THE FRAGILE POWER OF MEMORY
Part 3, Continued from page 2
In Texas, 28 reversals have occurred, and 20 of those convictions were based on eyewitness testimony, numbers right on the national average. Nationally, these innocent people had served a total of 2,500 years in prison, and this is likely the tip of the iceberg because most crimes do not include evidence appropriate for DNA analysis. (All of this data is available from the Innocence Project, www.innocenceproject.org.)
You can be sure that the mistaken eyewitness testimony was given with as much confidence as I had in my memory of the Challenger incident; a prosecuting attorney is not going to offer an eyewitness who is less than completely confident in their memory. The causes of this troublesome problem are many and varied, and there is no cure beyond educating ourselves about the reality of false memory in perfectly normal people.
Catastrophic Memory Failure
Forgetting and false memory are usually no more than nuisances. Amnesia is a disaster.
Amnesic syndrome accompanies a variety of diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, and always is a product of severe head injury. An important fact about amnesia is that only rarely is the memory loss complete. In some cases, memory is lost only for information acquired prior to the cause of the amnesia, leaving intact the ability to form new memories. Actually, this form of amnesia is probably more common on television than in nature, although it does happen. The more common form of amnesia is the loss of the ability to form new memories. This is generally the form of memory loss in early and middle stages of Alzheimer’s.
Try to imagine your life if you could not form new memories. Trivial questions such as “Do I own that?” or “Have I been there?” or “Did I eat?” become impossible to answer. Amnesia is totally disabling, and the amnesiac requires constant supervision. Even if only small percentages of the elderly suffer such debilitation, the world’s population is aging rapidly such that large numbers of people are going to need assistance, and this will come at considerable financial cost to society or emotional costs to families.
The rare cases of complete memory loss teach us just how central memory is to our lives and personal identity. We associate amnesia with an inability to remember the past, but we now know that total amnesia also robs one of the future.
Interviews with people suffering total amnesia have revealed that these people have no plans or goals. When asked what they intend to do after the interview, they have no answer. They say their mind is blank when they think about the future. As unimaginable as this state of consciousness is to you and me, we can understand why this happens when we realize that our plans are based in large part on the contents of our memory. Memory allows us to not only revisit the past but also to create a future.
No cure for amnesia exists, but an exciting discovery may offer some hope for at least limited rehabilitation.
As it turns out, most forms of amnesia do not stop memory from being stored. We know this because recent research has shown that the amnesiac’s behavior is affected by experiences in much the same way as are yours and mine. The difference, and it is a huge difference, is that the amnesiac can not consciously access the memory.
Here is a simple example: What does a densely amnesic person do the second time they hear a joke? If they have no memory, the joke should be just as funny on the second hearing, making them the perfect audience for the comedian with a limited repertoire. But that’s not what happens. The amnesiac, who may have laughed when first hearing the joke, does not do so the second time any more than you or I would. But when asked why, amnesiacs do not say that they had heard the joke, but rather attribute their response to something like the joke is stupid and not funny.
The point here is that the past experience of hearing the joke has the same effect on the amnesiac’s behavior as on that of the nonamnesiac; the joke is no longer funny, even though the past experience cannot be consciously remembered. This fact is being used to devise subtle training procedures to teach the amnesiac new skills, procedures that avoid requiring explicit memory for the training experience.
And in The End…
We all will lose our memory, but for most of us that loss will accompany death. In the meantime, we will experience frustrating and occasionally embarrassing moments when memory fails, but on the whole you can expect memory to provide you with the extraordinary ability to use your past to deal with the present and plan the future.
Most of the time you will not even be aware that you enjoy such ability because much of memory’s operation happens below the level of consciousness. Equally remarkable, however, is that we can bring elements of our past lives into our current conscious awareness. You can revisit pleasant past events and old friends who are not around. Your memory can provide an endless source of entertainment, relaxation and emotional experience, all for free. Among the more poignant quotes from literature about memory is one attributable to J.M. Barrie, Scottish author and creator of Peter Pan: “God gave us memory that we might have roses in December.” Of course here in San Antonio, we can see real roses in December and use our memory so that we might have snow.
© 2007 R. Reed Hunt
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— R. Reed Hunt
Illustrations by Anna Elena Balbusso