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.

Is There Such a Thing as Race?

Think about race. What comes to mind? If you’re like most people, you think of White (Caucasian), Black (Negroid), and Asian (Mongoloid). Maybe with a little reflection you add Native American. (The terms in parentheses are the scientific names for these races.)

These categories basically conform to the racial categories I grew up with, which we crudely called white, black, yellow, and red.

Now ask yourself: What is the meaning of race? Does it mean there are significant differences between groups based on variations in physical characteristics? Does it mean differences in abilities as well?

Do you think one race is superior to others in athleticism? Do you point to the number of black football and basketball players, or the winners of the 100-yard dash at the Olympics?

Do you think that one race is superior in intelligence? Do you point to the results of IQ tests that show Caucasians and Asians with higher average IQs than those of Negroid extraction?

Let’s think of regions of the world. What race are Mexicans—are they white? What race are Egyptians—are they black? What race are Indians—are they Asian? What race are Australian aborigines? Think about Europe. Are the blond, blue-eyed, fair-skinned Norwegians the same race as the dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-skinned Spaniards? How do you draw the lines that separate races? What is the basis for the categories?

Now let’s think of specific people. What race is the current president of the United States? Barack Obama is commonly called the “first black president.” But he is equally Negroid and Caucasian. He is just as much “white” as he is “black.” To label him as a member of just the one and not the other is absurd.

The Umwelt

Yesterday I was out in the yard with my cat, and watched her lift her nose to the wind. She was reading the scents of our neighborhood in a way I am completely incapable of. Often times I have seen her sniff at a bush and wished she could tell me the story of who passed by in the night. I sniff the bush and I don’t smell anything.

I see my neighbor’s dog prick up his ears: he hears something that is totally beyond my hearing. What does he know that I don’t know?

There is a world of sense experience all around me that these animals smell and hear but I am completely unaware of. What else might be right here under my nose that I can’t sense? I think I perceive all of reality as it is, but my cat and the dog show me I don’t.

A century ago a German biologist noticed this disparity in sense perception and came up with a term for an organism’s personal reality: the umwelt.

The Belief in Race is an example of Delusional Thinking

The book version of We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity begins with an example of a common delusion in our culture: the belief that humans can be divided into different races. I assert that there is only one race, the human race, and that racial divisions exist only in our minds.

This statement has caused some comment among readers of the book. They are convinced that racial categories are based in reality, which just reinforces the point of the book: “insanity” is defined as confusing our mind-generated reality with actual reality.

Every culture creates a “consensus reality,” a collective version of reality that its members take for granted. This collective reality is made up of subjective beliefs and assumptions, many of which have no basis in fact, but it’s very hard to see that when you’re a member of the society because to you it’s just “reality.”

When we travel we perceive that other cultures have their own realities, and we call the experience “culture shock.” We look back in history and call an earlier society’s collective reality a myth.

But it’s very hard to question the assumptions of our own culture. As historian Nell Painter, wrote in her 2011 book The History of White People: “What we can see depends heavily on what our culture has trained us to look for.”

What basis do I have for questioning our cultural assumption that races exist?

Delusional Thinking in Action

This week presented an excellent example of delusional thinking in action: the U.S. Presidential election. Many Republican strategists and conservative pundits predicted not only a Romney victory, but a landslide. This delusional reality was so strong that it led to such embarrassments as Karl Rove’s live meltdown on election night (watch John Stewart’s treatment).

This is an excellent example of how a culture can create its own reality, and the members of that culture will believe in a truth even when the evidence is against it.

In the days leading up to the election the right-wing true believers accused the polling companies of bias because the numbers didn’t fit their beliefs. (Even though this didn’t make any sense: if the pollsters were biased towards Obama, predicting a Democratic victory would mean liberals would be less motivated to go to the polls. I believe one of the reasons turnout was so high is because liberals believed Obama might lose. But this is typical of delusional thinking: it’s not rational.) The conservative media spent those days discussing the liberal machinations of the mainstream media and how the liberals were conspiring to create misleading polls, instead of facing the true situation of their presidential candidate.

But it turned out that the people who statistically analyzed those polls using facts and not wishful thinking, eminently including Nate Silver at the New York Times, were extremely accurate.

Planning Fallacy and the London Olympics

In his bestseller Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman discusses many common cognitive and decision-making errors. One that I’m certainly familiar with is called the “planning fallacy.”

Almost everyone, Kahneman says, creates forecasts that “are unrealistically close to best-case scenarios and could be improved by consulting the statistics of similar cases.” He uses as an example kitchen renovation projects. The average estimate for the job is about $18,000, and the average final cost is close to $38,000. But no one ever begins the renovation thinking their project will have those kinds of cost over-runs.

It’s not surprising that ordinary people fall prey to this common decision-making error, but you’d think people who are professional planners would know better. In the August 2012 Harper’s Index, there’s a perfect example of the planning fallacy on a large scale:

Cost of staging the 2012 London Olympics Games as estimated by the British government in 2003: $3.7 billion

Cost as currently estimated by the British government: $14.6 billion

As estimated by an independent study: $37 billion

When is the last time you heard of a large government or corporate project that didn’t involve huge cost overruns? You’d think the people involved in the planning of such projects would study similar projects, learn from the mistakes others have made, and plan accordingly. But it seems like we are all afflicted with the same prejudice: I’m different and I won’t fall prey to the same problems other people do.

What word describes the Olympics cost over-run better than “insane”? This is the confusion of subjective opinion with objective fact (our definition of insane) brought into the realm of public policy. (Not to mention the insanity of spending this kind of money on a spectacle with the austerity budget now in place in Britain.)