Invented memories
I watched "60 Minutes" on Sunday night. The show covered a truly sad story about a lady who'd been raped as a college student at 22. She'd memorialized various features of her attacker and helped investigators create a composite sketch. A local restaurant worker mostly fit the description and his photo was placed in a line-up along with several others who generally matched some demographic characteristics. As it turns out, a photograph of the actual rapist (later determined with some greater specificity by DNA analysis) was not among those shown to the unhappy victim. She picked out the fellow who appeared the most similar upon the various physical points of reference she had, quite painstakingly, committed to memory; who the police had picked because of her composite sketch and his proximity to the site of the crime. Suffice it to say, in an in-person line up, the same fellow was picked, the victim was congratulated on her consistency, and a conviction and long imprisonment duly followed. Watch the story here.
There's something frightfully interesting about how malleable memory is. Later in the broadcast, an individual characterized the memory of a crime victim as worthy of being guarded with the same care as one would the actual crime scene. Be careful not to leave things lying about, don't scuff the carpet, don't bush your shoulders off - your dandruff might incriminate you.
I find this an interesting jumping off point for what I hope will be observations of some import. A few months ago, I read Francis Yates' book, The Art of Memory. It's a historical study of the various means of manipulating memory used by the comprehensively bright folks who pulled off the Renaissance. (No small feat, when one considers that it used to be The Man could set you on fire for writing down the wrong thing or committing a victimless crime like blasphemy) Now, when I say "manipulating memory," I really mean placing artificial information in such a way that it seems real to the part of the mind responsible for recall. Let's say, for instance, that I need to recall the legal elements of some crime so as to be able to answer a question on the dread Bar Exam. I could write out the elements in a standard outline format, re-read them, copy them to flash cards, perhaps remember how they are placed on a given page, and hope to be able to reproduce them on demand. Another means would be to associate the concepts and words with objects in a three-dimensional space that one would move through in "rehearsing" the elements of the crime. For some reason it's more natural to remember a walk around a room than a decidedly abstracted paragraph - why else do people pace when deep in thought? This idea of creating a physical script of sorts, apparently allowed our predecessors to engage in prodigious feats of memory. Like, say, reciting the Iliad, with only the variations in adjective and adverb that made siting around a fire and listening to the same story for the umpteenth time pass as quality entertainment in the good old days.
This procedure of building memory is more than fascinating. Causing parts of the mind to associate artificial facts with reality, through verification and the placing of detail in a physical context... it's, Jesus H. Christ, pretty damn sweet!
It's also dangerous. Those of you who know me are aware of my dabbling in the cognitive sciences - I hope the story I lead with brings into sharp relief to point I've raised a thousand times about just how easy it is to place conceptual and conclusory artifacts into one's experiential memory. You don't even have to consciously want this sort of thing to happen. The knowledge of this distinctly human potential is powerful (woooooo!); the effects are occasionally tragic. Take care, young Padawan.
