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It’s more like Empty Trash than Secure Empty Trash.) (For the computer nerds: Forgetting can be like losing a pointer instead of scrambling what’s inscribed on the hardware. If you don’t go to collect that file for a long time, the thicket will take over that pathway, the trail melding indiscriminately into the forest, and you won’t be able to find your way to that file any more. Here’s a loose analogy: Imagine that you’ve stashed a secret file somewhere in the forest that can be reached by hiking down a trail. The wiring of your brain can change so that even if there’s a solid episodic memory of some event hanging out somewhere in there, you can no longer reach it. Sometimes forgetting is a matter of letting a memory record fall into disuse, so much so that the neural pathway to that record gets lost. Records don’t just vanish into thin air at the bottom of your subconscious. That’s an important point that the movie gets right, as Columbia psychologist Daphna Shohamy notes: Revisiting a memory in a new context can change your feelings about that past event in your life.īut then, of course, there’s the forgetting. That’s what happens when Sadness touches Riley’s memories and turns them blue: she’s changing happy memories to sad ones. Of course, there is one way in which memories change in Inside Out: They change their emotional valence, or how they make Riley feel. The parts where Sadness (Phyllis Smith) transforms memories? Those are pretty close to right. It’s visually stunning, and it makes for easy transportation of Riley’s core memories on the great journey Joy and Sadness take through the depths of her mind. So it’s misleading, to say the least, to represent episodic memories as hi-def records (of things that actually happened) that are crystallized forevermore in discrete capsules. If you’re asked to estimate how fast a car was going when it "smashed" into another, you’re likely to "recall" a higher speed than you would if you were asked how fast it was going when it "hit" another car.Įven just imagining what an experience would be like can implant an entirely false memory of that experience in you. The way you’re asked about what you remember can manipulate the features of the memory itself.

In one notable case in history, a rail ticket agent identified a sailor in a lineup as the person who had physically assaulted him, when really that sailor was just a past customer. You can come to think you saw a person in one context when you actually saw her in another. We know now about myriad terrifying ways in which memory can get messed up: The science of memory distortion is well developed. The more you try to remember, the less you truly remember. Those revisions can accumulate over the course of many instances of recall.

Just calling to mind something that happened to you in the past will change your memory of that event, just a little bit. In fact, the process is so creative as to become distorting: The more you recall a given memory, the less accurate it becomes. Even everyday recall of past episodes in your life is more like imperfect reconstruction than hi-def playback. If we took this picture literally, you’d think that episodic memories were perfect audiovisual records, available for scrutiny and fine scrubbing whenever they’re needed.īut we know now that episodic memory recall is much, much messier than that. The way Inside Out portrays it, recall of episodic memory works a lot like playing a video on your iPhone - including two-finger-swipe multi-touch dynamics. The luminous colorful orbs filling the halls of Riley’s mind are meant to represent her episodic memories - her recollections of specific past events in her life. Memory is messier than it’s made out to be Here are a few things about the mind that Inside Out gets, well - inside out. Real 11-year-old girls don’t have a gleaming control center staffed by five key emotions - Anger, Disgust, Fear, Sadness, and Joy, with Joy as captain of the ship - managing their moods and behaviors like Inside Out’s protagonist, Riley, does the brain doesn’t store memories in glowing orbs before consigning them to the bottom of the cavernous Subconscious, where they eventually disintegrate into wisps of gray smoke.īut the components of Riley’s mind don’t work well as metaphors for how real minds operate, either. This is obviously true in the literal sense. But it’s not how the mind actually works at all. It’s an immensely clever concept, and makes for a funny and moving film. But it’s not set in the brain it’s set in a fantasy world that represents the abstract structure of the mind by way of towering architecture and colorful landscaping. Inside Out, the latest from Disney-Pixar, is an adventure into the great depths of the human mind.