I had an incident that perfectly illustrates the unreliability of memory. Amongst my friends I’m known for having an uncanny memory for facts — but there are other areas (eg. faces) where I’m lacking.
About 14 months ago, I had the carpets in my apartment steam-cleaned. The steamcleaner was a man with a heavy French accent. I remember the accent because it really stuck in my memory when he told me in the accent that “it’s really bad” upon finishing.
About 2 weeks ago I moved out and I arranged for end-of-lease cleaning (with steamcleaning). I was amused to recollect how horrified-yet-dignified the original guy was. I remembered myself standing in the kitchen (where I retreated during his cleaning) while he rebuked my carpet from the living room itself just a few steps away. Naturally, the memory of the scene included his face and body.
A few days later something crept up from my subconscious that told me that memory was a bit funny. After some searching I realised what had happened. The man who I visualised during my recollection was none other than the Quebec actor Lothaire Bluteau!
I’ve seen him on 3 or 4 episodes of Law and Order. Like the steamcleaner, he has a heavy French accent and always played very stereotypically French villains (eg.a poetry professor). I assume he was also of a similar build to the steamcleaner — for of course I don’t remember what the steamcleaner looked like at all. Memory is reconstruction so when my brain searched for “+thin medium build +heavy French accent +dignified displeasure”, Bluteau was the more common match. Even though I probably haven’t seen him on TV for years, I’ve seen his face many more times than the steamcleaner’s. So that’s the face my brain slapped on the memory.
Yep, our criminal justice system (being based on the totally-disproved notion of memory being a reference book not a head-transposer) is screwed.
3 comments ↓
The vast majority of people don’t realise how little we actually remember and how much we make up on the fly.
We generally remember the framework of what happened but then add in the details from rough heuristics and general expectations. we remember the exceptional details but not the mundane, hence you recalled the exceptional French accent (plus what he said) but not the mundane face which your brain later filled in with the person it best knows with a heavy French accent.
You are 100% correct, this type of thing is very worrying for the criminal justice system which is why there is so much reliance on forensic evidence.
Great illustration of one of the many weakness of memory.
My 10 year-old son, on a long car trip today, asked me to explain the American politics — we stopped and visited a historic site on the way home. During our conversation I illustrated the weakness of democracy (majority wins) — which is a big part of our system. I discussed the different forms of representation, the different branches, the bill of rights and other checks. Thus I showed him not too cherish democracy too deeply. Yet, democracy is vital to our system.
Likewise, i wager you agree that memory and witness are important to a country’s justice system but needs checks like keddaw has mentioned — forensics, jury, judges and much more.
No system of knowledge is perfect be hopefully we keep developing better methods of approximating truth.
Well, without any memory there’d be no cases or anything like that! But yes, it’s yet another case of using a flawed system of knowledge to attempt and reduce the very same flaws. This is something religious people can have trouble grasping, as shown in, eg. the evolutionary argument against atheism — to them the source of knowledge must be flawless or else everything else is the fruit of a poisonous tree.
But stories like this actually show how a flawed system can be self-improving: my memory of reading about the problems with memory probably aided in recognising the gap in the same memory.
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