March 2020 / April 2021

It was a life-size experiment on a planetary scale: psychologists took advantage of confinement to better understand how the story of our lives is engraved in memory. Their studies have just been released.

Hervé Poirier, editor-in-chief of the scientific magazine Epsiloon talks to us today about what happened to us during confinement. New studies have just been published, they spectacularly demonstrate how the tempo of our memories expands, compresses, slows down and accelerates depending on our daily rhythm, especially during this strange period that we all experienced, between March 2020 and April 2021.

franceinfo: What happened during this year 2020/2021? How did you memorize this period, which was totally new for us humans?

Hervé Poirier: Try to remember. Despite the confinement, she perhaps left you with some good personal memories? It went by quickly, didn’t it? And do you remember that container ship stuck in the Suez Canal for a long time? Vaguely? For experimental psychologists, it was a life-size scientific experiment, on a planetary scale: 3 billion people confined to their homes due to the explosion of the coronavirus epidemic – that’s how we understand it. was calling at the time.

In France, the United States, Brazil and Germany, they saw it as a unique opportunity to study how everyone engraves the story of their own life in their memory. And their studies are now published – we have identified one quarantine.

So what ? What do these studies say?

With boredom, loss of rhythm, difficulty sleeping, all the studies converge: time, at the start of confinement, initially began to slow down. During surveys, recent events were systematically dated as older than they really were, as if the hourglass took longer to empty. And the more people felt isolated, the more this time expanded.

Then, little by little, with the new rhythm of life that took hold, time re-accelerated. And in hindsight, this time of confinement seems compressed. This period seems to have passed much faster than what was reported at the time: the memory of the events has become blurred.

Aside from those who are in a chronic depressive state, people no longer remember having problems with sleep, rhythm, or boredom. A British study shows that it is today much more difficult to precisely date the events which took place during this period than those which took place one or two years before…

Strange… What conclusion can we draw from this?

This confirms the metronome role played in our social relationships. Few outings, few meetings, few salient moments to mark memory: it is these social rhythms which stabilize our memories; it is the emotional state that determines the speed of time experienced.

This also illustrates our irresistible tendency to embellish the past: while at the time, the participants declared themselves overwhelmingly unhappy, today they report the feeling of having lived through a rather pleasant period. In short, this demonstrates, if necessary, that our Memory tells us a personal, very subjective story.