, then recall a religious event, it will probably be in the first person. However, if you’re prompted to think that you’re not very religious, then it will probably be in the third person.
Mental health can also make a difference in the perspective of memory. People with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) spend a lot of time worrying about perceived flaws in their appearance. When someone with BDD pictures themselves when worrying about their appearance, they’re likely to see themselves in the third person – but people without BDD tend to see themselves in the first person, as though looking in a mirror. This particular individual difference might be because people who don’t have BDD but are worrying about their appearance are likely to look in a mirror, but people with BDD quite often avoid looking in mirrors.
Another way that humans vary is in terms of how good we are at mental imagery. (Check out my blog on aphantasia for more information!) We can divide mental imagery into lots of different subtypes, like sound imagery and smell imagery, but the ones that are particularly pertinent here are object imagery, which allows us to imagine what objects look like, and spatial imagery, which allows us to imagine the spatial relationships between objects. If I ask you to imagine the layout of your bedroom in your mind’s eye, then you are using spatial imagery to do so. If I now ask you to imagine details of your bed like its height and colour, you will switch to using object imagery.
While object imagery and spatial imagery are linked, it’s possible to be good at one but not the other – so it’s probably not surprising that being good at spatial imagery is linked to remembering things like the order of the events, while object imagery is linked with remembering lots of details about the shape and size of objects. Object imagery and spatial imagery are also different in another way: good object imagery is associated with vividly imagining perceptual details in the past but not the future, while good spatial imagery is associated with vividly imagining event details in both the past and the future.
Oh yeah, the future. Because it’s not just the past we picture, is it? And I don’t mean in a read-it-in-the-tarot-cards way.
I don’t hold with tarot.
You know where you are with a nice psychic vision.
I’m writing this on a train and right now I am imagining the future of about an hour away: a brief walk in the rain from the station to my home; the joy of seeing my partner for the first time in a couple of days; being warm and cosy and eating something delicious. It hasn’t happened yet, but I can still imagine it.
Next time on Clare’s Life Experiences
Imagining the future seems to be very much like imagining the past. If you picture the past vividly, you’re likely to picture the future vividly too, and you’ll tend to be in much the same position imagining similar past and future events if you’re using the third-person perspective.
Future images even mirror the past in terms of whether they’re likely to be in first person or third person: in both cases, the further away from now, the more likely in the third person. There are also the same kind of cultural and interpersonal differences, with people in some countries reporting more mind-wandering to future scenarios and more in the third-person perspective than people in other countries.
All in all, this supports something I’ve said before when I wrote about false memories:
Thinking about the future is just remixing the past.
Why on earth would our minds do this?
Good question! There are probably multiple reasons:
It’s to save energy. First-person memories are typically more vivid, detail-rich, and emotionally intense than third-person memories – like high-definition TV compared to standard TV. This heightened level of detail probably means that first-person memories use more energy than third-person memories, so we might save energy by only recalling recent and important memories in the first person.
It’s a product of our need to update our memories after they are first formed. This fits with the remixing-the-past idea of imagining the future which I mentioned earlier. If we can update what we remember about events, then we can make use of the same function to imagine how events might have turned out differently and to make changes to our future behaviour.
It helps us maintain a stable identity over time. Remember how I said that we’re more likely to recall things in the third person if they conflict with how we think of ourselves at the time of remembering? We are literally distancing ourselves from the person we used to be, which means that past behaviours we would no longer do are not as confusing for us to recall as they might be in the first person.
It’s to help us regulate our emotions. You might have noticed that when you remember highly emotional events from the past you don’t usually relive the emotions of the experience as strongly as you did the first time round. Again, distancing ourselves from our old experiences is helpful in keeping us on an even keel, emotionally speaking.
Now for the serious bit. This emotion regulation function is really helpful for people who have experienced something traumatic. Let’s explore that a bit more.
Dealing with traumatic memories
I won’t talk about specific traumatic things in this section, just about trauma in general and how people deal with the memory of it.
Because PTSD-type memories are often emotionally intense, flashbacks may tend to happen in the first person, which could keep them more vivid than other, less horrible memories - a difficult feedback loop to be stuck in.
We learned earlier that older memories are more likely to be seen in the third person, but this happens much slower for memories that are repeatedly revisited than memories that aren’t. This could be pretty bad news for people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), who often have involuntary flashbacks to the traumas they experienced. On top of that, focusing on feelings about memories can often cause them to be relived in the first person, and this could be a problem because trauma is usually a strongly negative emotional experience that may inevitably have a big feelings component. Together, these two things mean that people who have PTSD are likely to repeatedly experience traumatic memories as though they are still happening, which causes a third difficulty – if something is recalled in the first person, it tends to remain a more vivid memory than something recalled in the third person.
There is, possibly, a way to break this feedback loop. For mundane, non-traumatic memories, it’s usually possible to choose what perspective you view them from. If you deliberately try to recall a memory from a third-person perspective rather than a first-person perspective, then some details will be lost. That loss of detail seems to be permanent – if you try to recall a memory that’s naturally changed to a third-person perspective in a first-person perspective, that memory won’t become any more intense or detailed. There’ll need to be some more research on whether this also applies to PTSD memories, but it sounds really promising.