Memory puts paid to dogged Irish style of play

We’re six games and nine months into the latest qualifying campaign, one that started with a brilliant result and an awful display against Serbia in Belgrade, writes Brendan O’Brien.

Memory is a strange thing. In 2010, researchers at Jacobs University in Bremen asked volunteers to look at videos of people performing a few straightforward tasks. Shuffling a deck of cards, shaking a bottle, that sort of thing. Two weeks later and the same observers were recalling those actions as if they had performed them themselves.

Two years down the road and a study published by Northwestern Medicine found our memories change each and every time we recall them. In other words, how we remember something is coloured by the times in which we are recollecting them. We are remembering memories of events, not the events themselves, and they are changing all the time.