Taking offense

A few days ago, Neil Gaiman wrote the following perceptive words:

I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase “In these days of political correctness…” talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin.  And I thought, “That’s not actually anything to do with ‘political correctness’.  That’s just treating other people with respect.” 

Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile.

You should try it.  It’s peculiarly enlightening. 

I know what you’re thinking now.  You’re thinking “Oh my god, that’s treating other people with respect gone mad!”

Which I agree with, for the most part.  Gaiman is right that people often use "political correctness" as a catchall to cover their own asses, to excuse themselves for holding opinions that are bigoted or narrow-minded.  To me, the phrase has come to be almost as much of a red flag as when someone starts a conversation with, "I don't mean to sound racist/sexist/homophobic, but..."

On the other hand, there is an undeniable tendency in our culture to equate "offensiveness" with "having our opinions challenged."  Witness, for example, the professors at the University of Northern Colorado who are being investigated for offending their students -- by presenting, and asking students to consider, opposing viewpoints.

One professor was reported for asking students to think and write about conflicting views of homosexuality in our society.  As part of the assignment, the professor had asked students to consider the following:  "GodHatesFags.com: Is this harmful?  Is this acceptable?  Is it legal?  Is this Christianity?  And gay marriage: Should it be legal?  Is homosexuality immoral as Christians suggest?"

Note that the professor wasn't saying that homosexuality is immoral, or that the answer to any of the other questions posed above was "yes;" (s)he was asking the students to consider the claim, and creating an evidence-based argument for or against it.  The student filing the complaint didn't see it that way.

"I do not believe that students should be required to listen to their own rights and personhood debated," the student wrote.  "[This professor] should remove these topics from the list of debate topics.  Debating the personhood of an entire minority demographic should not be a classroom exercise, as the classroom should not be an actively hostile space for people with underprivileged identities."

Because learning how to counter fallacious arguments with facts, and answer loaded questions rationally, somehow creates an "actively hostile space."

[image courtesy of photographer Fredler Brave and the Wikimedia Commons]

The second professor's case is even more telling, as it came about because (s)he had assigned students to read the famous article by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt called "The Coddling of the American Mind," which addresses precisely the problem I'm writing about in this post.  After reading the paper, the professor asked the students to consider the questions raised by the article, specifically the issues of "trigger warnings" for minorities such as homosexuals and transgender individuals in reading controversial material.

"I would just like the professor to be educated about what trans is and how what he said is not okay because as someone who truly identifies as a transwomen [sic] I was very offended and hurt by this," one student wrote in the complaint.

The university complaints office backed the student.  The professor was instructed not to interject opinions into his/her lessons -- including those of the authors who wrote the article.

So there's something to be gained by having students avoid all opinions that they disagree with?  If they think they're not going to run into those once they leave college, they're fooling themselves -- and if they haven't been pushed into thinking through how to respond to bigots and people who are simply ignorant, they're basically choosing to be intellectually disarmed adults.

Students should be forced to consider all sorts of viewpoints.  Not to change their minds, necessarily, but to allow them to think through their own beliefs.  I tell my Critical Thinking students on the first day of class, "You might well leave this class at the end of the semester with your beliefs unchanged. You will not leave with your beliefs unchallenged."

Now, note that I am not in any way trying to excuse teachers (on any level) who try to use their classrooms as a field for proselytizing.  I only have the one source for the incidents at the University of Northern Colorado, and there might be more to the story than I've read.  If these professors were using their positions of authority to press their own bigoted viewpoints about gender and sexual identity on their students, they deserve censure.

But I suspect that's not what's going on, here.  We've become a polarized society, with half of us lambasting the political correctness movement and simultaneously feeling as if their right to free speech makes it acceptable to offend, and the other half afraid to voice an opinion for fear of treading on some hypersensitive individual's toes.  What's lost is the opportunity for civil discourse -- which, after all, is one of the best and most reliable pathways toward learning and understanding.

Score card

It's the last week of June, and I just wrapped up another school year.  My 29th overall, which still seems kind of impossible to me until I realize that a child of a former student graduated from high school this year.  Then it seems pretty real, along with a realization of "Good lord, I'm getting old."

So I've been at this for a long time, and with, I think, some measure of success.  Which is why I read my letter from the school district awarding me my numerical grade for the school year with a mixture of amusement and irritation.

I won't leave you hanging; I got an 81.  I got an 84 last year and a 91 the year before that, so according to the state rating scale, I'm becoming incrementally less competent.  It can't, of course, be because the metric is flawed, that the three grades are comparing different assessments of different students put together in different ways.  No, in the minds of the geniuses at NYSED, this number means something fundamental about my effectiveness as a teacher.

In fact, that's what an 81 gets you; a designation of "Effective."  You have to have a 92 to be "Highly Effective."  If you're below 75, you're "Developing."  I'm glad I didn't land in that category.  If after 29 years at this game, I'm not "Developed," I don't hold out much hope.

What amused me most about all of this nonsense was the paragraph that said, and I quote:

Please remember that your scores are confidential and should not be shared in any way.  In accordance with state regulations, the parent of a child in your class may request your composite score and rating as well as that of the principal.  For your own protection, teachers are strongly discouraged from sharing their own scores outside of the district process.

Which is a recommendation I'm happy to toss to the wind (along with the aforementioned letter).  If we keep our scores and the way they were generated under wraps, it allows the statistics gurus at the State Education Department to keep everyone under the impression that they actually know what they're doing.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Let me get specific, here.  My 91 two years ago was based upon the scores of my Critical Thinking classes and my AP Biology class.  Critical Thinking is an elective, and while the day-to-day work is difficult (requiring a lot of thinking, surprisingly) the material that is suitable for an exam at the end of the year is actually quite easy.  So my students performed brilliantly, as I would expect.  Additionally, that year's AP class was an extremely talented group who knocked the final exam clear out of the park.

Fast forward to last year.  My score last year was based on a combination of my Regents (Introductory) Biology class and my AP Biology classes.  Because of a strange policy of piling students who are classified as learning disabled into the same class, last year's Regents Biology was half composed of students who have been identified with learning disabilities.  Many of these students were hard-working and wonderful to teach, but it's unsurprising that that part of my grade went down.  My two AP classes last year were a friendly, cheerful lot who also happened to be somewhat motivationally challenged, and who by the end of the school year were far more invested in playing Cards Against Humanity than they were in studying for my final.  So that accounts for the remainder of the decline in my score.

This year, my score was a composite once again between Regents and AP Biology, but this time my Regents classes were among the most talented, hardest-working freshman and sophomores I've ever had.  My AP class was small but outstanding, but because of the way the scoring is done, they would have to score on my (very difficult) final exam higher than a target determined by their score on the (far easier) Regents Biology exam for me to have that student's score count in my favor.  On the part of my assessment that came from my AP class, I got a grand total of three points of of a possible twenty -- mostly because of students who got an 81 or 82 on an exam where their target was 85.

So my three scores in three consecutive years have absolutely nothing to do with one another, and (I would argue) nothing whatsoever to do with my competence as a teacher.  But because there's no idea that is so stupid that someone can't tinker with it to make it even stupider, next year the State Department of Education has informed us that we'll be assessed a different way.  Our joy at hearing this pronouncement was short-lived, because once we heard how they're going to score us, we all rolled our eyes so hard it looked like the email was inducing grand mal seizures.

Next year, unless over half of your students are in classes that take a mandated state exam at the end of the year, 50% of your score will be based on an average of the "Big Five" exams, the ones that all students have to take to graduate -- English, US History, Algebra I, Global History, and Biology.   (The other half, fortunately, will be based on evaluation by an administrator.)  If you think you can't have read that correctly, you did; the half of the high school band teacher's grade (for example) will come from students' scores on exams that she had absolutely nothing to do with.  Even for me, who teaches one of the "big five" -- less than half of my students next year will be in Regents Biology, so I'll be getting the composite score, too.

But don't worry!  Because students mostly score pretty well on these exams, and the score will be calculated using the time-honored statistical technique of averaging averages, we'll all look like we're brilliant.  So in effect, they took an evaluation metric that was almost completely meaningless, and changed it so as to make it completely meaningless.

Because that's clearly how you want an evaluation system to work.

All of this, it must be said, comes from the drive toward "data-driven instruction" -- converting every damn thing we do into numbers.  Couple this with a push toward tying those numbers to tenure, retention, and merit pay, along with a fundamental distrust of the teachers themselves, and we now have a system that is so far removed from any measure of reliability that it's almost funny.

Almost.  Because NYSED, and other state educational agencies, look upon all of this as being deadly serious.  It's all very well for me -- a veteran teacher of nearly three decades who is looking to retire in the next few years -- to laugh about this.  I wouldn't be laughing if I were a new teacher, however, and I'd be laughing even less if I were a college student considering education as a profession.

In fact, it'd make me look closely at what other career options I had.

Take the wheel

One of my favorite units to teach in my Critical Thinking classes is ethics.

I'm no expert in the topic; not only do I not have a degree in philosophy, I have a way of seeing everything in so many different shades of gray that most of the time it's hard for me to make a decision regarding my own ethical standards.  I still love the topic for a number of reasons -- because it brings up issues that the students themselves often haven't considered, because it provokes fantastic class discussions, and because it appeals to the risk-taker in me.  I seldom ever know where the discussion is going to go ahead of time.

We usually start the unit with some exercises in ethical decision-making, presented through a list of (admittedly contrived) scenarios that force the students into thinking about such issues as relative worth.  Examples:  there are two individuals who are dying of a terminal illness, and you have one dose of medicine that can save one of them.  Who do you save?  What if it's two strangers -- what more would you need to know to make the decision?  A stranger and a family member?  (This one results in nearly 100% consensus, unsurprisingly.)  A stranger and your beloved dog?  (Are bonds of love more important, or is human life always more valuable than the life of a non-human animal?)  And for the students who say they'd always choose a human life over their dog's... what if the human was a serial killer?

Some students are frustrated by the hypothetical nature of these questions, although the majority see the point of considering such issues.  And there are situations in which such decisions need to be thought through beforehand -- such as in the case of self-driving cars.

Self-driving cars are an up-and-coming technology, designed to eliminate cases of human-caused automobile accidents (caused by fatigue, impairment, loss of attention, or simply poor driving skills).  And while a well-designed self-driving car would probably eliminate the majority of accidents, it does bring up an interesting ethical dilemma with respect to how they should be programmed in the case of an unavoidable accident.

Suppose, for example, there are three pedestrians in the road at night, and a self-driving car is programmed to swerve to miss them -- but swerving takes the car into a wall, killing the driver.  In another scenario, a truck is in the lane of an oncoming self-driving car, and in order to miss colliding with the truck, the car has to cut into the bike lane -- striking and killing a cyclist.  How do you program the car to make such decisions?

Google's Lexus RX 450h Self-Driving Car [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

This was the subject of a paper in Science this week by a team led by Jean-François Bonnefon at the University of Toulouse Capitole in France.  They created a survey that described the problem, and asked the following question: should self-driving cars be programmed to minimize casualties at all costs, even if it meant sacrificing the driver's life?  Or should they be programmed to save the driver at all costs, even if it meant putting others' lives at risk?

The results were fascinating, and illustrative of basic human nature.  Over 75% of the respondents said that a self-driving car should be programmed to minimize casualties, even if it meant that the driver died as a result.  It's a variant of the trolley problem -- more lives saved is always better than fewer lives saved.  But the interesting part came when the researchers asked respondents if they themselves would prefer to have a car that was so programmed, or one that protected the driver's life first -- and the vast majority said they'd want a car that protected them rather than some random pedestrians.

In other words, saving lives is good, provided that one of the lives saved is mine.

"Most people want to live a world in which everybody owns driverless cars that minimize casualties," says Iyad Rahwan, a computer scientist at MIT who co-authored the paper along with Bonnefon and Azim Shariff of the University of Oregon, "but they want their own car to protect them at all costs...  These cars have the potential to revolutionize transportation, eliminating the majority of deaths on the road (that's over a million global deaths annually) but as we work on making the technology safer we need to recognize the psychological and social challenges they pose too."

You have to wonder how all of this will be settled.  While driverless cars have the potential to reduce overall accidents and automobile fatalities, the programming still requires that some protocol be determined for decision-making when accidents are unavoidable.  Myself, I wouldn't want to be the one to make that call.  I have a hard enough time making decisions that don't involve life and death.

But it does give me one more interesting ethical conundrum to discuss with my Critical Thinking classes next year.

Risk and brain amoebas

We humans are poor at assessing risk.

It's something I've commented upon before; we tend to vastly overestimate the likelihood of being harmed by something gruesome and unusual (such as a shark attack), while vastly underestimate the likelihood of being harmed by something commonplace (such as smoking).  This leads to missed opportunities and unnecessary anxiety in the first case, and ignoring truly dangerous behaviors in the second.

This comes up because of an article I've seen posted now several times, about an Ohio teenager who died from an infection by the "brain-eating amoeba" Naegleria fowleri.  The 18-year-old victim appears to have been infected while on a whitewater rafting trip near Charlotte, North Carolina, and several days later came down with the fever, chills, and headache associated with primary amoebic meningioencephalitis, which is as horrifying as it sounds.  The microorganism gets into your system through inhaled water, and it travels through the olfactory nerves to the brain.  There it turns from eating its usual food source, bacterial films in freshwater sediments, to consuming your brain cells.  The disease has a 97% mortality rate.

Naegleria fowleri [image courtesy of the CDC]

Unfortunately, the story (although correctly reported, for the most part) is inducing widespread hysteria from people who evidently missed the following line: "The CDC reported 37 infections in the 10 years from 2006 to 2015."  Let me put that statistic a different way; given the current population of the United States (318 million), that amounts to about one death per hundred million people per year.  Even if there were three times as many cases that go unreported -- unlikely, given the severity of the symptoms and the likelihood of dying as a result -- it's still a tiny, tiny risk.

Interestingly, these numbers are ten times smaller than the likelihood of your being crushed to death by a piece of your own furniture (303 deaths in the last ten years).

So here are a few of the comments I've seen posted in the last couple of days, edited to reflect the far more likely scenario of your being killed by a falling television cabinet.  I've inserted "television watching" and equivalent phrases for "swimming" and "hard hat" for "nose plug."

• I wish I hadn't read about this!!!  I'm never sitting in front of an unsecured television cabinet again.
• Just in time for summer.  So much for television watching.
• They should post warning signs on television cabinets!  It could have prevented this tragedy.
• Every time I'm sitting in front of the television, I'm gonna think about this.
• I'm protecting my kids from this.  They'll never watch television again without wearing a hard hat.

There.  I hope that sounded as ridiculous to you as it did to me.  And remember; there is ten times the justification for making those statements as there is for making equivalent statements about brain-eating amoebas.

Note that I'm not trying to minimize the tragedy of what happened.  A young life cut short is always sad, especially given how unlikely an occurrence it was.  What is completely unjustified is the panic that these sorts of stories always induce, even in people who should know better.  The U.S. National Whitewater Center, where the young woman is thought to have been infected, has responded by hyperchlorinating their well water, and health officials in North Carolina have recommended "holding your head above water when taking part in warm freshwater activities" and "avoid(ing) water-related activities in warm freshwater during periods of high water temperature and low water levels."

So when are you supposed to go swimming?  January?

The bottom line is that everything you do is a risk.  Most of the risks are quite small, and chances are that you do several things every day without a thought that are orders of magnitude riskier than your being killed by brain amoebas.  If you really want to lower your risk of illness and death, quit smoking, eat a healthy diet, drive carefully, find ways to reduce your stress levels, and get enough exercise.

And keep an eye on any unsecured television cabinets.  They're just waiting for an opportunity to strike.

Finding yourself

Today's story is more of a puzzlement than anything else.  It came to my attention thanks to a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link to a site called What3Words with the message, "People will surely be making up conspiracy theories about the secret meaning of THESE words being attached to THAT place.  So I thought you might want to get the jump on them by making up your own."

What3Words turns out to be a "universal addressing system" that divides the entire world into 57 trillion three-meter-by-three-meter squares, and gives each of them a unique address made up of three random words.  My classroom, for example (or at least one three-by-three block of it) is extras.equine.outsmart.  As the "About" page explains it:

The world is poorly addressed. This is frustrating and costly in developed nations; and in developing nations this is life-threatening and growth limiting. 

What3Words is a unique combination of just 3 words that identifies a 3m x 3m square, anywhere on the planet. 

It’s far more accurate than a postal address and it’s much easier to remember, use and share than a set of coordinates. 

Better addressing improves customer experience, delivers business efficiencies, drives growth and helps the social & economic development of countries.

Which may well be true, but still strikes me as kind of weird.  Why do we need that kind of accuracy?  My classroom floor, for example, is about 7 meters by 12 meters in area.  So this means that just in my classroom alone, there are on the order of eight different "addresses."  If I cross the room, I've moved from "extras.equine.outsmart" to "ranch.speculated.dressing."  So what does that gain me?  If I order a pizza, and the delivery person can't find me when I'm six meters away, the pizza place needs to hire a new delivery person, not use a better addressing system.

I have to admit the map is fun to play with, though.  The assignment of the words seems random to me, although there may be a deeper structure there than I'm seeing.  The site explains:

Each What3Words language is powered by a wordlist of 25,000 – 40,000 dictionary words.  The wordlists go through multiple automated and human processes before being sorted by an algorithm that takes into account word length, distinctiveness, frequency, and ease of spelling and pronunciation. 

Offensive words and homophones (sale & sail) have been removed.  Simpler, more common words are allocated to more populated areas and the longest words are used in 3 word addresses in unpopulated areas.

I'm a little disappointed at the removal of the offensive words, because that could create an opportunity for a great deal of barbed hilarity.  Just think, for example, if the headquarters of the Church of Scientology were located at "bloody.fucking.nonsense."

And it does offer more precision, especially in areas that lack ordinary street systems (the site says it's already being used by the postal system in Mongolia).  But here in the United States, I'm not sure what's to be gained, especially since (most) house numbering systems are pretty logical.  You'd expect that 101 South Street would be next to 103 South Street, and across the road from 102 South Street, and most of the time you'd be correct.

What3Words addresses, on the other hand, don't tell you much of anything.  Good luck figuring out what "huge.mutant.weasel" is next to, for example.  The nuclear power plant, probably.

I guess some street addresses are equally bizarre, however.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

There's also the problem of minor misspellings making a huge difference.  One corner of my classroom, in Trumansburg, New York, is "extras.equine.outsmart."  On the other hand, "extra.equine.outsmart" is in Salem, South Dakota, and "extras.equine.outsmarted" is in southern Peru.  At least if you're trying to find 219 East Main Street, Trumansburg, New York, USA, you won't be off by 6,000 kilometers.

And since there is no apparent rhyme or reason to the choice of words, I'm afraid my friend is quite right; it's only a matter of time before the conspiracy-minded start "discovering" their own meanings for What3Words addresses.  A search for the What3Words address "all.seeing.eye" came up with nothing, as did "new.world.order."  Most of the addresses I've seen are simply weird and random.  But there are bound to be some combinations that raise eyebrows, and believe me, someone is gonna find them.

Anyhow, that's our news from the "Who Even Thought Of This?" department.  So I'll sign off from my comfortable office at "mango.trinkets.embedding," and am heading for a nap in my hammock over at "corresponding.scream.spot," which seems a little misnamed.

Blaming the victims

I would like, just once, to be able to read the news without being outraged.

Lately that wish has been a losing proposition.  Every other news story these days provides enough material to fuel thermonuclear-level fury in anyone who has a shred of sensibility and compassion.  It's reached the point where I'm thinking of avoiding the news altogether.  It seems preferable to remain ignorant than dying of a self-induced aneurysm.

Today's contribution from the Fountains of Rage Department hearkens back to the story of Brock Turner, the Stanford student who raped an unconscious woman behind a dumpster and got a slap-on-the-wrist six month jail sentence.  To add to the injustice, Turner's father and friends rose to his defense, never once mentioning the victim; the father expressed grief over his son's having to pay such a price for "twenty minutes of action."

At least in this case the victim found her voice, writing a letter to her attacker that was so poignant and powerful that it brought me to tears.  The judge in the case, Aaron Persky, has been the target of a well-deserved backlash because of his caving to white male privilege and victim blaming, and in fact was removed from another sexual assault case by Santa Clara county district attorney Jeff Rosen. "After ... the recent turn of events, we lack confidence that Judge Persky can fairly participate in this upcoming hearing in which a male nurse sexually assaulted an anesthetized female patient," Rosen said.

Well, yeah.  And it'd be nice if this kind of retribution were served around more generally.  Instead, we have two news stories that illustrate that even this level of justice is far from the rule.

First, we have a case in England where a wealthy Eton student who was found in possession of 1,185 images of child pornography was allowed to be tried under a false name in order to "protect his family's reputation."  In addition, he received no jail time -- he was given an eighteen-month suspended sentence.

The student, who was tried under the name of Andrew Picard, would probably have remained comfortably anonymous if it hadn't been for an article in The Daily Mirror that slipped up and revealed his true identity as Andrew Boeckman, son of Phillip J. Boeckman, a wealthy lawyer whose clients have included Goldman Sachs and J. P. Morgan.  The article vanished from the internet -- "mysteriously," says Summer Winterbottom in Evolve Politics -- but is still available in a cached copy, the link to which is in the article cited above.

Andrew Boeckman ("Andrew Picard") [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The judge in the case, Peter Ross, seemed more sympathetic with Boeckman and his family than he did with the victims, some of whom were toddlers.  "Your family didn’t deserve that (suffering) but it is a consequence of this sort of offending," Ross said during the trial.  "Inevitably your privileged background and where you were going to school added a degree of frisson to the reporting."

Story #2 comes from my home state of New York, where a bill to help the survivors of child abuse was killed in the State Assembly by passing the deadline without coming to a vote.  The bill, sponsored by Assemblywoman Margaret Markey, would have increased the time a sexual abuse case could be pursued by five years, created a six-month window to revive old cases, and treated public and private entities identically in cases of sexual abuse.  The Assembly, however, saw fit to let the bill fail rather than allowing it to come to a vote.

Angry yet?  Just wait.  Because Catholic League President Bill Donohue crowed about the demise of the Child Victims Act, saying that Markey is a "principle enemy of the church" and that the act was a "sham."

Then he made the following statement, which I had to read three times before I could honestly believe my eyes: "This was a vindictive bill pushed by lawyers and activists out to rape the Catholic Church."

I beg your pardon?  Curious choice of words, given that what you're gloating about is protecting rapists.  But not content even with that outrageous statement, Donohue had the following to say in addition:

If the statute of limitations were lifted on offenses involving the sexual abuse of minors, the only winners would be greedy and bigoted lawyers out to line their pockets in a rash of settlements.  The big losers would be the poor, about whom the attorneys and activists care little: When money is funneled from parishioners to lawyers, services to the needy suffer.  The Catholic League is proud of its role in this victory.

How about the "big losers" now, who are the victims of predators who use their position of power and authority to inflict harm on children?   Donohue, and the members of the New York State Assembly who were complicit in this decision, have chosen to protect a powerful and wealthy institution rather than giving aid to the victims of sexual abuse.

Bill Donohue [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But that's what people like Donohue, and British Judge Peter Ross, and California Judge Aaron Persky excel at; swiveling the blame around so that the victims become somehow culpable in their own injury.

The bottom line is that no institution, family, or individual should be above the law, regardless of their wealth, power, or self-perception of holiness.  The first priority in these cases should be the welfare of the victims, and seeking justice for the damage that has been inflicted upon them.  And the fact that people like Ross, Persky, and Donohue are in a position to deflect our attention from that priority makes them guilty of perpetuating a culture in which rape victims, however young, are to blame for their own suffering.

Remembrance of things past

Sometimes science uncovers things that are profoundly unsettling.  The problem is, as Neil deGrasse Tyson pointed out, "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe it."

Believing it, though, can run counter to our own intuition.  Consider, for example, the work of Julia Shaw, psychologist and lecturer at London South Bank University, which indicates that much of what we think we remember is simply wrong.

Shaw is a specialist in "false memory," our brain's ability to craft completely convincing memories of events that never happened.  And they're not minor and uncommon glitches, but pervasive and unavoidable.  "The question isn't whether our memories are false, it's how false are our memories," Shaw says, in an interview with Scientific American earlier this year.  "Complex and full false memories (of entire events) are probably less common than partial false memories (where we misremember parts of events that happened), but we already naturally fill in so many gaps between pieces of memories and make so many assumptions, that our personal past is essentially just a piece of fiction."

Nor are they always about small and insignificant pieces of our past.  In a study by Maryann Garry and Matthew P. Gerry, of the University of Wellington (New Zealand) Department of Psychology, the researchers found that complex and detailed false memories could be implanted by the simple expedient of a cleverly doctored photograph -- inducing one test subject to "remember" taking a hot-air balloon ride that never happened.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I find this deeply unnerving, mostly because of how rock-solid my memories seem to me.  "Of course it happened that way," my brain says to me.  "I remember it.  I can picture it.  It happened."

Shaw and others, however, have conclusively shown that this is a fallacious stance.  "I have always been self-conscious about my autobiographical memories, since I have always been really bad at remembering things that happen in my personal life," Shaw says.  "I am pretty good, on the other hand at remembering facts and information.  This is part of why I was confident my research on creating false memories could work, since if my memory was like this surely there must be others out there whose memories also don't work perfectly."

Which turns out to be an understatement.  "While I was always cautious about memory accuracy (as far as I remember, hah!)," Shaw continues, "now I am convinced that no memories are to be trusted. I am confident that we create our memories every day anew, if ever so slightly.  It's such a terrifying but beautiful notion that every day you wake up with a slightly different personal past."

For me, emphasis on the "terrifying" part, especially considering how much faith most of us have in our memories.  Eyewitness testimony is considered one of the strongest pieces of evidence in courts of law, and the work of Shaw and others has shown that it is in fact one of the weakest.  But on a more personal level, it's distressing to realize that so much of what we think of as our personal history might well be false.  It brings to mind the numerous instances when my wife and I have argued over the way a particular event happened.  Each of us was dead certain we remembered it right.  In fact -- it might be that neither of us was right.

The scariest thing to me is that there seems to be no way to tell the false memories from the accurate ones.  "[O]nce they take hold false memories are no different from true memories in the brain," Shaw says.  "This means that they have the same properties as any other memories, and are indistinguishable from memories of events that actually happened. The only way to check is to find corroborating evidence for any particular memory that you are interested in 'validating'."

Which, of course, isn't always possible.  So the unsettling truth is that what you remember of your past is a patchwork quilt of real events, partially misremembered events, and complete made-up bullshit your brain has invented.  The next time you're arguing with a friend over something in the past...

... remember that.