2B. PRECIOUS MEM’RIES.

It's hard to separate the good and bad information in memories.
• Sometimes our memories mix together several distinct events.
• Sometimes we construct or reconstruct memories in the light of later events and perspectives.
• We can be led to false memories.
• Institutions adopt and promote the memories that serve their own interests.
• Forgetting as policy.


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2B. PRECIOUS MEM’RIES.

“The struggle of humanity against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
-- Milan Kundera

Just as there are limits to how much of the world we can see, there are limits to how much of what we’ve seen we can remember.

When I was a kid I touristed through parts of Asia. It was an important experience for me, not least because I could brag about it to my friends. A few years later I realized that I’d told the stories so often, I had the words down perfectly but had lost the sense of immediate experience. The starlight on the temples of Pagan, that sort of thing. Later, as Halliburton was bombing Afghanistan, I looked through my notes and found several events I could no longer remember at all, even with the notes’ prompting.

If we can’t fully see the world, still less can we remember. There’s a common misunderstanding, even among educators, that memory is like a filing cabinet, where we can store information indefinitely and unchangeably, or a standard computer database.

The key to using your memory more effectively is to realize that --short of injury, disease or death-- your brain never loses anything. Once a thought or perception has been input to your memory, it stays there for the rest of your life. What we call ‘forgetting’ is either the inability to recall stored information or the failure to store information in the first place (Ellis 75).

In fact, our memories may work more like the connectionist network models developed by artificial intelligence researchers (Jeremy Campbell 164). In these models, memories are not stored as individual fixed items, but rather as complexly connected networks of information that are reconstructed in different ways each time an outside stimulus cues us to “remember”. Shermer puts it this way: "Memories cannot be reconstructed in the sense of playing back a videotape. The event occurs. A selective impression of the event is made on the brain through the senses. Then the individual rehearses the memory and in the process changes it a bit, depending on emotions, previous memories, subsequent events and memories, and so on. This process recurs thousands of times over the years, to the point where we must ask whether we have memories or just memories of memories of memories" (290).

We have to recognize that even the most vivid memories are on-the-spot reconstructions of the original experience, not a replay of the experience itself. Like my travel stories, with each retelling our memories tend to lose some of the original details, even as we embellish others. And we assemble memories not just from the information we took from the experience, but other information we’ve acquired, as well. Moreover, the reconstructions are in response to whatever cues we’re getting from the world now; what triggers a memory also colors it. The same childhood event could be recounted as an amusement, in one context, or as an accusation, in another. In short, the past event cannot change, but the story, the memory, our very experience, does.


It's hard to separate the good and bad information in memories.
Information of very different value can be remembered as equally true. Reagan used to recount episodes from his war movies as if they were his personal history, evidently under the impression that he was a war hero. (http://skepdic.com/memory.html; http://www.angelfire.com/co/COMMONSENSE/reagan.html --Oct. 2003). In general, eyewitness accounts of crimes or catastrophes are notoriously subject to this kind of contamination. Another dramatic case of source amnesia (also called memory misattribution) is that of the woman who accused memory expert Dr. Donald Thompson of having raped her. Thompson was doing a live interview for a television program just before the rape occurred. The woman had seen the program and "apparently confused her memory of him from the television screen with her memory of the rapist" (Schacter 1996, 114).

Another way non-facts get remembered as truth is when we read or listen to people who make their livings retailing opinion and speculation: Did Obama make bombs for William Ayers? What could be the mysterious pattern of suicides among Clinton staffers? Why are most people afraid of government health care? Even if these misleading questions are not presented as documented fact, “A mere conjecture is stored in memory in such a way as to be indistinguishable from a logical truth. In logic, assertions are quite distinct from presuppositions, and implications are not the same as inferences, but in memory they are all coded in much the same form” (Jeremy Campbell 142). Later on, we recall only that there is long-established evidence for our fears. A related point that came up during the ritual abuse scare: “Research on rumors has found that people tend to recall the most sensational aspects of news reports and forget later published denials” (Victor 117).

Studies by Marcia Johnson et al have shown that our ability to distinguish memory from imagination depends on the recall of source information (Carroll, The Skeptic’s Dictionary). It’s very easy to lose the qualifiers, however, especially when they are not clearly relevant at the time, but only become important later. When Halliburton claimed that Saddam was building H-bombs, according to British intelligence, clearly the President hoped we’d not wonder why he wasn’t citing U.S. intelligence, which had found the nuclear weapons story to be a hoax. The strategy worked so long as Halliburton was winning the war.

For example, in July 2003 the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland published a survey of U.S. opinions on the current war in Iraq. Do you remember the war? Among the many and shifting reasons the President gave for attacking Iraq: Iraq’s dictator
• had helped Al-Qaeda blow up the World Trade Center
• had chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction, and
• was planning to use them against the U.S.
Possibly you recall that U.N. inspectors spent months looking in vain for the WMD, with only faint Iraqi cooperation, and the President said it we couldn’t wait any longer.

A couple months after the occupation of Iraq --and while U.S. troops were still searching without success for WMD-- PIPA conducted a nation-wide survey. The pollsters found that, while media coverage did make a difference for some, a lot of folks still rate Halliburton’s undocumented pre-war claims as more truthful than the post-invasion (lack of) evidence.

One in four even believe, incorrectly, that Iraqi WMD have been found. Asked, “Since the war with Iraq ended, is it your impression that the US has or has not found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?” 23% said that it has and 73% that it has not. This is actually down sharply from May when 34% thought that the US had found WMD, while 59% said that it had not. Apparently the intense discussion of the issue in the press is making an impact on the public. (p.6)

Perhaps most striking, a modest majority even believes--incorrectly-- that clear evidence of this [Al-Qaeda] link has been found. Asked, “Is it your impression that the US has or has not found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the Al Qaeda terrorist organization?” 52% said that the US has found evidence, while just 43% said that it has not. (p.7)

Some folks in my GED class repeated the misinformation, saying that we invaded Iraq because Saddam had attacked us and had weapons of mass destruction. Either the claims --politely disputed at the time-- were evaluated as facts in the first place, or a few months later they misremembered those claims as conclusive evidence. Politicians can usually count on our tendencies to accept their sources without challenge, strip away the qualifiers, and overlook or fail to connect later corrections and retractions.