Friday, July 21, 2006

That's not exactly how it happened.

I have an utterly false memory of a particular incident in my life. I was running the tale past a blogger friend the other day, and as I told her about it -- knowing it was false -- it all came back to me as vividly as if the incident happened yesterday. It is a memory I have had for years.

I thought about that in light of some recent studies I was reading about, in which it has come to light that our memories play profound tricks on us, and some things we remember as being unremittingly bad, were not quite as bad as we thought. At least not all the time. Likewise, good memories were probably of time sand incidents that did contain negative moments or situations. In other words, things aren't always as they seem, at least in retrospect.

How do you remember your childhood? Is it a warm and fuzzy recollection of just one swell time after an another, and a mom and dad who constantly doted on you and your siblings? That just may not be exactly what it was like. There were bad times, and there were frightening times, and times when you hated your parents and siblings. Likewise, if you had a bad childhood, filled with say alcoholism and abuse, were there not also good things? A teacher who perhaps really cared about your wellbeing? Friends who were able to take you away from the ickiness of your home? Probably. I am always amazed by pictures of children in war zones who will merrily carry out their childish games amidst the rubble.

Anyway, the false memory I told my friend about. My stepdaughter and I are leaning over the railing of a little highway bridge in the town of Kapaa on Kauai, in the Hawaiian islands. She was about 14 at the time. Her mother is getting her hair done at a salon in a shopping mall just down the road from where Andrea and I are lingering. We were bored, so we went for a walk to kill time. We were laughing about how her mother, vacation or not, still had to have her hair 'just-so', but we knew she would also complain about what the stylist did, and how it just wasn't as good as the work from her stylist back home. We were idly looking down into the water and watching the little fish swimming about. It was kind of fun. A warm and comforting memory. A couple of years ago I was walking across that little bridge, and my thoughts went immediately to Andrea and our lovely time there.

And then it came to me. There was something that did not compute with that blissful memory. I had never, ever been on Kauai with Andrea. I had been there with her mother, and her mother once did get her hair styled in the salon of my recall. I even walked up to that little bridge. But Andrea was not there! My memory bank, my false memory bank, inserted her. I was once on Maui with her, but never on Kauai. After our divorce, I missed Andrea painfully. I still miss her very much. So, a trick was played, and she was inserted into a scene that she was never a part of. And there she rests, because I can still bring the incident back without difficulty.

What this means is, if our memories are so false -- and my story is no different from the stories of others about this -- is that they should not be relied on. Police and prosecutors know this. They know that eye-witness accounts of crimes should always be carefully scrutinized, because memories just do damn well play tricks.

At a potentially more damaging level, there are those tales of horrific sex abuse by a parent or elder that will come up in court cases, only to have it discovered that the incidents never actually happened. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. There are countless real incidents of such abuse. But, not all of them stand up in the light of serious scrutiny. The memories of the young are especially suspect, and even moreso when these people are coached by adults with a vested-interest in having a certain end result come to pass. That's why the kids in the Michael Jackson trial were so seriously and heavily scrutinized. Jackson, as we know, was ultimately acquitted. Was he innocent? We'll never know but, unfortunately, the memories of a number of material witnesses were remarkably inconsistent.

So maybe, if you are left with bitterness about a divorce or separation, for example, you should check back in your memory bank more scrupulously and you might find that all of the bad things were definitely interspersed with some good ones, or you wouldn't have been there in the first place.

10 Comments:

Blogger djn said...

That's very interesting. A friend of mine used to insert his daughter, who died as a teenager, into memories.

10:06 AM  
Blogger AlieMalie said...

It's interesting, eh? They've been doing a lot more research on this recently and subsequently they talk about it more and more in classes that I'm taking.

The only rational explanation that I've heard of it is that it's initially a fantasy/thought which, as it is accessed more and more often, becomes more concrete on our minds. The more times something is accessed in our minds, the stronger the link is - and the more links it creates - with other things we remember. And, like the cycle it is, the more times remembered, the stronger the link grows which makes it easier to access so it's activated again and again.

If you want to look at something else, Ian, that's related but slightly different, look up déja vecu.

:)
AM

11:27 AM  
Blogger Jo said...

I remember as a little girl of about 3 or 4, lying in bed "remembering" living in a huge stone castle and looking at hunting tapestries that were hanging on the castle walls. They were beautiful colors, reds, maroons and I loved them. And the castle was lit by firelight not by electricity. But I grew up in a small town on Vancouver Island where there were no castles and no tapestries. A few years ago I went to an exhibit of tapestries at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and they were identical to the ones I "remembered" as a little girl. The colors, the scenes, the size of the tapestries, everything was the same.

12:36 PM  
Blogger Twisted DNA said...

Very interesting post. In fact, I realized I had some false memories too and I read the exact same study you mentioned. The more I think about my memory the more real it seems but I know from reliable sources that my memory is false

8:13 PM  
Blogger Tai said...

"You're right! You're right! You're right!"

That's what I want to say.

But such a large part of me wants to yell that my memories are not wrong.

On one hand, my best friends and I (I'm sure you know who I mean) often share 'shared' memories.
And by that, I mean things that happened to 'them' by which the rest of us know so intimately; it seems to make no difference to whom they happened.
'False' memories I suppose. But memories that fill in the gaps, as well.

9:56 PM  
Blogger Lily said...

Sometimes the "false" memories--the innocent ones, like you've described with Andrea--give us something we're missing in our lives.

4:09 AM  
Blogger Belizegial said...

Ian, good morning.

Your post came just in time to clarify something I was explaining to someone I care about earlier today.

Although most of the memories I can recall about a certain siutaiton seem negative, there must have been some positive memories also otherwise I could not have been where I was to begin with.

We adapt our memories to suit our present purposes, so true.

Enid

9:03 AM  
Blogger Allena said...

I am so glad I found your blog! This was isightful and I believe very true. I will be back to read more soon!

2:32 PM  
Blogger Wendy C. said...

Interesting thoughts. I believe it works the same way with events we chose not to remember.

10:36 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ian ... that was not only extremely interesting, it was also disconcertingly true.

You mention false memories of child abuse ...

Someone I know quite well is certain that she was sexually abused by her father, and has nothing but shining words to offer about her grandfather.

I was in their lives at that time, and I know that she lived with her grandfather, but that her father was not home with her on a regular basis from the time she was 6 months old. He never spent the night there again after she was 4.

If she was abused, I know who did it ... and it wasn't her father.

However, she's always held a grudge against her father for "abandoning" her ... and so the bad memories are conveniently placed on the person she already loves to hate.

Her father's been dead for years now, and I'd like to defend his memory ... but somehow, I think it would only serve to drive a wedge between us.

Sad what the memory can do ...

5:51 PM  

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