"The human brain is rife with all sorts of ways of getting it wrong."
This quote is from a talk by eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and is just about spot on. Oh, sure, our brains work well enough, most of the time; but how many times have you heard people say things like "I remember that like it was yesterday!" or "Of course it happened that way, I saw it with my own eyes"?
Anyone who knows something about neuroscience should immediately turn their skepto-sensors up to 11 as soon as they hear either of those phrases.
Our memories and sensory-perceptual systems are selective, inaccurate, heavily dependent on what we're doing at the time, and affected by whether we're tired or distracted or overworked or (even mildly) inebriated. Sure, what you remember might have happened that way, but -- well, let's just say it's not as much of a given as we'd like to think. An experiment back in 2005 out of the University of Portsmouth looked memories of the Tavistock Square (London) bus bombing, and found that a full forty percent of the people questioned had "memories" of the event that were demonstrably false -- including a number of people who said they recalled details from CCTV footage of the explosion, down to what people were wearing, who showed up to help the injured, when police arrived, and so on.
Oddly enough, there is no CCTV footage of the explosion. It doesn't exist and has never existed.
Funny thing that eyewitness testimony is considered some of the most reliable evidence in courts of law, isn't it?
There are a number of ways our brains can steer us wrong, and the worst part of it all is that they leave us simultaneously convinced that we're remembering things with cut-crystal clarity. Here are a few interesting memory glitches that commonly occur in otherwise mentally healthy people, that you might not have heard of:
- Cryptomnesia. Cryptomnesia occurs when something from the past recurs in your brain, or arises in your external environment, and you're unaware that you've already experienced it. This has resulted in several probably unjustified accusations of plagiarism; the author in question undoubtedly saw the text they were accused of plagiarizing some time earlier, but honestly didn't remember they'd read it and thought that what they'd come up with was entirely original. It can also result in some funnier situations -- while the members of Aerosmith were taking a break from recording their album Done With Mirrors, they had a radio going, and the song "You See Me Crying" came on. Steven Tyler said he thought that was a pretty cool song, and maybe they should record a cover of it. Joe Perry turned to him in incredulity and said, "That's us, you fuckhead."
- Semantic satiation. This is when a word you know suddenly looks unfamiliar to you, often because you've seen it repeatedly over a fairly short time. Psychologist Chris Moulin of Leeds University did an experiment where he had test subjects write the word door over and over, and found that after a minute of this 68% of the subjects began to feel distinctly uneasy, with a number of them saying they were doubting that "door" was a real word. I remember being in high school writing an exam in an English class, and staring at the word were for some time because I was convinced that it was spelled wrong (but couldn't, of course, remember how it was "actually" spelled).
- Confabulation. This is the recollection of events that never happened -- along with a certainty that you're remembering correctly. (The people who claimed false memories of the Tavistock Square bombing were suffering from confabulation.) The problem with this is twofold; the more often you think about the false memory or tell your friends and family about it, the more sure you are of it; and often, even when presented with concrete evidence that you're recalling incorrectly, somehow you still can't quite believe it. A friend of mine tells the story of trying to help her teenage son find his car keys, and that she was absolutely certain that she'd seen them that day lying on a blue surface -- a chair, tablecloth, book, she wasn't sure which, but it was definitely blue. They turned the house upside down, looking at every blue object they could find, and no luck. Finally he decided to walk down to the bus stop and take the bus instead, and went to the garage to get his stuff out of the car -- and the keys were hanging from the ignition, where he'd left them the previous evening. "Even after telling me this," my friend said, "I couldn't accept it. I'd seen those keys sitting on a blue surface earlier that day, and remembered it as clearly as if they were in front of my face."
- Declinism. This is the tendency to remember the past as more positive than it actually was, and is responsible both for the "kids these days!" thing and "Make America Great Again." There's a strong tendency for us to recall our own past as rosy and pleasant as compared to the shitshow we're currently immersed in, irrespective of the fact that violence, bigotry, crime, and general human ugliness are hardly new inventions. (A darker aspect of this is that some of us -- including a great many MAGA types -- are actively longing to return to the time when straight White Christian men were in charge of everything; whether this is itself a mental aberration I'll leave you to decide.) A more benign example is what I've noticed about travel -- that after you're home, the bad memories of discomfort and inconveniences and delays and questionable food fade quickly, leaving behind only the happy feeling of how much you enjoyed the experience.
- The illusion of explanatory depth. This is a dangerous one; it's the certainty that you understand deeply how something works, when in reality you don't. This effect was first noted back in 2002 by psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil, who took test subjects and asked them to rank from zero to ten their understanding of how common devices worked, including zippers, bicycles, electric motors, toasters, and microwave ovens, and found that hardly anyone gave themselves a score lower than five on anything. Interestingly, the effect vanished when Rozenblit and Keil asked the volunteers actually to explain how the devices worked; after trying to describe in writing how a zipper works, for example, most of test subjects sheepishly realized they actually had no idea. This suggests an interesting strategy for dealing with self-styled experts on topics like climate change -- don't argue, ask questions, and let them demonstrate their ignorance on their own.
- Presque vu. Better known as the "tip-of-the-tongue" phenomenon -- the French name means "almost seen" -- this is when you know you know something, but simply can't recall it. It's usually accompanied by a highly frustrating sense that it's right there, just beyond reach. Back in the days before The Google, I spent an annoyingly long time trying to recall the name of the Third Musketeer (Athos, Porthos, and... who???). I knew the memory was in there somewhere, but I couldn't access it. It was only after I gave up and said "to hell with it" that -- seemingly out of nowhere -- the answer (Aramis) popped into my head. Interestingly, neuroscientists are still baffled as to why this happens, and why turning your attention to something else often makes the memory reappear.
So be a little careful about how vehemently you argue with someone over whether your recollection of the past or theirs is correct. Your version might be right, or theirs -- or it could easily be that both of you are remembering things incompletely or incorrectly. I'll end with a further quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson: "We tend to have great confidence in our own brains, when in fact we should not. It's not that eyewitness testimony by experts or people in uniform is better than that of the rest of us; it's all bad.... It's why we scientists put great faith in our instruments. They don't care if they've had their morning coffee, or whether they got into an argument with their spouse -- they get it right every time."
Many of these memory defects arise from the fact (as demonstrated by Elizabeth Loftus) that every act of recall is an act modification of memory; and the thoughts and perceptions in the mental environment at the time of recall get associated in memory with the previous item. This is why giving a picture lineup to a potential witness constitutes extreme malpractice by the police. It turns a squishy analog memory into an unreliably confident discrete memory.
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