Are memory errors adaptive?

Are memory errors really a bad thing? Could they actually reflect processes that are adaptive for our existence? Schacter and Addis discuss this interesting idea in an essay on constructive memory. (Continue reading for a passage from the essay.)

From the essay:

As Yadin Dudai and Mary Carruthers have discussed (Nature 434, 567; 2005), people draw on past experiences in order to imagine and simulate episodes that might occur in their personal futures. When we imagine different versions of tomorrow’s big meeting or what might happen during next week’s trip, for example, we project ourselves into the future based on what we remember from the past. Indeed, information about the past is useful only to the extent that it allows us to anticipate what may happen in the future.

But future events are not exact replicas of past events, and a memory system that simply stored rote records would not be well suited to simulating future events. A system built according to constructive principles may be a better tool for the job: it can draw on the elements and gist of the past, and extract, recombine and reassemble them into imaginary events that never occurred in that exact form. Such a system will occasionally produce memory errors, but it also provides considerable flexibility.

Constructive memory: the ghosts of past and future.
Schacter DL, Addis DR
Nature. 2007 Jan 4; 445(7123): 27