Welcome to the third episode of “Save the Human Mind,” the podcast devoted to recognizing and defusing the dynamics that shape our perception of reality. After taking apart the techniques of media manipulation, starting from the case of Fuerteventura, we move to broader ground: collective memory — the way a whole community remembers, and forgets, its own past.
It is a less abstract subject than it sounds. Collective memory is what holds a group, a nation, a culture together; and it is also, for that very reason, one of the grounds where the subtlest contest between truth and narrative plays out.
What collective memory is
The concept goes back to the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who in the 1920s observed something far from obvious: memories are not only an individual matter. They form and are kept within a social framework — family, community, nation — that gives us the references to interpret the past. Collective memory, in this sense, is not the simple sum of individual recollections, but a shared representation that a group builds of itself and passes on over time.
It lives in traditions, monuments, literature, art, and — increasingly — the media. And it is not a fixed archive: it is a dynamic process that selects some events and leaves others in shadow, that adapts and rewrites itself according to what a society considers important at a given moment. As Halbwachs put it, memory is always selective. It is also how a group inherits its certainties: a version of the past can be handed down from one generation to the next until it becomes unquestionable, even when no one remembers where it came from — the same dynamic told in the five monkeys experiment. That plasticity is its strength — it keeps memory alive — but it is also its vulnerability.
A memory that can be rewritten
That memory is reconstructive, not a simple recording, is one of the most solid findings in psychology. In a classic experiment by Loftus and Palmer (1974), people who had watched a car accident were asked to estimate its speed: simply swapping the verb “hit” for “smashed” pushed the estimates up and, days later, led some to “remember” broken glass that was not there. The fact did not change; the way of telling it did — and the memory reshaped itself accordingly.
At the collective level the mechanism is amplified. The study by Coman, Manier, and Hirst (2009), conducted on memories of September 11, showed how the selective retelling of an event — what gets repeated and what gets left unsaid — leads listeners to forget the unmentioned details, pulling a group’s memories toward a shared version. It is an important and counterintuitive point: shared memory does not drift only when someone lies. It is also shaped by the ordinary mechanics of what is repeated and what stays unspoken — a process in which the media, through their capacity to repeat at scale, play a decisive part.
When fiction takes the place of the record
The risk becomes concrete when a work of fiction is mistaken for historical documentation. That is what happened with the Colonia Agrícola Penitenciaria de Tefía, already at the center of our previous episodes: a television series and a few novels spread an image that historiography corrects on several points.
The defensible corrections are well known: Tefía was not founded as, nor was it mainly, a “concentration camp for homosexuals.” It was a penal colony set up for the so-called “vagos y maleantes,” where homosexuals were a minority — about twenty out of more than three hundred inmates — alongside common and political prisoners. The “concentration camp” label is historically out of proportion. For the local testimonies and documentary material on the place there are dedicated collections, such as the videos and interviews about the Tefía colony.
Local memory, in fact, tends to confuse the colony of the 1950s and 1960s with Batallón 91, a disciplinary battalion of Republican prisoners that operated in Fuerteventura a decade earlier, under far harsher conditions: two distinct episodes that collective memory fuses into one. It is exactly the way a shared memory, left to itself, overlaps and simplifies.
But here the same honesty is needed in the other direction, and this is the point that bears directly on collective memory. Correcting an exaggerated image does not mean erasing what is documented: in those years the legal persecution of homosexuality in Spain was real — the “vagos y maleantes” law, amended in 1954, made homosexuality a “dangerous state,” and there were men interned precisely for it. The dramatized version simplifies and amplifies; the reaction that denies any persecution simplifies in the opposite direction. Both, in different ways, distort shared memory. Protecting it does not mean swapping one myth for its opposite, but holding the complexity of what is documented. We reconstructed the full picture in the episode on the series Nights in Tefía.
How to protect collective memory
The tools are no different from those we saw in the episode on manipulation: critical thinking, media literacy, source verification. Applied to history, they mean a few simple habits: asking whether an account is documented or fictionalized, distinguishing the historical novel — which anchors itself to real facts — from pure fiction, and going back to the sources before accepting a version as “history.”
There is an honest detail to add: general skepticism is not enough. As we saw in the first episode, faced with a misleading account a vague warning — “careful, this might be false” — does not protect you; only pointing out the specific error works. And the opposite limit holds too: doubting everything is not critical thinking, it is just another way of losing contact with the facts.
All of this matters because memory shapes the present. When different groups remember the past in irreconcilable ways, fed by diverging accounts, our perception of reality drifts away from that of the person next to us, and that shared field we have called the Intersubjective Mental Matrix is fed. Keeping an accurate memory is also a way of preserving common ground we can still talk on.
The question that remains
At the end of this journey one question remains, simple and uncomfortable: how many things do we take as true simply because we saw them on a screen? Our picture of the past is more malleable than we like to believe, and well-crafted stories can take, in memory, the place of the facts.
This is not a call to distrust, but to care. Recognizing how collective memory forms — and how it deforms — does not make us immune, but it gives back a margin of choice over what we decide to remember and pass on. And there is a further step: the same plasticity that rewrites shared memory also shifts the boundary of what a society considers acceptable — the Overton window, which we take up in the next episode. The mind, individual and collective, can be protected; and it is protected better by understanding how it works.
