by Jill Price
Given how distracting my rush of memories is to me, the value of that process of memory inhibition is perfectly clear. What I find especially intriguing, though, about the description of that process is that my memory apparently operates so differently from the norm. The concept is that over time, we have many memories of such similar, mundane, repetitive life events of no particular consequence that this “clutter” blocks our memory of any given one of them. This is one of the things that my mind doesn’t seem to do in the same way. I remember all of the clutter.
Dr. McGaugh told me that one of the unusual features of my memory, which the scientists were especially intrigued by, is just this—how comprehensive it is. It doesn’t differentiate between the most dramatic or consequential events in my life, the somewhat significant benchmarks, and the completely banal day-to-day things. I remember the date my first boyfriend broke up with me—December 29, 1981—and more in the benchmark category, the date I started eighth grade—September 6, 1978, and that we started school a week early that year and ended a week late because we had a full month off for Christmas vacation. But I also remember that on Friday afternoon, October 19, 1979, I came home from school and had some soup because it was unusually cold that day. I know that my senior prom was on June 3,1983, but I also remember that on Sunday, March 28, 1999, when my mother and I went to breakfast at the Encino Glen coffee shop, I ordered scrambled eggs and I had a headache.
My memory also extends to lots of things that didn’t directly involve me but that I read about or heard about on TV or radio, some of which I found of great interest and others that were of no particular importance to me. Many people have vivid memories of a few especially dramatic news or popular culture events, such as hearing when John F. Kennedy and then Martin Luther King, Jr., were shot, or when the Challenger space shuttle exploded, which are often referred to as flashbulb memories. This sort of memory is formed about an event that was especially emotionally powerful, and they are not only about news events but also intense personal experiences, such as of being mugged or in a bad car accident. What’s different for me is I don’t have to feel any great degree of emotion in order to remember any particular thing, whether something from my own life or something I heard on the news. For example, I know that Bing Crosby died on a golf course in Spain on Friday, October 14, 1977, and though I was a fan of his movies, that news certainly wasn’t traumatic for me. I heard about it when I was driving to soccer practice with my mom, just as we were turning into the parking lot at Balboa Park.
One of the types of daily information that I recall vividly that often amazes people is the episodes of TV shows I watched. I was a big fan of All in the Family while I was growing up, for example, and if you throw out a date during its original broadcast, when I watched it religiously, I can tell you which episode ran. January 5,1974, a Saturday: Gloria and Mike are alone for the evening, and when Gloria makes the first move, it upsets Mike. He then makes up a girlfriend named Felicia. September 22,1976, a Wednesday: Archie has an affair with a waitress. October 16,
1977, a Sunday: It is Edith’s fiftieth birthday, and she is held at gunpoint by a rapist.
Truth be told, I hate the notion of forgetting. I’m happy that I can remember so many episodes of so many TV shows I’ve loved through the years; that I can revisit any given day that I may suddenly think about and know what really happened to me that day; and that I know what people really said to me, and I to them, and exactly when. The accuracy of my recall is important to me, and the idea of losing some of my memories, or my recall of dates and days of the week, is actually anxiety provoking.
If it’s true, though, that the normal memory has a talent for forgetting a host of happenings that we would otherwise find self-limiting or undermining, because they hold up a mirror to us about aspects of our lives and ourselves that we don’t like, I do have to say that it would be a good thing for me if my mind had that talent. Imagine being able to remember every fight you ever had with a friend; every time someone let you down; all the stupid mistakes you’ve ever made; the meanest, most harmful things you’ve ever said to people and those they’ve said to you. Then imagine not being able to push them out of your mind no matter what you tried.
According to some recent research, the ability to push unwanted memories out of the mind seems to operate according to the same brain mechanism that empowers us to restrain ourselves physically, like stopping ourselves from slapping someone or from reaching for that extra piece of cake. Though I may not truly envy the ability to forget, this is a talent I can say without hesitation that I wish I had. Research shows that such “motivated forgetting,” as it’s called, not only works in the short term but does assist people in forgetting unwanted memories for the long haul.
Forgetting is clearly of many kinds. Some is intentional and some simply natural; some is therapeutic and some tragic. Memory and forgetting perform an intricate, somewhat mystifying, dance through the course of the normal life experience, and sometimes even our memories can be a form of forgetting.
There is a short story from The Book of Forgetting by acclaimed Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata, titled “Yumiura,” which is well known to experts in memory due to the questions it poses about how fallible the normal human memory is. In the story, a middle-aged writer is visited by a woman who tells him in intimate detail that years ago they met in the town of Yumiura. She says that they became lovers and that Kozumi proposed to her during the Harvest Festival. Kozumi is distraught that he cannot recall her at all. How can she remember him so clearly? Is what she described true, or not? She is so certain of her memory that Kozumi begins to believe her—until he retraces his past and discovers he could not have been in Yumiura at that time. The story is fascinating to me because I could never convince myself of such a false recollection.
Kawabata’s story is recounted in Dr. Daniel Schacter’s important book The Seven Sins of Memory, in which he introduces seven primary mechanisms by which the normal human memory distorts reality. What was striking to me in reading about these seven mechanisms was that as far as I can tell, my mind doesn’t seem to engage in any of them, though my recall hasn’t been tested specifically by the scientists to evaluate that, so I can’t be sure. These sorts of distortions and issues with memory seem alien to me. Scientists have also thrown up a thought-provoking and somewhat disconcerting mirror to the story of my life that has helped me to understand more deeply how the unusual workings of my memory have shaped my experience.
The first “sin” is what Dr. Schacter calls transience, which is the normal loss of memory over time. Apparently this normal memory loss begins within hours of the events forgotten. It’s due to transience that most people remember many more things about what happened in the past few hours than about what happened the day before, and they remember even less about what happened on any given day of a week ago. An interesting question is whether this should be thought of as a weakness in normal human memory or in fact a strength, in that it clears the mind to focus on more important information. My mind just doesn’t seem to work this way. As opposed to my memory growing weaker with age, it actually seems to keep growing sharper.
The second sin is absentmindedness. I’ve always marveled at the way people lose their ATM cards or can’t find their keys or, when driving on the highway, suddenly come out of a fog and realize they’ve driven ten exit lengths without conscious thought or control. Some psychologists say that absentmindedness clears the way for our brains to be more creative, that the brain is working away on ideas while the mind seems to have checked out. I am never absentminded. I’ve never lost a single key. In fact I still have the house key my parents gave me when I was ten years old, which I used until I was thirty-seven, when we moved. I’ve never lost an ATM card or credit card, and I had the same driver’s license until I was twenty-seven, when I had to renew it. I never find my mind wandering in this way; to the contrary, it’s always crammed full of remembering. There are never times when the “film” isn�
��t running and I can focus exclusively on the present moment.
One of the sins I find hardest to relate to is what Schacter calls blocking, which he describes as a tip-of-the-tongue feeling when you know you know something (like the name of an acquaintance or the answer to a trivia question) but you just can’t get it out. For the period of my strong memory, from when I was fourteen on, I don’t think I ever block the way he describes the sensation. Usually my memories come flying right out. For the earlier period when my memory was still developing, between about ages eight and fourteen, I sometimes have to think for a moment, but I don’t have that tip-of-the-tongue sensation as I’m working on it.
Schacter calls these first three memory mechanisms “sins of omission.” The four others he calls “sins of commission,” which are a good deal trickier, even insidious. Misattribution is the sin when we remember doing things we didn’t do, or jumble up our memories, like remembering that a friend was at a party when in fact you saw her for dinner the week before that, or thinking you’ve told one friend something when in fact it was a different friend you shared that story with. If you’ve ever watched an old movie that you absolutely clearly remember starred Gregory Peck only to discover when the opening credits roll that it stars Cary Grant, you were misattributing.
I found this a particularly intriguing distortion to read about, because I make note of the people in my life misattributing all the time and find it amazing, especially that they clearly really believe they’re remembering correctly. I’ve learned that I have to stop myself from correcting people in most cases, which I used to do a fair amount of as a child. In fact, one of the facts about memory that Schacter reports is that people tend to privilege their own memories for events over the recollections of others. Most of the people close to me in my life pretty much gave up on doing that with me a long time ago.
It’s hard to fathom how people’s minds play this trick of misattributing, but an interesting theory about how autobiographical memories are recalled may go a long way toward explaining it. The theory is that our autobiographical memories are not stored all in one place in our brains; rather, we re-create them in an elaborate and delicate reconstruction process whereby different parts of an experience that have been filed away in different sections of our brains are pulled together again. This process is said to take up to 10 seconds, and it is vulnerable to errors. When we misattribute, we may be pulling together pieces of different experiences and fusing them into what seems to us to be a totally clear, accurate memory.
One of the sins that is most appalling to me is related but different; Schacter calls it suggestibility. This is the creation in our minds of outright false memories, such as through others’ suggestions. The key is that the false recall comes from outside information, not from information stored away in our brains. Children are especially vulnerable to forming such false memories, as seen in a number of child abuse trials in which prosecutors unearth memories from children about sexual crimes that never happened. Not only is this false remembering damaging in such cases, it also raises serious issues in regard to eyewitness testimony in legal trials. Many studies have revealed that witness recall can be substantially flawed, in part due to the way in which the witnesses were questioned or shown information, such as in a lineup of suspects. As far as I know, my memory is not susceptible to suggestibility.
What seems to me one of the most problematic of the sins, because it is so subtle and so pervasive, is the one Schacter calls bias. This is the way that people’s memory of the past can be significantly distorted by what they know or feel in the present. These distortions operate in many tricky ways, and Schacter identifies five key types. One, called consistency bias, causes us to make our thoughts and feelings more consistent over time, so that we remember feeling the same way about something in the past as we do now, even though we actually felt quite differently then. For example, someone who initially supported the Iraq War but now opposes it might misremember having ever supported the war. An example that Schacter describes is from one study that showed that if you asked a married couple how they had felt about each other five years earlier, they would tend to describe those feelings according to the way they were currently feeling, which, depending on the state of their marriage, might be a good thing or a bad thing.
Another category is change bias, which occurs when people think that they should have changed something in their lives or about themselves over time, and their minds exaggerate the actual amount of change that has happened. For example, if you attended an anger management class and think that you should have learned to become calmer, then you might exaggerate just how much improvement you’ve seen in your control over your temper due to the class. It’s interesting that this bias can involve not only exaggerating how much better the situation is in the present, but also how bad the situation was in the past. To use the same example, a person might also exaggerate just how bad a temper she had before the class. The mind is endlessly creative!
One type of bias that is fairly easy to spot in friends and family is the distortion called hindsight bias, which is when people believe that they always knew something that they’ve in fact just found out about. With those who are close to us in life, this sort of rewriting of history is bound to come up fairly glaringly now and then. Say, for example, a friend who is a big fan of the Dallas Cowboys claims that he always knew they were going to lose a big game they’d been the strong favorite to win, even though you clearly remember him saying they were going to cream the other team. Schacter uses the case of the O. J. Simpson trial and how many people who had thought Simpson would be convicted said after the trial that they had known he’d be let off. Interestingly, this bias is much stronger when it seems to people, after the fact, that there was good reason for them to have had the correct view initially. If the difference in outcome seems due to a quirk of chance, then the distortion isn’t nearly as strong. So if the quarterback for the Cowboys was injured, for example, then that friend who is a fan probably wouldn’t be distorting about his prior expectation that the team would achieve a crushing victory, or at least not as much.
A type of distortion that has plagued human life in many ways that are all too obvious is that called stereotypical bias, which has been a contributing factor in racial and gender stereotyping. What happens in this process is that preordained, general views about a category of people are projected onto individuals. As Schacter writes, “Because it may require considerable cognitive effort to size up every new person we meet as an individual, we often find it easier to fall back on stereotypical generalizations that accumulate from various sources.” Over time, this is one type of bias that I hope we can make serious headway in correcting.
The most personally damaging memory mechanism, in which people’s memories turn against them, is known as persistence: people cannot forget disappointments or moments of shame in life, like failing a major test in school, or getting fired from a job, or being rejected by a lover. The rehearsal of these memories can cause great emotional harm, as when terrible memories like rape or abuse haunt people all their lives. The excessive replaying can even cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Dr. Schacter refers to one case of persistence that led to shocking consequences—that of baseball player Donnie Moore, who was a relief pitcher for the California Angels. He was, as Schacter writes, “literally haunted to death by the persisting memory of a single disastrous pitch.” Moore was brought in to finish off a game against the Boston Red Sox but ended up throwing a pitch that was hit out of the park for a game-winning home run. He ruminated about that pitch so persistently that he was driven into a terrible depression and ended up shooting his wife and then committing suicide by turning the gun on himself.
Research in the field of positive psychology, often called the science of happiness, has also produced powerful results about the negative psychological effects of ruminating, particularly in the onset of depression. Those who are depressive are more likely to ruminate, and t
hose who ruminate are often dragged into depression. A horrible irony about this finding is that ruminators often think that their intense attention to whatever bad experience they’re dwelling on will help them gain some valuable insights, when in fact, rumination tends to undermine critical thinking of that sort.
Although persistence would seem to be similar to my own memory, I don’t think it is really the same as the kind of replaying that my mind does. My memory is not selective in that way, fixated on any particular event. For me, the least consequential moments persist alongside the most traumatic and influential. That’s not to say, though, that my most upsetting memories haven’t weighed especially heavily on me; they have, and they’ve thrown me into bouts of depression. It’s just that the mechanism seems quite different to me, as I also have all kinds of inconsequential memories popping into my head in the same way all the time.
The ever-present nature of my memories about the slings and arrows of life makes me envy the way in which the last of the biases, which is called egocentric bias, distorts most people’s memories in ways that are self-flattering. People tend to credit themselves more for successes than for failures, for example, and to privilege their successes in their memories of their lives. Psychologist Shelley Taylor, who has done important work on this subject, refers to this as creative self-deception. At the heart of egocentric bias is the tendency to put oneself at the center of the action in life, thinking that so many things have to do with us when they may not really be about us much at all. For example, we tend to interpret people’s moods as having to do with our influence on them, when they may really be feeling that way because of something else entirely; or we tend to privilege our role in some joint task over the contribution of others. What is especially fascinating to me about the way that egocentric bias tends to distort our memories is that for most people, it ends up distorting things in their favor, so that they tend to “remember past experiences in a self-enhancing light,” as Schacter writes.