At 6:30 p.m. on 4th October, 1992, a Boeing 747 cargo plane crashed over the suburbs of Amsterdam, hitting two eleven-story apartment buildings, which burst into flames.  The plane’s crew of 4 were killed instantly and 47 people died on the ground or in their apartments.  It was the worst air crash ever experienced in Holland.   A long time after all the emotions had died down after this event, a group of experimental psychologists gave a questionnaire to people in their university communities.  One of the questions was: “Did you see the TV film of the moment the plane hit the building?” 55% said they did. Many of them remembered details of the angle of the plane as it hit the building, or whether it was on fire or not before it hit the building.  Some also remembered where the pieces of the plane had finally landed.  But here’s the astonishing thing: there had never been a TV film, or any other film, of the plane crash. People “remembered” after being asked a blatantly suggestive question.   Because the event was so dramatic, people in Amsterdam probably had a strong visual imagination of the crash — they had then confused this visual imagination with “memory”.[1]  Repeated research has shown that it is easy for us to confuse imagination and memory.  Both probably use the same circuits in the mind and both can be strongly tied to emotions. 

 

Most of us are familiar with moments when we are not quite sure whether we have done a task or not.  Did I switch the light off or did I imagine it?  Research on memory shows that these kinds of confusions can also pertain to events that are very important to us. The fact that we cannot necessarily discriminate between imagination and memory has repercussions personally, psychologically and legally.  Memory can be fragile and can be altered by many different factors.  One of them is what we are told by others:

 

In an experiment on suggestibility[2], students were asked to make absolutely sure that they did not press the ALT key on their computers while taking part in a fast-paced typing test. They were told that pressing the ALT key would freeze the whole computer network because of the particular kind of program that was being used[3].  None of the students in fact ever pressed ALT, but each one of them was accused of doing so.  One group of students who had the highest pressure to type fast were each confronted both by an accuser and a witness who said he/she saw the student press ALT.  100% of these accused students ended up signing confessions that they had indeed pressed the ALT key!   35% produced a detailed false recollection of how they made the error.   These 35% had actually created details of  “memory” in alignment with a new false belief  — I pressed the ALT key — that had been implanted by others.

 

People may also “remember” what they are told about the more distant past.  In one of her many experiments on memory, Professor Elizabeth Loftus provided clients with a fictitious story that they were lost in a mall at the age of five.  The story was backed up by believable details supplied by the subject’s family.  25% of subjects “remembered” the story and many of them fabricated additional details which embellished the “memory”.[4]   There have been many experiments on implanting dramatic past fictitious “events” in patients through suggestion. In one experiment, clients were given dream interpretation that suggested repressed memories of particular events that happened before the age of three. The majority of these clients developed “memory” of these suggested events. 

 

The subjective memory of the past, even when it is completely at variance with reality, may nevertheless appear to us to be vivid and real.  False recollections may create a sense of certainty just as convincing as real memories.  In 1975, an Australian psychologist called Donald Thomson was accused of rape[5]. He was identified by the victim with absolute certainty. The one and only reason he was not convicted in court was that he had a perfect alibi:  he was doing a live television interview just before the time of the rape — ironically on the fallibility of memory — and had tens of thousands of witnesses.  There was inadequate time for the psychologist to have traveled from his talk on memory, in the TV station studios, to the woman’s house.  The woman had actually been watching the psychologist on TV just before the rape and had mixed up the face of the psychologist  with the face of the rapist. Even after this was explained to her and she was shown the proof of the psychologist having been on live TV just before the time of the rape, the woman continued to believe that it was the psychologist who was guilty.  Somehow, in her memory, the horrible event and this particular face had become permanently fused.   Misidentification by witnesses is probably very common.  Of the more than 200 US falsely accused prisoners, freed between 1989 and 2007 because of new DNA evidence, 77% of them had been wrongly identified by a witness[6].  

 

So far, our capacity for accurate memory isn’t looking so good.   There is a popular myth, which I used to believe, that the brain records everything that ever happened to it.  This idea, which has been copied from book to book, was based on the assumption that the brain behaves like audio and visual recording devices[7].  However, unlike recording devices, the brain selects what it sees, hears, and pays predominant attention to.   Even when sensory input is attended to, the brain immediately classifies the new input into established understandings or habitual concepts[8].  Information that is deemed useless is discarded[9].   In these ways, the brain makes its best attempt to make sense of the world and the masses of sensory information that come its way.  For the same reason, when new post-event information comes in, the new information is not recorded separately; it is combined with the old to form a revamped understanding.  In one experiment, subjects were shown slides of a definitively green car but were later informed that the car was blue.  After this, the subjects were given a color chart and asked to match their memory of the color of the car with a color on the chart.  The subjects either chose blue or else an in-between greenish-blue color[10]. None chose green.  Those who chose bluish-green had combined the new (inaccurate) verbal information with the older (accurate) visual memory from the slide, to create a reconstituted “memory” — a new colored version of reality.  

 

When we “retrieve” a memory, the memory is usually recombined with present knowledge and current understanding, and the updated result is then stored in revamped mental circuits.  When the memory comes up again, it will be the modified version even though we might swear that it was the original memory.  The modifications will depend on what we have heard, seen and learned in the meantime.  The modifications may be small or large.  Sometimes memories are corroborated by current knowledge and do not change.  And sometimes memories do not change, even without corroboration.

 

The elisions, deletions and combinations that we make to correlate memory and later experience can be very useful to us.  Through all the cross-referencing of sensation, experience and understanding, we build a total picture of the world, as opposed to a series of recordings.  Imagine if we didn’t do this — we would have millions of unrelated and unclassified recordings.  Our minds would be a librarian’s nightmare, and we would have the intelligence of a DVD-recorder.  However, our tendency to fit sensory inputs into our established understandings, and to delete memory that does not fit, in order to “make sense” of the world around us, can have a cost:  the loss of accuracy. 

 

The research I’ve mentioned so far shows that memory is not always trustworthy.  It can be altered, or even created, through vivid imagination, or through the influence of others.  Can memory also be shown to be altered by our own systems of belief?

 

In the early 20th century a Cambridge researcher, F.C.Bartlett, a pioneer in the research on memory, read an old Native American folktale to 20 university students and asked them to memorize it, and later to write it down.  He wanted to see how well these well-educated British students could remember a story from a totally different culture.  The answer was: not very well.   The students were not able to understand the Native American vision of the world, and so, without being conscious of doing so, they changed the story in order to make it rational within their own frame of reference.  They forgot aspects of the story that didn’t fit their understanding.  They altered other parts in alignment with their own comprehension of reality[11].  So here was an example of memory being altered in order to fit pre-existing constructs of belief.

 

We actually create stories about ourselves almost continually and organize or change our memories to fit the stories we tell.  When things are happening in our lives, there is of course no narrator telling us the story;  there are instead, thousands of sensory inputs.   Later we make sense of these sensory inputs by creating a story that fits our intentions and our understanding.  In a study by Barbara Tversky and Elizabeth Marsh, students were asked to keep daily records of actual events and then the stories they told to others about these events over many weeks.  Comparisons of the written account of the stories told as compared to the written account of the original event showed that the stories changed over time.  The researchers found that in 61% of the stories, students had fabricated or left out information, or else exaggerated or minimized it.    In about one third of these cases of altered stories, the students believed they were telling the truth accurately.  The story-tellers had come to believe their own fabrications, omissions etc.[12]  The story became the memory.

 

We create stories about ourselves and the world, and we try to fit our memories into these constructs.[13]   If the memories don’t fit, we can adapt them or make up new ones, and most of the time we have no idea we are doing this.   

 

In 1986, Greg Markus published a survey he had made on political attitudes[14].  In 1973, he had asked over a thousand subjects to indicate their agreement/disagreement with five different political statements, each on a scale of 1 to 7.   In 1982, the same subjects were asked the same questions.  Not surprisingly, after nine years, most of them had changed their views to some extent, and answered differently.  They were also asked to mark down how they remembered they had scored these questions nine years before.   The results were striking: the subjects’ recall of their 1973 ratings was almost identical to their actual 1982 ratings and bore little resemblance to what they had in fact written down nine years before.  Their memory had been altered to fit their current beliefs.  This was a numerical demonstration of the common “oh, I always thought that” justification.    It was also a demonstration that beliefs unconsciously affect memory:  the past is changed to support the present belief.

 

Seeing these experiments on memory, one after another, may not seem very complimentary to the human brain.  Are our memories really this bad?  Well, they are certainly variable.  The mind is capable of astonishing feats of memory.  An actress can memorize her part word-perfect.  Thousands of actors and actresses do this every day.  A piano player can remember a piano sonata and repeat every note and every nuance of expression exactly, without a glance at the music.  A leaping basket ball player remembers, without thinking, the relative positions, tensions and actions of dozens of different muscles.  When we study and practice carefully, we are capable of highly accurate memory.   Many of our memories, however, are more arbitrarily gained.  Many of our experiences were not studied or repeated:  they were seen, heard and felt just once.  How these one-off experiences are remembered is rather more hit and miss. We may be very accurate, or not.  Such memories may be more easily manipulated by others or by our own understandings and beliefs. 

 

There have been hundreds of experiments on the malleability of memory.  The observations on the fallibility of memory are of crucial importance in understanding one of the ways in which false beliefs are upheld.   Memories can be changed or fabricated in order to align with current beliefs.  Such distorted memories then appear to provide evidence for whatever belief we hold.  While all this is important in the justification for our beliefs, there is another method of justification from the past which is perhaps even more common and insidious — our selection of memories…

 

 

Selective Memory

Even when memories of events are fairly accurate, we still have a choice of which memories to select, out of a lifetime of happenings.  Each of us has had hundreds of thousands of pieces of experience[15] in our lives, of which we remember perhaps some tens of thousands.   With all these thousands of possibilities, we have to be selective; we cannot take all of them into account at the same time.  How do we select what to recall?  Most commonly, we select what supports our point of view.  There may be an equal or larger number of past events that contradict that point of view, but we tend to remember that which corresponds to our current thinking. 

 

Most of us have vivid experiences of this.   Think back to the last time you had a heavy emotional argument with a partner, sibling, or someone very close to you, in which you felt very critical of his/her behavior.  During the argument or soon after, did you find your mind remembering other times in the past when this person did the kind of things you are mad about — or did you find yourself thinking of the wonderful good deeds and great qualities of this person?  

 

We use the past to collect ammunition to support our case.   This has an important bearing on psychotherapy.  Are incidents from the past causative of a current inadequacy, or is a current inadequacy accepted as inevitable and permanent because past incidents have been selected to explain it?[16]  

 

All kinds of beliefs can be supported by selective memory.   One 50 year old client spoke to me about her strong and sad belief:  "The best part of my life is now over."   Her belief was supported by emotive memories:

 

   "After my mother had children, she gave up work com­pletely and resented us for her lost ambition -  she never really got over this."

    .

"My grandmother was alone and miserable after she was 60."

 

As we discussed this version of her past, and other possible memories, she realized that she had been screening out the inspiring examples of others — an aunt and two friends, for example — who lived fulfilling lives well beyond the age at which she was thinking, "the best part of my life is over."   After recollecting these examples, she recognized that she had been selecting her past to fit her belief.  This was liberating for her because she now saw that she had a choice of which memories to select and what kind of belief she wanted to support.

 

Selective memory may be used deliberately in courts of law or fields of politics.  In many different public arenas, people with good credentials and integrity can have their reputations deliberately ruined by selective focus on one mistake.  For most of us, however, the process of selection or distortion of the past is highly auto­matic, and we do not even realize our own bias.  

 

Ben and Angela were having a fight.  Angela was furious that Ben, once again, had left the kitchen in a mess.  “You always leave the place like this,” she yelled.  “You think that I’m just going to clear up for you.  What am I — your maid?” 

 

Ben said nothing but thought plenty:  “There she goes again.  Nagging and nagging!  I would have cleared it up.  And I don’t always leave the kitchen like this.  She’s doing her usual thing — going into a fit about nothing.  This is the third time in the last few weeks.  She’s done it as long as I can remember… Gee!  Why did I marry her?”

 

Angela, even more annoyed at Ben’s lack of overt response, continued out loud:  “You know, you always treat me like I’m your servant.  Last week you left your clothes all over the floor.  Who was supposed to pick them up?   As long as I’ve known you, you leave things, you make messes  -  expecting me to clear up for you.  Well I’ve had enough!”  

 

In this commonplace vignette, both Ben and Angela remember and select out corroborating evidence from the past to support their case.   They both ignore or forget, at least during the argument, each other’s great qualities or the many incidents of sweetness, kindness and support between them.  In addition to this, there is another important belief cementer — feeling.  Both Ben and Angela do not select bland incidents from the past  -  they select the incidents that have feeling for them, and it’s a feeling that also happens to match and corroborate the current anger that they are experiencing in the argument. When the closet of aggression is opened, each glaring item of clothing, hung on its hanger of anger, becomes visible and available.

 

Emotion affects which memories we select. With Angela and Ben, the emotion for each of them was specific to the other.  Sometimes the emotion can be a more non-specific key to selection of memory.  Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night angry or upset about a particular event, and then found your mind wandering onto other unrelated events that have been annoying or upsetting to you?  To use a computer analogy, it is as if we group incidents under the file name of an emotion.  Within the “anger file” are a number of anger incident documents.  The act of saving (remembering) any new incident  involves opening the anger file which lists and makes visible many other past anger incident docs.  Our mental filing systems are probably a lot more complex than this, with multiple cross references.  But all we need do is an intra-cranial search on anger, and we can have all the incidents we need to justify any current peeve.

 

It is easy to prove almost any case by careful selection of the past.  This can be a case against another human being, or a more general belief about life.  In the arena of social delusions, selection from the past is one of several powerful means of justification of the delusion.   Karl Marx stated in the Communist Manifesto that positive change from capitalist society could only come with revolution[17].  The reason he gave for this statement was that no one willingly gives away his power:  therefore the power must be wrested, taken by force.   This idea was backed up by historical references to leaders who only gave up their power when they were forcibly defeated.  This is an example of selecting evidence from the past to support a current belief.  Marx ignored the historical events that did not fit his theory.  The most obvious example, which occurred just before and during Marx’s lifetime, was the ending of the slave trade and the abolition of slavery in Britain (where Marx lived)  — an enormous social change that was against the interests of those in power, but which occurred without revolution or war.

 

Rationalization of Contradictory Evidence

Evidence from the past can be selected from our vast smorgasbord of memories and stories in order to support beliefs or delusions.  If necessary we can get extra support by changing or fabricating memories.  Sometimes, however, there are inconvenient memories that are not forgotten, or are only minimally changed, but which contradict our current beliefs.   In these cases, we have another potential strategy to keep our belief systems intact:  the rationalization of contradictory evidence[18].   For example, many blood-letters who bled people of copious quantities of blood had a number of their patients die.  Such events were sometimes rationalized:  she died because of the disease she already had.  Maybe if I had bled her more, she would have survived.

 

Before women were allowed higher education, a man who held the social delusion that women are morally and mentally inferior could support his belief with a whole slew of selected memories of women who appeared frivolous or shallow.  At the same time, he might have selectively forgotten the times when the wisdom and compassion of his wife guided him to making crucial decisions in his life.   On the occasions that he remembered his encounters with intelligent women, he might have rationalized away the contradictory evidence:  Oh, they appeared clever, but they were just repeating what they had learned from others (i.e. men).  This was a common method of explaining away women’s intelligence and morality.   In 1869, James McGrigor Allan wrote a formal ‘scientific’ paper, published in the Journal of the Anthropological Society, in which he attempted to explain why women had any moral sense at all.  His fantastic rationalization of contradictory evidence (the fact that women did indeed have morality) was this:  “[Woman has] no method of knowing right from wrong, but by implicitly receiving man’s dogmatic dicta on every question of religion, morals, and the practical conduct of life…”[19]

 

What people do to support their beliefs with evidence from the past can be divided into two simple categories:  ways of increasing the corroborating evidence and ways of decreasing contradictory evidence.  Here is a diagrammatic summary:

 

 

 

METHODS OF CHANGING THE PAST TO FIT OUR STORY

 

CORROBORATING EVIDENCE FROM THE PAST

CONTRADICTORY EVIDENCE FROM THE PAST

Corroborating incidents from the past:

• Remembered and selected

• Remembered, exaggerated, and selected

• Imagined and selected

• Any of the above combined with supportive feeling

 

Opposing or non-confirming incidents from the past:

• Remembered and ignored

• Remembered and minimized

• Remembered and rationalized

• Forgotten

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We select, forget, distort, fabricate, or rationalize the past to support our point of view and to keep our beliefs and social delusions intact.  We change or select our memories not only to avoid challenging our beliefs, but also to bolster them.  The past provides evidence for present positions.   We are not usually aware of changing our memories, for  the mind is often not able to discriminate between actual events that happened in the past, events that have been partially reconstructed by the mind, and entirely imaginary events.  We are also not usually aware of selecting incidents from the past that act as supporting evidence for our beliefs.  The reason for this is that the selection is governed by our vested interest which we do not usually admit to ourselves (see chapter… (ego)).

 

So this is one aspect of creating our own reality.  We project our beliefs back into the past and change the past to support our beliefs.   It’s as if we fish with metal molds cast into the past behind us, hoping to catch something useful from the complex jelly of our history; but the only thing the molds can catch is that which fits the molds.  We do much the same with the present and the future, the subject of the next two chapters. 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Crombag, H. F. M., Wagenaar, W. A., and van Koppen, P. J. (1996). Crashing memories and

the problem of ‘source monitoring’.  Applied Cognitive Psychology, 10, 95-104.

[2] Katherine Kiechel and Saul Kassin: "The Social Psychology of False Confessions: Compliance, Internalization, and Confabulation," Psychological Science, 1996.

[3] In 1996, such an explanation was plausible.

[4] Loftus, E. F. (2003). Make-believe memories. American Psychologist, 58, 864-873.

[5] Reported in Read, J.D., Tollestrup,  P.,  Hammersley, R.H.,  McFadzen, E., & Christensen, A. (1990).  The unconscious transference effect:  Are innocent bystanders ever misidentified?  Applied Cognitive Psychology, 4, 3-31.

[6] From Harper’s, July 2007, quoted by Joseph T. Hallinan in Errornomics, Ebury Press, Random House, UK, 2009.

[7] The theory as actually impossible to disprove because one can always argue that all the forgotten information exists somewhere, even though it cannot be accessed.  The theory appeared to be supported by hypnosis and electrical stimulation of the brain which can sometimes elicit forgotten memories — or scenes that feel like memories.  It is a big jump to conclude from occasional discovery of bits of possible memory that everything sensed is recorded.

[8] See the Ames room example on page…

[9] Forgetting information is an important function of the brain.  Albert Einstein was once asked why he did not remember his own phone number.  He replied that he did not want to clutter his brain with information that he could carry in a notebook;  he preferred to use his brain for more creative pursuits.  Rare individuals who have difficulty forgetting information can be severely incapacitated because they are unable to make sense of their knowledge.  To function well, the brain probably needs to discard (forget) a great deal of information that it deems unnecessary.  The only problem with this otherwise sensible system of sifting and forgetting is that what the brain deems unnecessary is predicated on the major beliefs and prioritizations that the brain has been taught, and some of these beliefs may be relative or even delusional.

[10] Loftus, E.F. (1977).  Shifting human color memory.  Memory and Cognition, 6, 696-699.

[11] Errornomics

[12] Tversky, Barbara, and Elizabeth J. Marsh.  February 2000.  Biased Retelling of Events Yield Biased Memories.  Cognitive Psychology 40, pp. 1-38. 

[13] At the same time, what we derive from memory affects how we see the world.  It’s a two way street.  See chapter 17, “Distorting the present to fit our story.”

[14] Markus, G. B. (1986). Stability and change in political attitudes: observed, recalled, and explained, Political Behavior, 8(1), 21-44.

[15] The figure depends on how large a “piece” of experience is.  By the time you’re 30 you’ve had approximately 10 million waking minutes.

[16] See chapter 37, What I Am is Determined by my Past

[17] This statement led, fairly directly, to the deaths of many millions of people.

[18] From Gillett, Richard, Change Your Mind, Change Your World, Simon and Schuster, 1992.

[19]  James McGrigor Allan, “On the Real Differences in the Minds of Men and Women,” Journal of the Anthropological Society, VII (1869).  Quoted in Rogers, Katharine M., The Troublesome Helpmate, University of Washington Press, 1966, p 219.