What Does It Mean That Many of our Memories are False?

The vagaries of human memory are notorious. A friend insists you were at your 15th class reunion when you know it was your 10th. You distinctly remember that another friend was at your wedding, until she reminds you that you didn’t invite her. Or, more seriously, an eyewitness misidentifies the perpetrator of a terrible crime. Not only are false, or mistaken, memories common in normal life, researchers have found it relatively easy to generate false memories of words and images in human subjects.

This passage is from a New York Times article about research just published in the journal Science: false memories were successfully implanted in mice.

What does it mean that it is common for our memories to be false?

When I was fourteen my parents divorced (the event was so traumatic I’ll admit to being a little fuzzy about my age). This was totally unexpected; my four siblings and I had no inkling that anything was amiss in our parent’s marriage. One night the whole family was called into the living room, and my father told us he’d decided to separate from my mother and was moving out that night. We talked for some time and then he left. I have a very strong memory that all my brothers and sisters cried, but I didn’t.

Years later at a family gathering we discussed that night. All my brothers and sisters were there, along with our mother. Everyone shared their memories and how this had affected their lives at the time. One thing was stunning: each one of us had the same false memory. Each one of us thought everyone else cried but he or she didn’t. Our mother told us that we all cried.

The fact that all of us believed we didn’t cry says reams about our family psychology. But the point here is that all of us had operated for years from a false memory that slanted our perception of a pivotal event in our lives.

The premise of We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity is that everyone is deluded about reality; we are all confused about what is true. Optical illusions are wonderful illustrations of how we don’t perceive sensory information accurately (see blog post). False memory research shows we don’t accurately remember what happens to us.

Our mind-generated reality is largely constructed from sensory input and memories; if both of these are faulty how can our reality be anything but false?

“Delusion” means a “fixed, false belief resistant to confrontation with actual facts.” Even after my mother had told me I cried that night, I was resistant to believing her because my false belief was so strong. It had been reinforced by years of remembering.

Who Knows What is Good or Bad?

Last night I watched James Cameron’s Titanic. One of the twists of the film’s story is that Jack, the protagonist, was not supposed to be on that ship. Just before the Titanic sailed he won two tickets in a poker game with two Swedes. When one of the Swedes realized that the other had bet and lost their tickets to America, he punched his friend out. This appeared to be a disaster for the Swedes, and a triumph for Jack and his Italian friend.

After boarding, Jack and his friend ran down the corridor of the great ship’s third-class compartment, and Jack shouted, “We’re the luckiest sons-of-bitches in the world!”

This makes me think of a Chinese parable: One day a farmer’s only horse disappeared. When his neighbor came to console him the farmer said, “Who knows what’s good or bad?” The next day the farmer’s horse returned accompanied by a wild horse, and the neighbor came to congratulate him on his good fortune. “Who knows what’s good or bad?” said the farmer. The next day the farmer’s son broke his leg trying to ride the new horse, and the neighbor came to console him again. “Who knows what’s good or bad?” said the farmer. When the army passed through, conscripting men for war, they passed over the farmer’s son because of his broken leg. When the man came to congratulate the farmer that his son would be spared, again the farmer asked, “Who knows what’s good or bad?”

In the movie, Jack and his friend ended up dying, and the Swedes were now the luckiest sons-of-bitches in the world.

The Portal of Awareness

In an earlier blog post I wrote about the “umwelt,” the individual view of the world created by a creature’s unique physiological ability to perceive its environment. For example, the internal model of reality of a blind bat is built through sonar, which creates a very different umwelt than that of a keen-eyed hawk that can spot a mouse from hundreds of feet in the air.

As another example, my husband Arthur is always smelling things that I can’t smell, and he’s often astonished at my inability to detect odors that he finds strong. But those smells just do not exist in my umwelt.

I thought of umwelt again because Arthur is working on an archival project, transferring tapes of singer-songwriters he recorded in the 1970s into an audio-editing software and burning CDs. One musician’s songs are marred by a hideous tape squeal—to my ears. Arthur couldn’t hear it and none of our friends could hear it either. But to me it was so loud it made the CD unlistenable. Arthur and I opened that musician’s computer file and I manipulated the EQ setting, creating a narrow band of lowered volume that I slid up and down the frequency scale until I’d removed the squeal (at about 8300 Hz). Then I played a song, toggling the EQ on and off as Arthur tried to hear the squeal. What was loud and obvious to me was completely nonexistent to him. This sound did not exist in Arthur’s umwelt.

Humility or Humiliation?

For most of my life I hated the idea of humility. For me humility was synonymous with humiliation, it meant saying, “I don’t know” or “I’m wrong.” I’ve always hated being wrong, so I would work hard to either be perfect so no one could find fault with me, or find rationalizations to explain my mistakes away. I also pride myself on my intelligence so I hate admitting that there are things I don’t know.

But the truth is human beings are limited creatures. I have limited knowledge. I have limited abilities. I have limited understanding.

Humility just means the willingness to acknowledge my limitations, to face the truth of just how much there is that I don’t know.

The oracle at Delphi named Socrates the wisest man in Athens. Socrates rhetorically asked, “How can I be the wisest man in Athens if I know nothing?” The answer, of course, was that Socrates was the only man in Athens who knew he knew nothing—and thereby knew more than the rest of the population! Socrates had humility.