MRCPsych on the Go: Revision Essentials

11. Why We Forget: Memory Distortion, Interference and Schemas

Aalap Asurlekar Season 1 Episode 11

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0:00 | 14:27

Eyewitness testimony has sent innocent people to prison. Memory is not a recording. It is a story we tell ourselves, and that story can be wrong.

In this episode, we explore why forgetting happens and how memories become distorted. We cover Hermann Ebbinghaus and the forgetting curve, proactive and retroactive interference, and the role of schemas in shaping and distorting what we remember. These ideas have important implications for memory disorders in psychiatry and for understanding false memories.

Ideal for MRCPsych Part A revision, psychology students and anyone curious about the unreliability of human memory. Aligned with the Royal College of Psychiatrists MRCPsych Part A syllabus, paragraph 1.1.4.

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