Monday, October 20, 2014

Memories False and Lost



“Tell the jury what you saw," the prosecutor asks the man on the witness stand.   We have seen this happen many times in movies and in crime shows on TV and read it in scores of crime novels.  Nothing is as convincing to a jury as an eyewitness report.

We know from Caro’s fascinating post a few months ago, though, how unreliable the hindsight of eyewitnesses can be.  If you missed her report or (ahem!) don’t remember it well, you can find it here:



This morning, while fixing myself breakfast, I listened to an episode of my favorite radio show.   It's called Radio Lab and reports on social and physical science and often about how they intersect and interact. All the episodes are available as podcasts, so I can tune one in whenever I want to hear something to stimulate the little gray cells.  This morning, it was the show called "Memory and Forgetting,” which deals with, among other things, some notions very useful to the crime writer.  Like the fact that memory is dynamic.   One does not put away one’s experiences like storing a can of tomato soup in the kitchen cupboard—with the ability to take out the exact same thing you put in.



Decades before the scientists proved what really happens to memories, Fredrick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner instinctively knew that the more often one accesses a memory, the less likely we are to remember it accurately.  Viz--



Those two characters must have been truly in love and often thought back on their love affair.  That’s why their memories of it are so different.  Science can show us that now.

This means that the more the police repeatedly question the witness, the more degraded will be the quality of the testimony.  But maybe that is what the investigators want?



And memories can be planted.  Scientific investors have been doing that quite successfully for a long time.  All it takes is to tell the subject about a childhood memory reported by, say the his parents or by her older siblings and, bingo, most people will report details of the scene, filling in with memories of other places, the mall where they “remember” having gotten lost.  What never happened begins to feel absolutely real.

If you want to hear the radio show in question, you can find it here:  (I warn you, you will likely become addicted to Radio Lab and be a smarter person for it.)



At the very least, if you listen, you will learn that the human memory—while precious beyond words and the source of our sense of ourselves—is not one hundred percent reliable.  Try to keep that in mind.




Annamaria - Monday

10 comments:

  1. I'll try not to forget. By the way, if I haven't told you before, Annamaria, considering your interest on this subject I think you'll be fascinated by Nobel Prize laureate Erik Kandel's "In Search of Memory."

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    1. Thank you for the recommendation, Jeff. I have long been fascinated by people's insistence that what they remember is the exact, unvarnished truth. And that governments regularly execute people based on conclusions involving such unreliable recollections. Justice may be blind, but sometimes it is also deaf and dumb--very DUMB.

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  2. I remember, AmA, when we had that secret rendezvous on Jeff's farm (he was on Mykonos at the time), and the ...uh... ummm... stimulating appliances and ...er.. toys that we found in his drawers. I'd never known anyone who kept their kitchen utensils in their bedroom and vice versa. And do you remember how we left a rubber-band around the spray nozzle on his sink? I'll bet he was struck dumb when he turned on the faucet and it was suddenly raining on the front of his shirt. But at Jeff's age, he probably doesn't even remember it now.

    Well, that's all for now, I just remembered that I have some new memories to write down. (Isn't "new memories" sort of an oxymoron?)

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    1. Yep, "moron" to describe your memories works for me, EvKa.:)

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    2. If you guys are going to try to create false memories for me, please make sure that if they involve kitchen implements, the tools will be used only by me--preferable in the preparation of osso buco.

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    3. Jeff: I knew I was dropping a straight-line for you, and almost called your attention to it, but then thought, "No, if he's too dense to pick up on it, he doesn't deserve it." I'm glad you didn't fail me.

      Ama: Well, of course you were the one using the instruments. I've never even HAD osso buco, let alone PREPARED it! (Yes, we're a deprived (no, Jeff, not depraved) bunch out in the wilds of the west coast.)

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    4. Good heavens, EvKa. Never? What a deprived life you have led. We must try to correct this during LCC next spring.

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  3. I really like the tomato soup analogy. Speaking of tomatoes, do you make the newer version of osso buco with tomatoes or the older version without?

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    1. Hi Juno, I do both. With tomatoes in the winter and without (alls Novese), because it is lighter, in the summer. It is my favorite meat dish--period, full stop!

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  4. we know how fond the Nazis, the KGB and, als, our own CIA ( et co ) have been of messing with memories of the indidual... but how many so-called "nice" people in the media say things to shift our memories around! Scary, huh? tstraw in cooler manhattan

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