Quote of the Week...from Elizabeth Loftus

Just because someone thinks they remember something in detail, with confidence and with emotion, does not mean that it actually happened, ..False memories have these characteristics, too.
                                                                     ---Elizabeth Loftus

Elizabeth Lofton is a respected cognitive psychologist specializing in the study of memory.  She is especially knowledgeable in the area regarding eyewitness testimony and how various factors can distort someone's memory of past events while they themselves fully believe in their recollections.  With this "Me Too" movement arising recently with people...mostly women...recalling...sometimes from decades earlier...their experiences of sexual abuse at the hands of usually affluent and famous men, this is an important field to examine.  Of course, anyone who had been paying attention to the news last year knows of the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing, when she claimed he tried to sexually assault her upstairs at a party some 35 years earlier.  I'm not here to suggest that hers or any specific allegations from others are true or false...come on, how would I know anyway...but rather I want to steer the topic of false memory to my own experiences, for which I do claim some authority...

A year before she passed away, someone close and dear to me in my family made certain statements that I knew were absolutely untrue about the way things were at a past time during which I was 5-6 years old...just to be sure it wasn't me who was imagining things I consulted with another family member who confirmed my memory.  The only reason I can fathom for her misrepresenting our past is that her new "memories" fit in better with the narrative that she had adopted about her own life...a week ago on this blog I discussed this idea recently of folks believing falsities for the sake of preserving their own cherished worldviews.  I also had more than one unsettling experience with an old friend going way back to elementary school when I would bring up something random that I remember him being involved with and he would flatly deny any memory of it...very disturbing.  I think that these two dear people weren't the only ones who unconsciously either manufactured false memories of their own pasts or simply denied to themselves parts of it...I think this cuts across our society, and Dr. Loftus would probably concur.  The question I have to pose myself is how pervasive are false memories among people in general and have they infected my own recollections of my past?

Elizabeth Loftus has been a critic of what has been called the "recovered memory movement", which involved adults...sometimes under hypnotism...coming up with "memories" of being abused as children.  The hysteria in the early 1990s about childhood satanic ritual abuse that destroyed the lives of some of the accused parents was a symptom of this...I'm glad somebody rose up to denounce this biased and agenda-driven process.  Nobody should be subject to automatically having their life ruined by another who, out of the blue, starts pointing their finger at them and falsely accusing them...even with all sincerity...of some horrible outrage from years gone by. Still, narrative-driven individuals, without the assistance of anybody else, can come up with their own false memories and wreak all sorts of havoc...after all, they're obviously not lying, right?  That was the problem with Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh: our system of law depends on and respects eyewitness testimony...but how do we distinguish between a real account of events and an honestly-held false memory?  I initially held that Kavanaugh's confirmation vote should have been delayed until a full-blown FBI investigation was held, but the witness's lack of recall of the event's specific time and place...as opposed to her detailed description of the alleged attack...most likely meant that such an inquiry would have been fruitless. I'm not saying that the accuser in this case wasn't ultimately correct with her recall, but rather given the lack of corroboration how should society properly react to the charges and protect the accused who, as an old friend from high school pointed out to me in a comment, is supposed to be held innocent until proven guilty?

One important guard against false memory is the simple acknowledgement that it can sometimes happen, and that sometimes it comes about...albeit unconsciously...as a positive response to an agenda or narrative...