Twenty years ago a movie named Blade Runner -- ostensibly about human-like robots rebelling against their masters -- adroitly confounded the near-certainty we all hold of our own memories. In the end, the question was: how do you know that you're not just a replicant, with implanted false memories of a childhood that never existed?
Now, new research is continually showing that human memory is incredibly malleable, and that we're wide to doubt ourselves, no matter how clear our memory may seem.
"We can easily distort memories for the details of an event that you did experience," says Loftus. "And we can also go so far as to plant entirely false memories - we call them rich false memories because they are so detailed and so big."In Memento we all pitied Leonard Shelby, who had no long-term memory and couldn't remember anything that happened more than a few minutes in the past. But really, how much better are our own memories? They're mostly amalgamations and approximations of real events, all jumbled together and distorted by perspective, time, conscious desires, and self-delusion.She has persuaded people to adopt false but plausible memories - for instance, that at the age of five or six they had the distressing experience of being lost in a shopping mall - as well as implausible ones: memories of witnessing demonic possession, or an encounter with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. Bugs Bunny is a Warner Brothers character, and as the Los Angeles Times put it earlier this year, "The wascally Warner Bros. Wabbit would be awwested on sight", at Disney.
Elizabeth Loftus' research has obvious implications for the reliability of eyewitness testimony. And it was as a result of her findings that in 1994 she co-wrote her book, The Myth of Repressed Memory, and took a strong stand in the recovered memory debate of the 90s, for which she was reviled by those who claimed to have uncovered repressed memories of abuse - alien, sexual or otherwise.
It wouldn't surprise me if half of all human conflict arises out of memory distortion of one type or another.
I used to love riding a little red wagon down a huge hill at my grandparents'. That "huge hill" is really about five feet high.
I've often said that memory is fiction, because I noticed the selection process in recallng memories - editing in what we thought happened according to our present desires for such to have occurred.
That doesn't change the fact that memory can be true. I suppressed for 30 years an event of pedophile molestation which happened at age 14.
I didn't forget it immediately, but over the next few months it eventually disappeared from memory not to be recalled again until so much later.
I might ber able to identify the man today as he was then. I could certainly identify his penis - the memory is so indelible.
So let us not distrust memory so much as some may wish to.
Memory is suggestible, and we do create fantasies we think are memories; and there is a memoirist need in us to construct memories to fit a pattern or structure of thought we now think is the real us.
I also was abused when I was about 10. A one-time event by a retarded kid who didn't really know what he was doing, I think.
I created a "memory overlay", but I still kinda knew it was fake. When I told people about that day, I stumbled over the part that I invented. When I finally took off the cover and told someone, it was emotional, but...better afterwards.
I do agree, tho, that we don't know ourselves as well as we think we do. We all want to be the heroes of our own story, and we easiliy alter our memories to make ourselves look better than we did.