THE FRAGILE POWER OF MEMORY
Part 2, Continued from page 1
People often will try to remember something by simply repeating it over and over. This works fine as long as you use the information immediately, as in retaining a telephone number long enough to enter it, but research on memory has shown that simple repetition of information is a very poor technique for long-term memory. Rote memorizing is very difficult and frustrating for most everyone.
Memory, as a biological process, did not evolve for rote memorizing any more than human arms evolved for flying, and to successfully force the process to accomplish an unnatural function is not easy. In its natural role as a recorder of meaningful perception of the events of our lives, memory is powerful and essentially effortless.
A final characteristic of the power of memory is its compelling quality. We rarely question the truth of our memory because remembering feels as if we are reliving the past. This feeling compels us to believe in the memory with total confidence in its accuracy. We will make important decisions based on it, trust the memory to guide our actions, even swear by it if necessary, because it feels so right.
It is much the same as with other feelings that we experience such as hunger or fatigue. We trust these feelings to guide appropriate action. If I feel hungry, I eat. The feeling of remembering indicates that whatever I am thinking about really did happen. Remembering is a powerfully convincing experience.
Normal Memory Failure
Then the dishwasher quits working. Whereas the power of memory goes largely unnoticed, the fragility does not.
Forgetting happens all too frequently, and it is small consolation to know that it is a normal aspect of memory operation. Most normal forgetting is caused by competition among memories, and an important implication of this fact is that the forgotten information is not lost, otherwise it could not compete.
There is no good evidence that normal forgetting is caused by total loss of the information. Just think about the times that you have forgotten something only to remember it later. You couldn’t do this if what you forgot was gone from memory.
Sometimes we blame memory when it is not its fault. Perhaps as much as 90 percent of what we claim to have forgotten was never in memory. The common case of failing to remember the names of a few people to whom you have just been introduced is an example of attention failure that we attribute to memory failure. Often we are not really attending to the names but are thinking about something else, such as what we are going to say after the introductions. You can’t forget something that was never in memory.
At least with forgetting, you know it is happening. There is another common form of memory failure that is less familiar to you, not because you don’t fall prey to it, but because you have no feeling of failure.
To the contrary, your feeling is that you are remembering something, a feeling you trust. Sometimes, however, what you are remembering is wrong. False memory is more insidious than forgetting because you do not know that your memory is failing when you falsely remember something. The only way you can know of this memory failure is if someone convinces you that the memory is wrong.
False memory sounds like an exotic problem that might occur infrequently to a few people. In fact, psychological research has shown that false memory is a common by-product of normal mental functioning. It even applies to memories that we are very confident of, such as memories of dramatic and important events, sometimes called flashbulb memories because they seem so detailed and vivid. We now know that even these memories can be loaded with false information.
I experience a false memory of the circumstances surrounding the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. I have a memory of seeing the live television coverage of liftoff and then disaster. I have detailed memory of the room where I saw this happen. But the memory is totally wrong. I heard about the event on the car radio. Someone who knew the facts convinced me of this when I first described this memory. Even though I now know that I heard the Challenger news on the radio, I still remember seeing it happen on TV. Memory remains powerfully persuasive even when it is wrong.
This fact puts false memory at the center of an important issue of public policy. Since DNA analysis became available and admissible in court in the late 1980s, more than 200 people have been exonerated of crimes for which they were convicted and sentenced. The original conviction was based on eyewitness identification in 70 percent of these cases.
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— R. Reed Hunt
Illustrations by Anna Elena Balbusso