Speaking of Justice and Brains

Daylight Atheism has a post on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony.

As many of us have no doubt read previously, the average person's memory for events is actually not that great. We tend to add things, adjust things, assign pieces of memory to other personal storylines, make things up entirely. In short, our brains are filthy liars. I knew it!

I find this fascinating for some reason. How do we even know that we know something if our lying brains are all we have to go by?

And yet, clearly we know enough to get by, most of the time. We remember enough things accurately enough that we don't constantly mistake people we know for people we don't know, or misremember who we married. Mistaking the details of the story isn't, usually, that big a deal.

So I remember us mentioning The Complete Textbook of Awesome at the first book purchasing meeting, while you don't recall it coming up until the third. As long as we eventually got it on the shelves for our eager students, does it really matter?

Clearly it's a different matter if we're picking people out of a line up to be charged with a crime. Sadly, we're apparently just not that good at it.

Our memory for Simpsons quotes, on the other hand, is excellent.