Our Idiosyncratic Memories

Gary Marcus believes that our memory is the single factor most responsible for human cognitive idiosyncracy. And he gives plenty of examples. One interesting fact is that we are not very good at noticing even fairly large changes in the background of a photo we’ve seen. We apparently remember the gist of things, but not the details. Marcus refers to an amazing video called Person Swap that shows someone asking directions then swapping with someone else, and the person giving directions doesn’t even notice.