Speaking of Lying Brains...

Slate has a whole series up about the work of Elizabeth Loftus, who has done a lot of research and experimentation into false memories and how to create them.

There's information on how people were convinced that they'd experienced things that couldn't have happened (like meeting Bugs Bunny at Disneyland), and speculation about the future of implanted memories and whether they might be used for good (if you remember that you always loved vegetables, will you be more likely to eat more of them now?).

It's interesting stuff. Basically, don't believe anything at any time.

But then, the justifiably suspicious among us never do, right? We know our brains better than that.

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Let the Record Show

I have previously written about unreliable brains and their secretive plans to make us think that events happened differently than they in fact did.

I'm not sure why they do it, but there's documentation. It's happening all around you, people! The plot even extends inside your own head!

T. Scott is with me on this (though in a less alarmist fashion), with an interesting post about keeping a journal over the years, and sometimes finding, on re-reading entries, that the way he remembers something is not the way he initially wrote it down.

I too have kept a journal for many years, and one of these days if I go back over the collected volumes, I expect I'll be startled to find things I thought happened one way, that actually were somewhat different. If my contemporary description is to be believed, that is. There's always the chance that I lied about it when I first wrote it down, and remembered it accurately, but in general the opposite is probably more likely. I don't remember lying to my journal, anyway.

Mostly when I glance back over the pages I find that I seem to spend a lot of time talking about how tired and busy I am. I am apparently always simultaneously stressed out and on the verge of falling asleep. My faithful legions of blog followers are fortunate, since I occasionally try to think of something more interesting than that to say here, or at least to find interesting things that other people are saying.

This makes me wonder if memory will get better now that it's easier for people to record and document events in their lives. If we can go back and fact check our recollections, will we be inclined to preserve the memories more accurately?

Or will we just misremember the things that aren't recorded, since pretty much no one documents everything, and think we remember perfectly the things that are recorded, even if the memory has actually faded and what we're remembering is the documentation?

Knowing the wiliness of our slippery minds, I'm betting on the latter.
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Speaking Further of Memory

Since I've run out of yarn for the afghan squares I'm supposed to be knitting, I had a chance to catch up on Wired. Wouldn't you know they have a story about unusually reliable memory?

It's about Jill Price, who has startlingly accurate recall of events in her life. The days and dates of news events, weather, and what was happening, are all clear in her memory. 

She doesn't remember absolutely everything that she's ever learned, however, so it's not a perfect record: her memory focuses on her own life, rather than incorporating historical information from before she was born, or even more recent events that maybe she just wasn't that interested in. 

The article concludes that the exceptionally good memory may be similar to obsessive-compulsive disorder; she remember things about her life incredibly well because she keeps excellent records and thinks about it all the time.

So there are certainly people whose memory is a lot better than average. Perhaps I would trust her recollection of the discussion at a book purchasing meeting.

It's not clear from the article whether she would be any better than the average person at correctly picking someone out of a police line-up, so I'm not sure about the implications for justice.

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.

More on Unreliable Brains

I am once again reminded of the mutability of memory (previously here) by a post from Cutting Through the Crap, which talks about a football player's detailed false memory:

Asked by the interviewer if there was any chance it was someone else who made hit, the man went on to recall the feeling of it, the joy of it, in detail. At which point the play was shown again (the movie was a mixture of footage from the game, with recollections of players all these years later.) The man was nowhere near the play; rather, he was at the bottom of a pile well across the the field.

Clearly, the mind is bizarre and cannot be trusted. I am casting doubtful glances at everything I thought I knew about my life. 

Of course, there's documentation for a lot of things. Photos of me under a pile at the other end of the field, journal entries, paperwork I've done, blogs, etc. 

Also I figure probably the boring parts are fairly reliable, because why bother to falsify that for myself? I wouldn't misremember having gone downtown and browsed around a bookstore but not bought anything, right?

Fortunately, there are a lot of boring parts. 

Or are there?

So Many Memories

Dangerous Intersection posted about this interesting article on how false memories can be created and made convincing. 

Apparently it's not even that hard! Also, since the article is from 1997, apparently this isn't really news, so who knows how many of my carefully stored reminiscences are complete fabrications? 

Well, that's not quite true. You have to at least have some access to the person and get them to think about the past and about things that might have happened. I don't recall anyone ever taking that kind of time with me. Although, if there's a complementary technique for removing actual memories, that might not mean much. 

If there is such a complementary technique, it's not mentioned in this article (though here's a mention of a pill that can remove the immediacy of memories).

This does make you wonder to what extent you can trust your own mind---and if you can't trust your own mind, where does that leave you? In yet another relationship with a slippery, unreliable thing working in its own self-interest. The difference between oneself and other people blurs. Everything is alien to some degree, even inside your own head. 

Weird, I tells you.

I'm not actually that concerned about having sinister people implanting and removing memories from my head to further some conspiracy.* But it's interesting to me to think about, not least because I myself nearly implanted one false memory in my head that I know of, so who knows on how many other occasions I might have been successful?

It was no big deal: I was on a car trip with my mother and a friend, and my mother was explaining some part of our past that I, as a child, had understood differently than I understood it as she told it to her friend, and I thought "so that's how that worked out!"

I imagined turning to my sister to exchange this new understanding: pictured how we'd nod at each other if we were both there in the back seat.

Later, I remembered that moment, and really thought that my sister had actually been there...only the fact that I remembered other things about the circumstances, including that I was the only kid along on that trip, made me realize that I had made up the part about exchanging a significant glance with my sister. If I hadn't particularly remembered the other details, if more time had passed before I thought about it again, who knows?

Not that complicated, not that hard, not that sinister...but also, the brain, not that trustworthy. 

I suppose we just have to make peace with the slippery, unreliable things in our heads, try to understand both their strengths and their limitations, and do the best we can.  

Here's to you, mind-thing! Now let's get back to killing you with wine.

*I already accept that this is true, and it doesn't bother me. I'm confident that our new insect overlords have our best interests at heart.