Memory and Perception

Here's a little blurb on something that I've been thinking over for a little while now.

I pride myself on having a fairly good and accurate memory. That is, in most cases my recollection can be supported by either a third party, concrete evidence, or both.
However, I have run into a few occasions where a friend of mine (after much deliberation) caused me to realize that what I remembered was either wrong or not wholly true.

Naturally, the occurrence of such a turnaround compelled me to re-examine my conviction of having a good memory.

In another case, a different friend said that an item purchased for them by their parents was not needed, but they did not mind receiving it. At the time, I expressed my distaste for the purchase of said item. A couple of years later, the same friend claimed that they had vehemently asked their parents not to buy the item.
With this scenario, I am forced to also consider the impact perception has on memory.
The most logical explanation for my friend's change of story would be a change in how useful they perceived the item to be. Did my influence alter my friend's perception? Quite possibly.
Or perhaps my distaste for the item led me to believe that my friend had no qualms in receiving it, in order to explain why they had it. Conversely, that same distaste could have caused me to interpret my friend's later claim as much more rejecting of the item, and that their actual story never changed.

This leads to a slippery slope. If a change in perception can change how you remember something, what does that say about the memory I am so proud of? Do I remember myself as being unforgetful due to my own perception? Is the person who remembers something the same way I do being influenced by me to remember it that way? These questions, if imagined to an extreme, can be quite alarming.

Have any of you had such thoughts? Or are you so confident in your memory that you are always doubtless? On the reverse side, is your memory so shoddy that questioning it has become like a reflex and you don't find yourself in such a conundrum? Also, share your crazy memory stories, if you'd like.

My memory is not all that amazing, I occasionally pull out something very obscure but otherwise it's just average. In most cases when I have doubts I'll simply roll with it, if it's important I'll reference it with someone who was there. There was a show on tv that shows you can implant memories into people's heads by being somewhat vague about the event but specific about the details. Very strange stuff.

Most of the time, this. There are some things that I can remember for long periods of time, no problem. But my short term memory is so horrible that I don't put any stock in it. It is quite the norm for people to have to correct what I recall, as close as a few hours after an event took place.

This is a psychology thing man thats what i gotta say, and memory is affected by lots of shit. I gotta question certain memories but thing is if you constantly keep replaying one memory isnt it gonna be permanent no matter what?

My memory is at times unreliable. I would often think of things and think that I already did them but in reality I have yet to do so. Its quite irritating.

My dreams are so spaced out, they are more vivid than memories. (and often confused for one another)

Also: I operate as though all my perceptions are false. Once, while I was in academy, the day class filed in, after a daylong drill, during the time the night class would. I honestly thought that my perceptions of my classmates had been false and began to re-asses everyone's appearance to hide the obvious insanity.

I almost shat myself when the night class finally arrived.

Luckily, or sadly - depending on your point of view - my tertiary education forced me to take in large quantities of cognitive neuroscience. Ever since, I have given up entirely on the illusion of having a halfway accurate memory of actual events.

People's recollections of real-worldly situations ("visual reports") are always wholly wrong and subject to the grossest later distortion (cf. Loftus & Palmer (1974), Loftus (1996), etc. pp.) and re-formation. Déjà vu is a very simple, but particularly striking testament to how scurrilously unreliable memory is.
Beyond that, though, experiments cited above have shown quite impressively, how people will alter their recollections to ludicrous degrees simply to conform with their situational wants, even if presented with photographic evidence to the contrary. Not because they are lying, or clinical confabulators, but simply because that is how recollection works: It largely doesn't.

Even multiple witnesses make for no improvement, as they influence each other's recollection just as much as a given questioner involved in the conversation does, and are easily influenced by personal stereotype just as well (Leichtman & Ceci (1995)).

Once you have arranged yourself with everyone's memories being wrong about everything, always, you may either begin to panic or experience a strange feeling of solace. For me, it's the latter.

Not going to write an essay, but the memory is basically something pretty vague. To compare it to a computer, imagine each time you remember something you reload the file, however you leave out a few details (delete Text out of a document so to speak) and save it again. The next time you try to remember it, you will load it together with the gibberish and the process will repeat over and over. That is also the reason why people when questioned by the police after an accident have quite a good memory of whats happened. If you than ask them a few days later, they have already forgotten a part of it and it continues that way.
The only way to bring back the "lost data" is so to speak reading / watching the source again.
That is basically what is happening very simplified.

Only important stuff registers in my brain. And most of it doesn't. Well, I don't have to analyze if the thing is important or not. Its more of an automatic thing.

My memory is ludicrously unreliable. I sometimes remember things from 10 years ago, and forget events that happened not even an hour ago. In high school I used to be able to remember things from late elementary school, but five years later I can barely recall events from early high school. This pattern is really making me fear becoming old.

edit: I also can't remember most people's names. I have had people from middle and high school come up to me And say hi because they remember me, but I can never remember who they are. I have been lucky and managed to talk to them while leading them away from the fact I do not know their name. Talking to these people really sucks because of how guilty I feel not knowing them.

As many people here know (at least if they remember) I have a terrible memory. So I never assume what I remember, unless I perceive it to be crystal clear (and even then), is completely accurate. I have however noticed that even people with "good" memories perceive past events differently than I did and have even noticed them change their accounts of said events.

You also asked for us to provide some examples: I remember (and at one point I could vividly remember) seeing a mosquito on a wall almost the size of said wall. (This was pretty frightening as at the time said wall was about twice my height.) Obviously this memory is inaccurate (or I was witness to something truly amazing).

shit I used to have a really good memory but nowadays I cant even remember thing from like 2 minutes ago wonder if my brain is fucked up somehow.

I'd say panic, which is the slippery slope I care not to expand on. It's like a big black dark hole of thought.