If an assailant attaches little significance to an assault
From the dizzying stream of incoming perceptions, the brain stores, or “encodes,” the sights, sounds, sensations and emotions that it deems important or novel. The quality of preservation may depend not only on the intensity of emotion in the moment an event occurs but on the mechanics of how that event is recorded and retrieved — in some cases, decades later.
“Recollection is always a reconstruction, to some extent — it’s not a videotape that preserves every detail,” said Richard J. McNally, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of “Remembering Trauma.” “The details are often filled in later, or dismissed, and guessing may become part of the memory.”
Also, I have read elsewhere, for instance in the work of Elizabeth Loftus, that recalling a memory changes it. There’s no such thing as an intact unchanged memory.
For a trauma victim, this encoding combines mortal fear and heart-racing panic with crystalline fragments of detail: the make of the gun, the color of the attacker’s eyes. The emotion is so strong that the fragments can become untethered from time and place. They may persist in memory even as other relevant details—the exact date, the conversation just before the attack, who else was in the room — fall out of reach.
“In situations of high arousal, the brain is flooded with hormones that strengthen those things you’re paying attention to,” said Daniela Schiller, a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “But other details are less accessible.”
Conversely, experts suggest, there are scenarios in which someone could have committed an assault and yet also have almost no memory of it. If an assailant attaches little significance to an assault—for instance, if he doesn’t consider it an assault — his brain may only weakly encode details of the encounter.
Ahhh yes, of course. That makes sense. It seems all too clear that Kavanaugh never did consider what he was doing an assault. It was just “horseplay”; it was just horndog teenage boys doing what horndog teenage boys do; it was just Rock Hudson trying to nudge Doris Day into the sack; it was just Ensign Pruitt in Mister Roberts hoping to get the nurses drunk so that he could rape them; it was just good clean fun. If he had thought of it as rape maybe he would have remembered it, but naturally it wasn’t in his interest to think of it as rape, was it. Rape is bad, rape is a violent crime, rape is a felony, rape is low class, rape is for losers, rape is not something a nice white boy from a nice elite Catholic prep school would do. No no, it was just Brett and Mark having boyish romps with some girl whose name they never caught. They went downstairs laughing and forgot all about it.
“But for me it was Tuesday…”
Hmm. I assume you mean in the movies as opposed to real life?
Seriously, though, this is why two people can have very different memories of the same event even when both were directly involved, and also helps explain the feeling that time slows down in certain circumstances. It is something I experienced a lot when as a doorman I had to sort out trouble. I found that I could take in a lot of important details very quickly – who was standing where, who presented the greater threat, who was holding what potential weapon – to the extent that I often felt llike I was watching events unfold frame-by-frame whilst my body was reacting in real-time.
It’s because of that ‘slowing down’ that I was able to restrain violent trouble-makers rather than use violence myself, could act while being totally aware of what was going on around me, and could later recall events better than those of my colleagues whose main motivation for doing the job was (I believe) to provide a sort-of legitimate outlet for their own violent tendencies. For them, their violent reactions were normal and as unthinking as saying ‘plesse’ and ‘thank you’ where I never could normalise it.
So, yes, in a case like Kavanaugh’s, whenever the choice is to believe the memory of somebody whose actions were routine to them or a person who was in an abnormal, frightening situation, I’ll believe the latter person every time – barring other evidence or factors – of course, because that person’s mind will be taking in the details of things that they do not consider normal.
Interesting corroboration. People with combat experience must be well familiar with that. I don’t suppose it ever came up in that amateurish “hearing” yesterday.
Adrenaline speeds up the body’s reactions in a flight-or-fight situation, I always figured it has the same effect on cognition. If you’re processing things more quickly than usual, it feels like they’re happening more slowly. Surely everyone has tripped and fallen over “in slow-motion” at least once in their lives? Don’t even get me started on how much time seems to pass between the instant a horse leaps sideways, and you finally hit the ground. I’ve composed large chunks of my will in that limbo.
Catwhisperer, that’s true, but the important factor here is how two people remember the same incident in different ways, particularly if the routine behaviour of one person causes a fear reaction in the other, or if both are going into a situation which is run-of-the-mill to one but out of the ordinary for the other.
David Lisak’s subjects would cheerfully admit to coercion, restraint, forcing alcohol and drugs upon their victims…every behavior and attitude associated with ‘stranger in the alley’ style rapists. So long as the actual word ‘rape’ wasn’t mentioned. They were NOT ‘just boys,’ they were full-tilt sociopaths with multiple victims and patterns of parallel offenses. And they were immune to any sense of culpability.
Yes, of course–this must be a universal experience. I’ve said or done thoughtlessly hurtful things that people have told me have caused them great pain and that they’ve remembered, sometimes for years. (And thoughtlessly kind things as well, that I’ve totally forgotten but the recipients have remembered.)
Heck, I’ll tell a story about that–years ago, when I worked part-time from home, I volunteered to walk dogs at the nearby animal shelter. I’d go get a dog when I wanted a break from work, walk around the park or down the street to the shops for half an hour, and bring it back. It was a no-kill shelter, so I didn’t feel anxious about the animals, but I never got attached to, or really even noticed, any of them, and don’t think I ever took the same dog out more than once. Some time after I got a full-time job and stopped visiting the shelter, I was crossing the park nearby on the way to the shops. All the way at the other end of the park, barely visible, were a man and a dog. The dog started dragging the man over to me; by the time they got within reach the dog excitedly ran to me barking and happy. I literally had no idea what was going on. The man said ‘did you ever walk dogs at the shelter?’ I said I had, and he said ‘I just adopted this dog from there, and am taking him home tonight. He remembers you.’ I felt awful–to me it was a half hour lunch break; to Max it was a show of kindness he’d remembered for all that time, and for which he wanted to express his gratitude.
AoS, I didn’t mean to dispute that there is a difference in the way different people remember the same event. Maybe it wasn’t clear because I didn’t comment on how the banalities of life don’t stick in the mind. I just got excited about this time-slows-down-in-a-crisis thing and jumped on it. For what it’s worth, I forget whether or not I locked the front door before I’ve even got in the car every bloody time I leave the house, but that’s a really boring fact. I very much hope Kavanaugh did not assault women as often as I lock my front door, but it seems likely that he would forget about it for much the same reason.
guest @ 7 – oh jeez that made me tear up. I’m glad Max was on his way to full-time happiness or it would be too poignant to stand.
Me too tbh–a trivial incident in the grand scheme of things but for me a powerful metaphorical whack on the head about how my actions affect others, which I still think about after all this time. And to belabour the point, if anyone had asked me ‘do you know this dog? Have you ever interacted with this dog before?’ I would honestly have said no.