Our Memories are Weak Without the Holy Ghost

I taught in Elders Quorum today. My subject was the talk from President Eyring, His Spirit to be With You.

I started with a story about memory, comparing one woman's memory of what she was doing when she heard about the Challenger explosion one day after the event with her memory two years later.

"When I first heard about the explosion I was sitting in my freshman dorm room with my roommate and we were watching TV," wrote an Emory University student who participated in a memory study a year and a half after the Challenger disaster. "It came on as a news flash and we were both totally shocked." 

But that same student had given a surprisingly different answer, just 24 hours after the tragedy. "I was in my religion class and some people walked in and started talking about [it]," she wrote. "I didn't know any details except that it had exploded and the schoolteacher's students had all been watching which I thought was so sad."

The New Yorker also had an article on the same memory research that goes on at a bit more length than the article linked above.

Why are our memories so fallible? Especially when we're encouraged to remember so often in the scriptures? I believe it is because the Lord expect us to rely on the Spirit to enhance our memories of the important events in our life.

Keryn reminded me of the story of Laman and Lemuel seeing an angel. Did they forget the experience, or come to doubt it later in life? I wonder if they did, in the same way these memories of the Challenger explosion got modified, because the memories weren't being constantly refreshed by communion with the Holy Ghost.