Our memories are unreliable, limited and suggestible – and it's a good thing too

Milan Kundera opens his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting with a scene from the winter of 1948. Klement Gottwald, leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, is giving a speech to the masses from a palace balcony, surrounded by fellow party members. Comrade Vladimir Clementis thoughtfully places his fur hat on Gottwald's bare head; the hat then features in an iconic photograph.

- BY NICK HASLAM

Four years later, Clementis is found guilty of being a bourgeois nationalist and hanged. His ashes are strewn on a Prague street. The propaganda section of the party removes him from written history and erases him from the photograph.

"Nothing remains of Clementis," writes Kundera, "but the fur hat on Gottwald's head."

Efforts to enforce political forgetting are often associated with totalitarian regimes. The state endeavours to control not only its citizens, but also the past. To create a narrative that glorifies the present and idealises the future, history must be rewritten or even completely obliterated.

In a famous article on "the totalitarian ego", the social psychologist Anthony Greenwald argued that individual selves operate in the same way. We deploy an array of cognitive biases to maintain a sense of control, and to shape and reshape our personal history. We distort the present and fabricate the past to ensure we remain the heroes of our life narratives.

Likening the individual to a destructive political system might sound extreme, but it has an element of truth. Memory Lane, a new book by Irish psychology researchers Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy, shows how autobiographical memory has a capacity to rewrite history that is almost Stalinesque.

There is no shortage of books on memory, from self-help guides for the anxiously ageing to scholarly works of history. Memory Lane is distinctive for taking the standpoint of applied cognitive psychology. Emphasising how memory functions in everyday life, Greene and Murphy explore the processes of memory and the influences that shape them.

What memory is not

The key message of the book is that the memory system is not a recording device. We may be tempted to see memory as a vault where past experience is faithfully preserved, but in fact it is fundamentally reconstructive.