One Utah

I’ve read about it a number of times but I don’t know that I’ve ever blogged about it.

The It in question is the Challenger study by the very bright Ulric Neisser.

Neisser, who is a scholar specializing in memory, had his students in 1986 record their memories of the Challenger explosion - he asked them to record how they heard about it, what they heard, what they felt, what they saw. Then, some two and a half years later, interviewed the same students about what they remembered.

Neisser discovered something profound: almost none of the students remembered accurately. Most were off by some small details, some specifics, but 25% were completely wrong. Not even a little close. Interestingly, when shown their diaries from two after the event, a number of the students denied the accuracy of their diaries and defending their inaccurate memories. One student said, “That’s my handwriting but that’s not what happened.”

The Challenger study is one of the more interesting studies of its type - mainly because it’s one of the few of its type. I know people who will tell you what they were doing the day Kennedy was shot - but those memories are probably no more accurate than Neisser’s students. Other researchers of memory, i.e. Elizabeth Loftus, have demonstrated again and again that memory is both malleable and unreliable. For instance, in a study Loftus performs, she shows students a short movie then asks questions about it. The questions she asks shapes the memories and responses. For instance, the film shows a car hitting a person. If she asks, “Why didn’t the car stop at the stop sign?”, some students will assert is did or that it ran the stop sign. She shows the film again and there’s no stop sign. Students will sometimes ask if it is the same film since they remember the stop sign so certainly.

These experiments suggest that memory isn’t so much a record of what happened as a record of how we understand what happened.

I think about an incident when I was a child. We were driving to my aunt’s house for a family party. Our vehicle was rear-ended. We were taking food to the party (a dip for vegetables and chips and so forth). What I remember is the dip spilling in the car - not just spilling but showering out of its container throughout the vehicle. I was holding the container and was covered by food. I have a vague memory of waiting around for the police, of the guy who hit us feeling really bad and his car being really damaged. Then of being at the family party and my uncle making me really mad because he kept making fun of me because of the spilled food - and getting in a huge amount of trouble for getting mad at my uncle. Then my mother later saying my uncle was wrong to behave as he did. When I recently brought up this event with my family, it was amazing to me how differently my family members remembered the event. My mother doesn’t remember me getting mad at my uncle but remembers my father getting mad at me. My father remembers the man who hit us and his car and recounts that the other driver was distracted by a bunch girls sunbathing and that’s why he hit us. My father remembers me getting mad at my uncle but not him getting mad at me over it. My brother remembers being really upset about the spilled food. My sister remembers the party in great detail and almost nothing of the accidet - for her it wasn’t a big deal beyond delaying us in getting to the party where she got to play with our cousins which is really what she wanted to do.

Recounting the story with my family created a gestalt picture of the event - one in which each of us remembered the details differently, in which we placed the emphasis on different things and different parts of it. I remember the car hitting us being yellow and black - my father remembers it being black with yellow highlights. Minor differences but perhaps neither is wholly accurate. After all, my sister later had a boyfriend who drove an older model yellow sports car with black stripes and I rode in that car frequently so maybe that’s the car I remember and it was similar to the one that hit us and so my brain just substituted the boyfriend’s car for the one that hit us. Which makes me wonder how many of the details of our shared memory are accurate? How many are things are brains have said, “This doesn’t matter really so just make it close enough”?

But that my key memory really concerns being upset with my uncle for being mean to me is revealing. My uncle was one of those big fat men who thinks being funny is the same as making fun of people. He would tease the kids in the family until we were in tears and the adults in the family almost never intervened except to tell the kids to respect our elders. We were just supposed to put up with his teasing. It woud often start as funny but for an adult he had no sense of when to stop or when he crossed the boundary. Even as an adult, I didn’t really like my uncle - it’s not that he was a bad man, I just had a long life of memories of him as someone who was mean.

My uncle later had a mental breakdown and was hospitalized for some months. I remember waiting in the car outside the hospital because kids weren’t allowed in the mental ward for a visit; my parents visited my uncle in the hospital. I remember it being a comfortable night and being quite dark out - as if the street lights weren’t turned on for some reason. My parents remember the visit but claim they didn’t the kids with them since we weren’t allowed in the hospital. They say they left us as my grandmother’s house while they went to visit, then came back and got us and drove home. I remember being alone in the car. When I asked, “Well did I fall asleep in the car on the way to grandma’s?” my mother said, “Yeah! Yeah, now I think about it, you did. We didn’t want to wake you up so we left you in the car and locked you in at the hospital. You were still asleep when we got back to the car.” I woke up while they were in the hospital and since I knew where we were, I wasn’t bothered. I fell asleep before they returned.

How reliable - or more likely - unreliable is our memory. One of the best days of my life (the day I started at Judge Memorial) is strangely hazy. I remember the drive to Salt Lake and being so stressed and worried about the day that I jabbered the entire way down - I don’t think I said a thing worth saying but I couldn’t stop talking. I was so worried about starting at a new school where I knew exactly one person. I was terrified! I remember almost nothing about the rest of the day - Mrs. Glines was very kind to me, Cathy Olsen showed me where to buy my books, my class schedule wasn’t ready when I got there. Other than that, I remember getting home at the end of the day and being elated, feeling transformed by a the day.

These are pretty minor events. But they make me wonder. Maybe waiting outside the hospital for my uncle didn’t happen, maybe I remember a different event and think that’s what happened. What other things happened that first day at Judge? Why was the day so good? I really don’t know and I really can’t know for certain - in any of these instances.

Somehow those, these memories add up to the story of my life and the who I am today. Each of us is an accumulation of memories, experiences, events. We are shaped by what we remember and if we lose our memories we lose ourselves.

In Mind Wide Open Stephen Johnson recounts the way the brain creates and stores memories. He uses the example of seeing a snake in the grass; the first time we see one, it scares us, we snakes can be dangerous, so we jump away from the snake. Later on, we jump when we think we see a snake in the grass even if it’s not a snake. Johnson makes the point that snakes are dangerous and we’re better off jumping away the 99% of the time when it’s a stick or a hose than not jumping away the 1% of the time it’s actually a snake. Our brains are wired for survival and our survival instincts say it is better to be overly cautious than not cautious enough. As human we really don’t “know” the way we think we know and we don’t “remember” the way we think we remember and certainty is fleeting, uncertain and often as not, unreliable. Claims of certainty and absolute resolve strike me as something we should not entirely trust. Everything we think we know is conditional. As weird as it sounds, I find that very comforting.

In ordinary every day life, our brains don’t record the details of the “good” stuff as readily because it’s less necessary for survival. My experience of my uncle was that he was a “danger” - someone who caused stress and upset so I remember what he did and said the day of the car accident but I don’t remember what Brandy Stanfield said to me that first day at Judge even though she became my best friend and is someone whose presence in this world makes me know that the is not a lost cause.

This entry was posted Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 8:39 am and is filed under People Are Nuts, Zeitgeist. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.