What is memory?

Memory is extremely unreliable.I heard this many times when I covered the police beat in South Florida, from the cops investigating crimes. Read it a lot in the true crime books I used to be addicted to. Heard it on all those crime shows I used to watch, once upon a time.Thing is, it's not just eyewitness memory in a crime situation that's unreliable. All memory is. Even our clearest, happiest memories are unreliable. Maybe we get the color of the carpet wrong, or what we were wearing, or the exact wording of the amazing thing someone said to us.I'm thinking about this because I've been watching Legion (a TV Tyrant post to come on that at some point), and right now it's unclear to everyone, including the main character, David, what is his memory and what is real. Even Ptonomy Wallace, whose power is to put himself into other people's memories and witness them himself, isn't quite clear on what is memory and what isn't.It makes me think about my own memories.I have a horrible short-term memory, to be frank. I often can't remember what I watched on TV the night before, until much later in the day. The other week, I broke a glass before bedtime and spent half an hour looking for the glass with my husband (so we wouldn't accidentally knock it over and break it) before suddenly remembering I had broken it.I can still remember my phone number from when I was a child, however. And certain photographs from 40 years ago are burned into my memory. I suppose that's normal, but it makes me think a lot about what memory really is.Is it what we need to remember, overwritten with what we want to remember? How much is having a good memory sheer force of will versus skill versus genetic gift?Obviously, I don't have the answers to any of these questions. I had another example of something I forgot akin to the example of the broken glass, but I've already forgotten what it was. I do, however, have amazing recall of the times I've been embarrassed by having a faulty memory.I often wonder what I can do to improve it? Is it just my life?I never used day planners or other such calendar-type things because I'd always forget about them and either forget to write what I needed to do in them or forget to look in them. I'd be great about using them for a couple of days, then, whammo. I loved the idea of them, though.At a work function, I ended up singing a probably inappropriate song during karaoke. The next day, I'd (of course) forgotten that my song had come up. Until someone mentioned it to me. I know they thought I'd had a blackout or something, but their asking me triggered the memory. That's pretty much always the case for me.When I used to misplace something on my desk, I'd loudly ask, "If I were me, where would I have put that?"People thought I was weird, but that wasn't the first time or only reason for that. It was a genuine question, though. I needed to put myself into my own brain and think how I would think. It sounds weird, but you come up with strange tricks when your memory is so bad that five minutes after putting something down in an obvious place, you can't find it or remember where you put it.Wait, what was I writing about?Photo by missusdoubleyou via Flickr Creative Commons.