One of the main purposes of writing these articles is to catalogue my experiences spending a year abroad, with a focus on how I felt at the time I would encounter these challenges and the learnings I’d take away from them. Challenges such as trying to communicate at the health centre that I had been bitten by a feral cat in Hungarian or the perilous task of trying to send a postcard back home. At the time these were Herculean tasks for me, and they consumed a huge amount of mental effort to navigate, as well as at times feeling incredibly overwhelming. I thought recalling how I felt at the time would be a simple case of pulling up the memory and writing down how I felt in those moments. Yet, this was surprisingly hard, what felt like a monolithic task at the time I couldn’t quite verbalise or even get my brain to acknowledge how I felt, instead I could only focus on how I felt about it now, despite many of these events only happening a few months ago. I experienced this most in my article about joining the Australian Football team. This difficulty had me wondering, why are our brains so bad at remembering how we used to think?
This idea that we can so easily forget the mentality of our past selves is especially fascinating when you look at how much development we do through life. From childhood through to adulthood we undergo a swathe of changes mentally and physically, and its pretty much accepted that this is going to be a massive period of change. But then once adulthood rolls around there can be a perception that our development is more or less finished. I don’t blame people for buying into this idea, even though I don’t agree with it, for statements after you get your first career job of “Welcome to the rest of your life” are commonplace.
When looking back on these childhood memories I see a distinct separation from who I am now to how I was back then. Yet within adulthood the difference in myself at age 25 compared to age 30 is less easy to identify from a mental perspective, despite there still being evidence of large development in those 5 years. Even harder is to go back into my 25 year old mind and try and see back from his perspective.
Most of us would believe that when we go through a memory we are retrieving it like it’s a perfect recollection of what we did in the past, including where the memory occurred, how you felt at the time etc. In reality, that isn’t how memory works. When we recall an event, we’re not accessing a perfect recording of what happened. Instead, we retrieve the parts we can remember accurately and then fill in the missing pieces with whatever fragments are available, shaping them into a story that feels coherent. This concept was pioneered by the British psychologist Frederick Bartlett in 1932 where he postulated the idea that memory is not in fact a rote recalling system as was previously accepted1. Bartlett’s theory has since repeatedly been proven as true with the modern scientific method2.
This concept is evident in real-world events as well. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, as demonstrated by the case of Jean Charles de Menezes. De Menezes, an innocent man, was shot dead by London police after being mistakenly identified as one of the perpetrators of a failed terrorist attack. Eyewitness accounts of the incident varied widely. Some disputed whether the police had shouted “armed police”; others claimed that de Menezes had moved threateningly toward the officers, while some insisted he had never even stood up from his seat. And that’s not even factoring in the contradictory reports about what he was wearing or the number of shots fired by the police2.
What this leaves us with is proof that our memory isn’t as good as we think it is. And instead of admitting what we can’t remember our mind pieces fragments of what we do have together and essentially fills in the blanks until we have a story that makes sense to us.
The issue we run into here when it comes to improving our lives and reflecting upon our achievements is that our brain is absolutely terrible at remembering what we used to be like. If our brain recalls memories by using fragments to fill in what we don’t have an accurate understanding on, then what chance does it have to remember how you used to think 5 years ago, or in my early old man brain , a few months ago?
When I tried to journal about my thoughts and beliefs regarding the type of people who played Australian Football before I had ever played it myself, I found it extremely difficult to fully understand or justify my thinking at the time. I believed that Australian Football was a sport only for strong individuals who had been playing for many years, yet I struggled to explain why I held that belief. It felt like digging through the archaeological recesses of my mind, only to uncover memories that, the more I examined them, turned out to be reflections of how I think now—just expressed in a different way.
Bartlett again pioneered this concept here that the memories we do reconstruct with these fragments are influenced by our current attitudes and beliefs thereby making it nearly impossible to empathize with our memories of our past selves. Generally, we tend to view our past selves as inferior to who we are now. While this can be useful for recognizing personal growth, it doesn’t help us truly understand how we felt in the past or see things from that perspective. Instead, we often just think, “Oh yeah, I’m so much better now than I was back in 2013.” (I was 17 in 2013—any 30-year-old would probably feel more comfortable with who they are now than they were at 17.)
And herein is the crux of the problem, that we can be overly critical of ourselves despite having made significant achievements or progress in many facets of our lives. And all too easily we can forget what progress we have made when comparing ourselves to a given time period. Rather than just shitting on our past selves we struggle to identify why we thought the way that we did back as our past selves did, limited purely to just understanding that we were better than we were.
If we look back into modern research, we can see that there are two types of memory responsible for this situation: semantic memory and episodic memory. Semantic memory refers to what we would term ‘general knowledge’ in a way, what colour is paprika? etc. Whereas episodic memory is more about specific events relevant to us such as where were you on New Years in 2023? Endel Tulving – the psychologist who coined the term episodic memory describing how it allows us to perform ‘mental time travel’ and to relive past memories3.
However, what happens over time is that the details of our episodic memories fade and become more like semantic memory4. So the example of “I felt really nervous that I would be inadequate as part of the football team and therefore as a man if I didn’t play well in the football match” becomes closer to a factual statement more like “I was nervous before the first footy match”. The rich contextual details that defined how euphoric you felt in the moment that you realised you were shattering 29 years of preconceived negative talk about your physical abilities gets simplified to just preserving the general vibe of what happened, and all subject experience of the original event is watered down like a cheap drink at a stingy nightclub
As for what can be done about this, I believe journaling immediately after an event has the power to immortalize your experiences while they’re still fresh, shaped by your current belief system. Ideally, you’d write about it right after the event or within a few days. Even better would be to create an “immortality project” for these lessons—perhaps by posting them online or typing up your experience and printing it for easy access later. In my case, cataloguing my experiences months later felt too late. While I could recognize that my mindset had shifted in a positive direction, it was frustrating not being able to fully understand how I felt back then. I wanted to anchor those changes with clear references to my past self, something I couldn’t fully do with hindsight alone.
References
- Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge University Press.
- Schacter, D. L. (2012). Constructive memory: Past and future. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 14(1), 7–18. https://doi.org/10.31887/DCNS.2012.14.1/dschacterSource:
- Baddeley, A. D., Eysenck, M. W., & Anderson, M. C. (2025). Memory (4th ed.). Routledge.
- Sekeres, M. J., Winocur, G., & Moscovitch, M. (2018). The hippocampus and related neocortical structures in memory transformation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 19(6), 364–378. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-018-0023-1