Belief
That discussion below in the comments on ‘Memory Tricks’ about memory and how reliable it is or is not, is highly interesting (I think) and suggests a number of other thoughts and subjects. There is for instance the matter of Elizabeth Loftus and her work and what it suggests: that memory is highly unreliable, easily manipulated and changed, a dubious source for evidence, testimony, and information-gathering generally. Not that that was completely unknown before Loftus’ work (defense attorneys have, I believe, long had a heightened awareness of it, for instance), but her research did add some new elements to the picture, and that at a time when memory and its fallibility were in the news, so to speak. That was the time of all those allegations of child abuse, Satanic ritual abuse, recovered memories, etc etc etc – all those allegations that sent people to prison for very long terms on the basis of what seem likely to have been fabricated or reconstructed memories. That poor sad guy just sixty miles south of where I sit typing this, for example, who (it appears) invented a whole stack of memories of his own participation in grotesque ‘Satanic’ abuse of his own daughters, later expanded to include his son. It seems unlikely that any of it ever happened at all – but he was convicted.
And then there is the large subject of how memory plays into the matter of Freud – of Freud’s role in making memory and ‘recovered memory’ seem vastly more credible and reliable than it ought to be and otherwise would be, because so many people were raised on the idea that repression happens often and routinely and can be undone by the right kind of analysis, rather as one might rewind a videotape. Our friend Frederick Crews has an excellent book on that, Memory Wars.
So then there is the question of how belief works, and how skepticism works, and how the two interact, or fail to interact. I’ve been thinking hard about this lately anyway, because of a chapter I’m working on for this book JS and I are writing. I might talk further about this later. For the moment, suffice it to say that I’ve been thinking about the fact that some people learn to be cautious about forming beliefs in the first place, while other people don’t, and that this difference is an important one. It is a good idea to be cautious about forming beliefs. It’s a good idea to be sharply aware that beliefs can always be wrong, that one, we, I, can always be wrong. One step toward that awareness is to recognize various ways that false or unfounded beliefs can be formed. One of those ways, is to have unwarranted confidence in one’s own memory. That’s one of the things I learned from reading Elizabeth Loftus – actually it’s two of the things: how easily we can get our own memories wrong, and how obstinately people refuse to believe that. It’s as if memory is somehow sacred. That’s understandable in a way – memory feels accurate, it feels real and like our own. But if one thinks a little harder, it seems to me, one can realize that that’s an illusion. For instance by comparing a fantasy with a memory, and then trying to specify how they differ. Surely the first thing one notices is that they don’t. And that being the case, how can we be sure we know the difference? We can’t, it seems to me. (Another way might be to consider all those experiments with the guy running into the lecture hall and doing something dramatic and running out again, and then the way everyone’s written answers to questions about the incident give different accounts. Ought to give one pause, that kind of thing. What – everyone else misremembers and only I don’t? Unlikely, don’t you think?)
So maybe it’s relevant that the guy who had such a predictable, generic, Identikit memory of conversations with Bush that took place thirty years ago*, is not a scientist or some other kind of inquirer but a professor in the Business school. Maybe it’s not, maybe I’m just being rude in saying that. But scientists and other empirical inquirers do get quite a lot of training and then experience in, at least, knowing that evidence is not transparent, that it doesn’t interpret itself nor offer the right interpretation of itself written in letters of fire across the sky.
Large subject, as I said. More later.
*Go on, remember a conversation you had thirty years ago, word for word, with some guy you barely knew. Go on, let’s see you.
It’s funny, I usually am sceptical about my own memories but I seem to have some very clear ones from early childhood while things from high school tend to blur or be totally gone from memory.
Just yesterday, I watched a documentary on Star Wars with my mom, and I told her that I remembered being taken to see Return of the Jedi when I was only 3. I described my memory of the theater and all the specifics I could and my mother was surprised that it all seemed accurate. Of course, her memory is subject to error as well.
In fact, I have many strong memories of movies I have seen, and on reflection I realize that I can usually tell you where, down to the exact auditorium, I have seen most movies. Strange.
That’s interesting. Of course, all I’m saying is that memory is fallible, not that it’s never accurate. (Still, reading Loftus did make me doubtful about some entrenched childhood memories, precisely because they were entrenched. I knew I’d remembered them often, so I wondered if I’d altered them in the process.)
Wait – where am I? What am I doing here? Who are all these people?
I think there is quite a big difference between -implanting- childhood memories (which is what most of this work is trying to do) and people just spontaneously coming up with false memories. So I don’t think the take-home message from Loftus’ work is that all memories are unreliable, rather that implanting false memories is easier than you’d think. So that the implications are most relevant for ritual abuse, eye-witness testimony etc.
What amazes me though, more than anything else, is just how many truly bonkers people there are – people you can get to say practically anything you want, I don’t even think you need to implant a memory, they’ll just do it anyway – so when that Christian or UFO-believer asks you how so many eye-witnesses can be wrong you have the obvious answer, because they’re all nut-jobs.
This is all very interesting. I’m quite persuaded by Ophelia’s link between memory and belief. My wife is quite scathing about my inability to remember almost anything about my early life. Trying to look into this from the outside, as it were, I think that when I try to remember those times, my ‘mind’ is extremely sceptical about what turns up and so the random strands and little bits and pieces never congeal into full-blown ‘memories’; which is all of a piece with my general cautiousness about believing anything in the absence of a lot of evidence.
Is this common, or am I a hopeless case?
I remember almost nothing about my early childhood from an autobiographical perspective (obviously I remember stuff I’ve been told about it, or talked about, but I can’t picture any events) – maybe a few fleating, fragmentary images or sensations but that’s it.
It always makes me highly sceptical of other people’s detailed really early memories (‘when I was two I remember…’ – yeah right). I can alse feel the pull of photographs and stories your parents tell – the pressure they exert in trying to get incorporated into your memories – but we must resist good soldiers of memory fidelity!
Well OB if you can wait a few weeks then this
http://tinyurl.com/7yycn
will be coming out, and I’ve written three sections on false memory within it – false familiarity, false recall and source memory. They dwell on quite a few of the points you raise here, for example the fact we can succeed in reality monitoring paradigms (is this a fantasy or a memory) is actually an impressive feat; that memory is not a video-tape, but at the same time the normal cognitive system is fairly well protected against inserting vivid fabrications into the mix; the equivocal status of science with respect to repressed memories – you have the work of Loftus and others on the one hand, forcing an acknowledgment that a recovered memory may in fact be false, whilst recent experimental work suggests memory suppression is indeed a real cognitive phenomenon, contra the previous position where attempts to suppress are self-defeating (the ‘don’t think of a polar bear!’ type of experiments).
Also Paul Broks ‘Into the Silent Land’ has some nice stuff about confabulation, and is a good read throughout. But if I may shamelessly plug, the book I’m involved with is a total joy for anyone with an interest in neuroscience or psychology – and who isn’t? A Dictionary of Fashionable Sense, if you will…. ;)
Re your experience Chris, I think that part of the personal authenticity of memory comes from being able to seat it within a larger narrative: events need a context to feel real.
The first reason for this is that candidates for ‘memory events’ include dreams and imaginations, which in the main are detached and unconnected, making this a handy rule-of-thumb to separate the wheat from the chaff.
The other reason I can see is that when events are contextualised they allow you to apply reasoning and knowledge from other areas to appraise your putative memory (is it plausible that Bob was at the cinema, as he said he would probably be going to birmingham); as such the memory system is likely to be conservative towards memories it cannot situate, making them uncertain because they cannot reach that level of verification.
working at a memory clinic you see this in action now and again. following a memory loss people report vivid and full ‘islands’ of memory that feel real but they cannot always be sure of.
Interesting stuff. Sounds like a terrific book, Alex.
“The other reason I can see is that when events are contextualised they allow you to apply reasoning and knowledge from other areas to appraise your putative memory.”
That’s just it. That cuts both ways, it seems to me. It can help you to check, but it can also (I’m hypothesizing) help you to construct a memory, or pad one out, and once you’ve done that you can’t tell which is which. For instance, I’ve been thinking about my memory of the slaughterhouse since Crumb Trail’s riposte – and it seems to me that I don’t have any one clear sense-impression type memory of it. What I have, I think, is a narrative constructed from the sense impressions I got at the time, rather than a real memory. I can’t clearly visualize anything in particular, although I do have what seems to be a clear idea of the layout of the chute (it ran from the door along the back wall then made a right-angle turn and ran along the side wall downhill to where the slaughtering happened). I think it’s accurate, but I can’t swear to it. I ‘know’ roughly what happened, but by now it’s more of a narrative than a memory. So possibly has elements of reconstruction.
Yes, that’s absolutely true. Events are often remembered in a way that is more consistent with their surrounding narrative – e.g. a story in which someone asked for the bill, and then left the restaurant might be remembered as them asking and paying for the bill, as that fits the restaurant schema much better. So it does definitely cut both ways; my tack on it is that the blade is sharper on one edge. Specifically, that this normalisation of memory will tend to be a good thing, as it works to exclude really wacky things (such as remembering a particular discussion with someone that never happened) and includes things that being congruent, tend to be true; when people ask for the bill they almost always do pay, so the filling in makes some kind of sense.
Of course, wacky things do happen, and some events do break the mould, which is where the system fails. But I think thats where other systems can help to kick in, particularly emotional memory. Highly charged events get a special pass in memory so that they pretty much trump any other conventions. So Bill dodging becomes memorable because its arousing and kinda scary, fixing it indelibly. Or something. Aarg. I’m late. Bu thanks – I hope the book will be good – I’m only one of many contributors (there are 100 ‘hacks’ in all, each on a different phemenon – see my pal Tom’s summary http://tinyurl.com/4mvc7 for details – and I’ve contributed 6) but I am excited. To be published! That will be cool.
“To be published! That will be cool.”
Yup!
I’m going to take it that this “surrounding narrative” aspect of memory is why, say, I can I remember the characters and conversations of a Balzac novel I read ten years ago, while I can’t remember what shoes I wore yesterday?
Otherwise, I’m not sure what’s worse: my memories of going to see the Ice Follies as a child, or if I didn’t actually go, the idea that somehow the idea of suffering through the Ice Follies as a child has gotten locked into my brain.
Oh dear – a possible false memory of going to the Ice Follies. That is sad.