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Metadata is data that provides information about other data.
Often, this means you attach a bit of text to a digital photograph, indicating who took the photo, what camera or other device was used to take it, what type of image compression is used, and how many pixels are in the image. Such data is encoded into the image file itself so that software will have access to and at times display it alongside the image, granting that additional context to the viewer.
“Source monitoring” is a psychological framework that defines how we assess the authenticity of a memory, and it says, in essence, that we attach contextual metadata to the information we take in about the world.
This source monitoring-related data includes information about the environment in which the information was acquired, when it was acquired, who was involved in the acquisition process, and the senses through which we acquired it.
So rather than simply having a snippet of information in our brain that tells us modern-day Istanbul was previously called Constantinople, we might recall that we first heard this fact from a friend while eating lunch the week-before-last, that it was cold because you were both wearing your winter coats, and that she told you this fact verbally—you remember the way she pronounced the word “Constantinople.”
Environmental context, temporal context, involved agents, and sensory modalities are thus encoded alongside informational data that is then stored in our brains. Which can be useful, as it can allow us to recall information by tracing it from our sensory experience or chronological data we have about that situation, rather than only having the information itself to go on.
That said, source monitoring errors can occur as a result of psychological state, environmental disruption, or socially distributed contextual reframing.
Our state of mind while encoding information can influence how we store this data: because we’re stressed, thinking about something else, or thrown off by a loud sound or tooth ache or concern about a fight with our significant other, we might fail to accurately encode the context surrounding our acquisition of that fact.
As a result, we might recall that Istanbul was once called Constantinople, but incorrectly recall that we heard it on the news, read it in a book, or learned it from a different friend.
A similar disruption in encoding can occur in the very young and in the elderly, as both groups, for different reasons, can at times have more trouble distinguishing tangible reality from internal, imagined happenings, which can in turn result in misleading information and/or misleading metadata encoded with that information being stored as memories of things that actually happened and facts that were actually learned in a particular way.
What’s going on around us can also influence our storage of memories and information, as our state of psychological arousal—in the sense of fight-or-flight preparedness, but also sexual arousal—can distort our perception of information we’re taking in through our sensory organs, and thus, can distort the information we’re encoding into things we’re learning.
Such psychological states can also cause us to be distracted, which can lead to a lack of encoded information—simply not remembering where we learned something because we were too busy being afraid, for instance—and can cause us to misinterpret or misconstrue information being presented to us: we might recall that we were told a particular fact while flirting with someone at a bar, when in reality that person was trying to fend off our advances with the most boring facts they could come up with.
Finally, our sense of context can be disrupted by what’s called our distributed cognitive systems: our understanding of things based on a sort of crowdsourced intelligence that we regularly tap into for information about what’s happening around us.
If you walk into a coffee shop and everyone is sitting very still and silent, staring up at the ceiling, you’ll probably stop, look at the ceiling, and put your sensory organs on full alert in an attempt to figure out what everyone around you is so concerned about.
A source monitoring error can occur when the collective mind into which we tap has different information or metacontextual information than we do as an individual.
This misalignment in memory can be caused by differences in perspective—different people being in different contexts when something was learned or when something happened—but it can also be caused by something akin to the telephone game that children play: little bits of noise distorting a clean signal over time.
There’s some evidence that certain types of physical brain damage and chemical alternations of the kind experienced by those who suffer from depression, or those who are experiencing high levels of stress, can cause us to accidentally tweak the metadata attached to new memories and information, but also previously stored memories if we recall them while our brains are thus adjusted.
It’s possible, then, to have our understanding of things distorted by our psychological circumstances when we initially acquired the relevant knowledge, or sometime later, when we revisited, handled, and then tucked that data back into our brains–the memory changed by the handling.
Enjoying Brain Lenses? You might also enjoy my news analysis podcast, Let’s Know Things.
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