Agreed, and unfortunately many memories are difficult to test. A few ideas that leap to mind:
Go back to my memory of Japan and thereby increase my memory for the layout of my friend’s house—make predictions and then ask him to take and send pictures.
Go back into those email archives, light up my memory, then make predictions about the games I was playing back then, such as the layout of the levels. Find the game and compare. Or make predictions about the layout of my middle school, then go visit it.
I expect that my brain is making some mistakes, but that it’s also largely accurate. The more valuable activity is often stepping into the minds of others, and in that case you ideally come away with a new and improved way of doing something, which constitutes its own evidence of the investigation being useful.
Um … do you have any way to test how much of the detail was just confabulated by your brain to fill in gaps? Brains do that.
Agreed, and unfortunately many memories are difficult to test. A few ideas that leap to mind:
Go back to my memory of Japan and thereby increase my memory for the layout of my friend’s house—make predictions and then ask him to take and send pictures.
Go back into those email archives, light up my memory, then make predictions about the games I was playing back then, such as the layout of the levels. Find the game and compare. Or make predictions about the layout of my middle school, then go visit it.
I expect that my brain is making some mistakes, but that it’s also largely accurate. The more valuable activity is often stepping into the minds of others, and in that case you ideally come away with a new and improved way of doing something, which constitutes its own evidence of the investigation being useful.