Human memory may be unreliable after just a few seconds, scientists find

The idea that human memory is basically unreliable is a debunker myth that is easily refuted on the basis of recent scientific research, and yet it's likely the primary claim debunkers rely on to undermine confidence in the existence of anomalous phenomena. It's kept alive by low-quality experimental psychology work that overstates the significance of human memory errors and biases, generally by subjecting people to some highly unusual and artificial testing conditions designed to inflate rates of error. Look at the study described in the article linked in the OP: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/articl...ne.0283257. In two different experiments participants were sat in front of displays and shown letters and pseudo-letters in rapid succession and were instructed to remember what would subjectively be small details of what they were shown. Like the many bogus studies of "implicit bias," the modalities of the experiments were such that participants may have been put under significant cognitive load and could have easily become confused, as is made obvious in the paper's methods writeups: "The participant was extensively instructed to not confuse real and pseudo-letters." Even more revealing is that five participants out of 45 had to be excluded from the first experiment because they didn't do well enough in the "training" for the experiment! This is a clear tell that this was effectively designed to trip people up. How informative can something this contrived be about memory in real-world conditions?

Probably not much at all, because such work massively contradicts studies of human memory in naturalistic conditions that find that it is essentially or even highly reliable: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10....lCode=cdpa.

Even more impressive are the findings of Nicholas Diamond described here: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/obs...-imperfect.

>Even as the “memory wars” surrounding these and other possible memory errors play out in courtrooms and other venues worldwide, it can be difficult to determine the actual prevalence of misremembering under real-world conditions, Diamond told the Observer.  Diamond and colleagues explored that prevalence by analyzing 74 participants’ recollections of two verifiable events at Baycrest hospital in Ontario, Canada. The first group of 34 participants took part in a standardized mask-fitting procedure for hospital staff during the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak. The remaining 40 participants experienced a staged tour of a small art exhibition on the hospital’s ground floor.  In both cases, participants were invited days to years later to share their memories of the event with a researcher who encouraged them to volunteer additional details using general statements such as, “Is there anything else you can tell me about this event?” The memories were recorded and scored based on whether each detail constituted a specific episodic memory and whether the researchers could objectively verify that the event had occurred as recalled.

>Despite the significant decline in the number of details recalled by participants who were older or whose interviews took place later, one finding was consistent across groups: The vast majority of verifiable details that participants freely reported in the interviews were accurate. In fact, the lowest accuracy of any group was 93%, on average, for older tour participants, and no participant in any group was found to be less than 70% accurate. 

>“Consistent with centuries of past work, participants in our study forgot a great deal of information, and they recalled fewer and fewer details with greater retention intervals (e.g., 2 years vs. 2 days) and in older age,” Diamond explained. The accuracy of information that participants did recall was very high, however, suggesting that when people aren’t pressed for details in a leading manner, they’re likely to share only information they are confident they can remember.

I regard these findings as utterly devastating to unthinking debunker bilge about how we can't trust human memory and testimony.

Thanks for this post, @RViewer88. I thought that the debunker claim that memory was unreliable was true, but I agree that these studies shows the opposite to be the case. However, I wonder what you think about these two studies. If I have understood things correctly, they do not use artificial testing conditions but instead uses the real-world condition of major news stories. These two studies still claims that memory is unreliable. I find it difficult to understand why those studies finds memory unreliable while the studies you wrote about finds memory reliable. What is your opinion about this?
Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch. "The ecological study of memory". Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences. 52 (1362): 1697–1701. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article...415921.pdf
Jennifer Talarico and David Rubin. Confidence, Not Consistency, Characterizes Flashbulb Memories in Psychological Science Vol. 14, Issue 5, 2003. https://www.academia.edu/314498/Confiden...b_Memories
I found out about these studies in this blog post by Prescott, which discusses the studies: https://michaelprescott.typepad.com/mich...orget.html

As RViewer88 pointed out, such studies greatly exaggerate the unreliability of memory and in themselves exhibit great unreliability. The replication crisis in psychology research is an indication of big problems in this research area.

But anyway I think that this is completely irrelevant to the validity of much of the empirical evidence for paranormal phenomena. For instance, there are the birthmark/birth defect cases where the present existence of certain birthmarks or birth defects in the now mostly grown-up child is a physical fact uncovered by the investigators, as is the existence of the newspaper accounts and medical records that indicate where and how the previous personality in the past life met his or her sudden traumatic death, closely correlating with the present observed birthmarks or birth defects. Memory issues only partially enter into this kind of investigation.

Then there are the many powerfully evidential mediumistic communications investigated in the past, such as with Leonora Piper, where the in-trance utterances of the medium were recorded in writing at the time and later compared to known facts concerning the apparent deceased communicator. And other related experiments such as the "book tests".

Other empirical evidence to which these concerns are irrelevant are the many replicated demonstrations of psychokinesis and/or precognition documented by parapsychologists such as Dean Radin.