The Unreliability of Memory

[Perknose]

This article is long, complex and fascinating to me, both for the subject and for the in-depth dive into this researcher's personal history.

I invite those posters so inclined to read it in full. I am not asking for any responses, though I am prepared to withstand the almost unavoidable occurence that there will be several posters who will be prompted to respond without having read most or possibly any of the article.

But if even one of you reads the article in full, I will be content.

 

[MtnMan]

I didn't read the article, but I have seen too many studies about the fallibility of human memory to be very suspicious of "eyewitness" proof.

I've never served on a jury, and won't as I have aged out of the pool, but for a long time I figured that if a case came down to "eyewitness" testimony, without corroborating evidence, be it DNA, video, etc., I would basically disregard the "eyewitness" aspect in making my decision.

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

Maybe later.


If I remember.

 

[IronWing]

I read the story. The brain is frustratingly fascinating. It's a sparse data problem to some extent.

 

[mect]

Thanks for posting this. It's a great read.

 

[skyking]

That was quite a well crafted piece of journalism. The author connected me to her subjects in a way that brought up some of my own memories, and how there are certain to be flaws.
If she had tackled the body of work of Loftus head on, it would have bored most anyone to pieces.
Thanks Perk.

 

[cytg111]

Have not read the article.



yet.

 

[digiram]

Read some if it. Reminds me of Inception. One can easily plant false experiences in another ones mind. Well, not easily, but it can be done.

 

[maluckey1]

I liked the article. Our memories are not only malleable, but often faulty from the start. We all colorize what we see through our own "lens" of life experience and knowledge.

After my first experience being on the wrong-end of a gun, I found that my memory of the incident didn't 100 percent match what eye-witnesses saw, and nobody's memory 100 percent matched what nearby cameras saw. Funny thing is that I instantly remembered a justified-shooting course that taught me that split-second judgment and memory of the "facts" don't always coincide.

M

 

[sandorski]

Trump is the proof of it.

 

[Jaskalas]

According to Loftus, who has published twenty-four books and more than six hundred papers, memories are reconstructed, not replayed. “Our representation of the past takes on a living, shifting reality,” she has written. “It is not fixed and immutable, not a place way back there that is preserved in stone, but a living thing that changes shape, expands, shrinks, and expands again, an amoeba-like creature.” ​

It is no surprise to me to reinforce the knowledge that memory, being analog instead of digital, is more like a VHS tape than DVD. Quality is poor to start, with static and overriding info increasing with time. I have believed this for a decade or two. Possibly due to reading something based on her work.

Police have long known that in the event of a car accident, eye witnesses accounts can all vary and tell different stories.

The idea that eyewitnesses are worth a damn in a trial, to send someone away for life, never sat well with me. It can help tell a story, but I want proof that the story is real. And "someone said" is not proof to me.

 

[Jaskalas]

On February 6, 2020, the day before she testified, she received an e-mail from the chair of the psychology department at New York University, where she was scheduled to give a lecture. Her plane tickets had already been purchased. “Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond our control it is necessary to cancel your talk,” the professor wrote. Loftus asked whether the cancellation was because of the Weinstein trial; the professor never responded.​

Ah, Cancel Culture ever on the prowl for dastardly offenders. Such as professors of psychology who dare speak truth to power, or dogma in this case.

 

[IronWing]

I think the author should have taken more time to discuss Loftus’ academic work. The mix of gun for hire work and personal issues left her credibility in question. Spending more ink on her peer reviewed work would have alleviated that.

 

[1prophet]

On February 6, 2020, the day before she testified, she received an e-mail from the chair of the psychology department at New York University, where she was scheduled to give a lecture. Her plane tickets had already been purchased. “Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond our control it is necessary to cancel your talk,” the professor wrote. Loftus asked whether the cancellation was because of the Weinstein trial; the professor never responded.​

Ah, Cancel Culture ever on the prowl for dastardly offenders. Such as professors of psychology who dare speak truth to power, or dogma in this case.

Probably would have been cancelled and blackballed if she was a witness during the Kavanaugh hearings against Christine Ford.

 

[zinfamous]

According to Loftus, who has published twenty-four books and more than six hundred papers, memories are reconstructed, not replayed. “Our representation of the past takes on a living, shifting reality,” she has written. “It is not fixed and immutable, not a place way back there that is preserved in stone, but a living thing that changes shape, expands, shrinks, and expands again, an amoeba-like creature.” ​

It is no surprise to me to reinforce the knowledge that memory, being analog instead of digital, is more like a VHS tape than DVD. Quality is poor to start, with static and overriding info increasing with time. I have believed this for a decade or two. Possibly due to reading something based on her work.

Police have long known that in the event of a car accident, eye witnesses accounts can all vary and tell different stories.

The idea that eyewitnesses are worth a damn in a trial, to send someone away for life, never sat well with me. It can help tell a story, but I want proof that the story is real. And "someone said" is not proof to me.

It's not that simple. VHS vs DVD is still the same analogy--the information is identical and does not change. In your analogy, degradation can lead to holes, but the base information never changes.

The issue with memory is that it is constantly influenced by life experience and the ways that your brain reorganizes meaning in order to interpret the realities that you experience, over years. This means that memories actually change--the original data is actually replaced by an event that didn't actually happen--because when writing that memory at the time, say when you were 6 years old, was dependent on your brain's ability to analyze the world and establish relevant meaning to that event. As you age and experience new things and, hopefully, new experiences that update your understanding of the world, provide more nuanced meaning to similar events, your memories actually become re-written through updated perspectives.

Details don't just become fuzzy because of something like the instability of magnetic tape introducing artifacts to the recording medium (lets say, uh, plaque clogging up signals between neurons), but the details fundamentally change. The red balloon that you recall now was actually a blue balloon at the time--but it's hard for you to know that because this memory has been re-written, and it's a wholly subconscious process.

And this is a natural process. It isn't a qualitative relationship to age (meaning: cellular degradation as you get old), but a functional one (as you age, you gain more experience, knowledge)