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.

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We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity: The Mechanics of Compassion, is now available as an e-book at Smashwords.com, and as a Kindle ebook and paperback at Amazon.com. Click here to download the first four chapters for free.

Here's a brief description:

Most of us think we perceive reality directly and accurately, but we don’t. What we see is an individual mind-generated reality, heavily distorted by our beliefs and assumptions. We erroneously believe our subjective reality is actual reality. We’re all insane because we’re deluded about what is real.

What better explanation for dysfunctional human behavior than universal insanity? What better way to explain why loneliness, fear, and hatred are so familiar and love so rare? Why so many people need to use alcohol and drugs just to get through another day? Why half of all marriages end in divorce?

We are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity presents the idea that the primary cause of human suffering is universal insanity. Insanity is defined as: confusing our mind-generated reality with actual reality. In practical terms, this translates as confusing subjective opinion with objective fact.

For example: “I made a mistake” is an objective fact. “I made a mistake because I’m a loser” is a subjective opinion. When I think and act as if the subjective opinion is an objective fact I’m confused about what is real. It is this confusion of fantasy with fact that makes me insane.

Free will is shown to be a complete myth. Insane people do not have free will. We are driven by subconscious psychological forces over which we have no control. Recognizing our insanity means the end of blame, shame, and arrogance.

In addition, the recognition of universal insanity is the key to compassion: we’re not right in our minds.
By understanding that all hurtful behavior—from gossip to mass murder—proceeds from insane thinking, we can experience compassion for ourselves and everyone else.

The book includes references to recent scientific and psychological research that demonstrates how out-of-touch with reality we really are. Other references range from Zen stories to the Three Stooges.

I use examples from my own life to illustrate how we all build a personal subjective reality—My Story. I also share my personal growth as I face my own insanity.

This book is for adult audiences. There is a chapter on sexuality and passages in other chapters that discuss sex in an explicit manner.

Sanity is love. Love is defined as: the experience of unconditional acceptance of what is. This means that when we experience acceptance of reality exactly the way it is we experience love.

This book may transform the way you see yourself and the world.

Like Watching a 3D Movie Without Glasses

Recently I gave the following quick synopsis of the theory of universal insanity to a new acquaintance: “Most of us think we perceive reality directly and accurately. But we don’t. What we see is an individual mind-generated reality, heavily distorted by our beliefs and assumptions. We confuse our subjective opinions with objective facts. We’re all deluded about what is real, and this is why we’re all insane.”

I could see that he found this a dubious proposition, and I was pretty sure it was because he was convinced that he was perceiving reality directly and accurately.

It occurred to me that the analogy of a 3D movie could help to illustrate the concept of universal insanity. When a 3D movie is being made, two cameras film simultaneously from slightly separated positions. The final film superimposes the offset perspectives. When you wear polarizing glasses those two images are separated and delivered to the appropriate eye, and you perceive the illusion of three-dimensions on a flat movie screen. But when you look at the film without glasses, it’s blurry, like it’s out of focus. If you watch it too long it’s disorientating and nauseating.

The more clearly an organism perceives objective physical reality, the better its survival chances. For example, when we are trekking through the jungle, if we can’t distinguish the crouching tiger from the obscuring foliage we’re dead. Humans are the product of over three billion years of evolution on this planet, and our ability to construct an effective model of physical reality in our minds is quite remarkable.

But there is another reality built in our minds, a subjective reality, and this doesn’t match physical objective reality exactly. It is offset from physical reality by a certain amount, depending upon the content of our personal subjective beliefs. This offset causes dissonance in our minds, analogous to the way the 3D picture causes nausea. This dissonance is our delusional insanity, and the more our subjective reality is offset from objective reality, the more insane we are.

As 3D films show, it doesn’t take much offset to create an uncomfortable distortion. This is why it can be hard for us “normal” people to grasp our insanity, because our everyday actions appear to prove that we are in touch with objective reality. We can navigate our cars through rush hour traffic, handle the demands of our job, shop for groceries, cook dinner, bathe the kids—all this seems to indicate that we are accurately perceiving objective reality. But accompanying these actions are the distortions caused by our subjective reality: we’re unhappy, or anxious, or depressed, or wish we could be doing something else.

We have all been programmed to think this internal dissonance is completely normal. It’s “normal” if by that word you mean what most people live with every day. It’s also “normal” in the sense of being an evolutionary inevitability. But this dissonance is exactly what we mean here by universal insanity. We confuse our subjective reality with objective reality, and when life doesn’t go the way our subjective reality thinks it should we feel anger, anxiety, or depression.

Recognizing my insanity means I stop trying to impose my subjective beliefs on objective reality. It doesn’t mean I don’t have a subjective point-of-view, it means I eliminate a lot of the dissonance—conflicts, disappointments, worries, problems—in my life.

Fear of Completion

For much of my life I had trouble finishing things. I would start on a project, like making a quilt, and devote hours to it. Then I would find myself slowing down as I neared the end, and it would often just sit there, unfinished, for months or years. Sometimes forever.

Then one day I realized that I had a fear of completion: there was an image in my mind of the perfect finished product, and I was sure that what I was doing would never match that image, so I preferred incompletion, where I could continue to dream of perfection, rather than finish and realize my imperfection.

The aphorism “the perfect is the enemy of the good” seems apropos here.

Just recently I ran into a musician acquaintance and he told me how he just didn’t seem able to finish writing the songs he started. “They didn’t sound good enough to keep working on them,” he said. I told him how my musician husband, over the years, had recorded his songs and consistently hated the sound of the recording. Then, years later, he’d listen to the cassette tape or CD and say, “you know, this is pretty good.”

A component of universal human insanity is self-hatred. All of us are encumbered with doubts and insecurities.

It’s like there’s two parts of us. One is vibrant and alive and creative, wanting to share our vision with the world. The other part is fearful and dark and suspicious, sure that our vision is silly or worthless or stupid. This part convinces us that if we express ourselves we’ll be shot down as a fool—“you actually thought that was of value?!”—so we shut ourselves down. We censor ourselves.

Some years ago I produced a weekly one-hour TV show, and simultaneously wrote a weekly opinion column for a local newspaper. I was forced to get over my fear of completion! I learned how to just do the best I could, because I didn’t have time to hone anything to perfection. And one of the benefits was that by completing one thing, I opened up the space for something new. I found that all of that incompletion acted like a plug, blocking creativity and expression.

Stiletto Surgery

Women are cutting off their small toes so they can wear stiletto heels. This is insane. Enough said!

The American Podiatric Medical Association says, “eighty-seven percent of women have had foot problems from wearing uncomfortable or ill-fitting shoes such as high heels.”

A collective belief of our culture is that women should have small dainty feet. We were all programmed by the story of Cinderella: the stepsisters’ feet were too big for the dainty glass slipper, and their huge feet were as much a part of their ugliness as the look of their faces.

How different are we from the Chinese who bound their women’s feet?

As a feminist once said about the Virginia Slim slogan (“You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby”): “You haven’t come a long way and you aren’t a baby.”

 

Search for a Motive

The perpetrator of the latest American mass shooting—at the elementary school in Newton Connecticut—also killed himself and his mother. In addition, Adam Lanza smashed his computer hard drive before he went on his rampage. This, we are told by the investigators, is going to make it harder to find what motivated Mr. Lanza to do such a horrible thing.

When we say we want to find the motive for a crime, what we want is a clear, logical, rational explanation for an action that makes it understandable. However, when someone does something of this nature—a mass killing—you can be sure they were not thinking clearly and rationally. Sure they could think clearly about the guns, ammunition, clothing, etc., but this deludes us into thinking that the motivation for their action is also rational.

Dr. James Gilligan, a psychiatrist who directed the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School and was in charge of psychiatric services for the Massachusetts state prison system for ten years, begins his book, Violence, with this message: “The first lesson...is that all violence is an attempt to reach justice, or what the violent person perceives as justice, for himself or for whomever it is on whose behalf he is being violent…Thus, the attempt to achieve and maintain justice, or to undo or prevent injustice, is the one and only universal cause of violence. [italics in the original]

I think Dr. Gilligan gives us the guidance we need in our search for a motive: somehow, for Adam Lanza this action was an attempt to achieve justice. It’s not too hard to imagine how Mr. Lanza might have perceived that his mother had caused him an injustice, but it’s much harder to get a handle on how killing children could undo or prevent injustice. I suggest we’ll never know for sure. All we can know is that in some way this action helped Lanza, in his mind, right an injustice that he believed had been done to him.

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.