84: Memory

Little Brother: "Hey remember than time when we all jumped off the ski lift?" Older Brother: "Dude you weren't even there. In fact you were 5. I told you that story." Little Brother: "Oh." Memory is a funny thing. We all know that it is fallible and that we forget stuff or misremember stuff all the time. Yet, when a memory is vivid it is deeply upsetting to find out that it is false or even flawed in some way. In this episode Mica, LaShawn, Thomas, and I discuss how memory is experienced, how memory is understood according to modern psychologists, and how this understanding of memory should inform our interpretation of history. Side Note Please check out the RF-LCF fundraiser page and donate while you are there (and nab some sweet Mormon swag). Mini-Lecture Text I spent much time playing guitar through my high school years, and like other guitar nuts I never learned to read music like those who went through piano lessons did. I learned new songs through guitar tablature found on the internet. I remember several times visualizing in my mind, what I thought was a memory of previously seeing a link to tablature for a song I wanted to learn on a website. When I went to look for the actual link my brain was telling me existed I could not find it. It simply wasn’t there. This kind of experience is not unique to only me. Similarly, a memory researcher “Dr. Neisser, came to the realization that his own memory was as fragile as [anyone else’s]. For years, he had said that he was listening to a baseball game on the radio when he heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Finally, he said, it dawned on him that he could not have been listening to a baseball game in December.” They don’t play baseball in the winter. What he thought was a vivid memory was at least in part. . . fabricated. This fabrication went on unbeknownst to Neisser, or likely any other human being experiencing such a “false” memory.   Even more challenging than this is a deeply troubling story of Penny Ann Beernsten who was out running along the Lake Michigan shoreline and was apprehended by an unknown man who forced her into a wooded area and sexually assaulted her on July 29, 1985 while on vacation. She recalls making an effort to etch her assailant’s face in her mind and later when a lineup was produced she confidently picked out Steven Avery as the perpetrator, or who she thought was her attacker. Later, that is 17 years later, DNA testing advocated through the Innocence Project which first started in 1989, demonstrated that Steven Avery who had spent nearly two decades in prison wasn’t at the scene of the crime and did not commit that crime, it was a man named Gregory Allen.[1] How does this happen? How do we confidently recall facts, of traumatic events or seemingly trivial details yet be wrong, when we feel that we can only be right? In order to answer than question we need to have a short discussion of memory research In 1977 Harvard researchers published an article about memory in the journal Cognition. In questioning individuals about the assassination of president John F Kennedy, surely an emotionally arousing event that rocked the nation, the term “flashbulb memories” was coined. The questionnaires revealed that “almost everyone can remember, with an almost perceptual clarity, where he was when he heard, what he was doing at the time, who told him,