Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [176]
The following sources helped shape the discussion of memory in this chapter: Daniel Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (Houghton Mifflin, 2001); Daniel Schacter, ed., Memory Distortions: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past (Harvard University Press, 1995); Daniel Schacter and Elaine Scarry, eds., Memory, Brain, and Belief (Harvard University Press, 2000); and interviews with Daniel Schacter of Harvard, William Hirst of the New School for Social Research, and Elizabeth Phelps of New York University. Hirst was the first person to tell me the story of Ulric Neisser’s false flashbulb memory, although it also appears frequently in the memory literature. The Challenger study (including the “I know that’s my handwriting” quote) was written up by Neisser and Nicole Harsh as “Phantom Flashbulbs: False Recollections of Hearing the News about Challenger,” in Eugene Winograd and Ulric Neisser, eds., Affect and Accuracy in Recall (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 9–31. The claim that flashbulb memories decline in accuracy at the same rate as more mundane memories was advanced by Jennifer Talarico and David Rubin in their paper “Flashbulb Memories Result from Ordinary Memory Processes and Extraordinary Event Characteristics,” in Olivier Luminet and Antonietta Curci, eds., Flashbulb Memories: New Issues and New Perspectives (Psychology Press, 2009), 79–98. Information about the 9/11 Memory Consortium can be found online at http://911memory.nyu.edu/.
In addition to the above-mentioned sources, the information on implanted false memories comes from Trauma and Memory: Reading, Healing, and Making Law, Austin Sarat, Nadav Davidovitch, and Michal Alberstein, eds. (Stanford University Press, 2008). The story of Chris, the boy who was told that he had been lost in a mall as a child, comes from “The Reality of Illusory Memories,” Elizabeth F. Loftus, Julie Feldman, and Richard Dashiell, in Schacter, ed., 62. The study itself was conducted by Loftus and a colleague in 1994.
You can listen to the “Modern Jackass” episode of This American Life for free, and you absolutely should. Its real title is “A Little Bit of Knowledge,” it was produced by Lisa Pollak and host Ira Glass, it originally aired on July 22, 2005, it is available online at http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1090, and it is very, very funny.
Although I both open and close this chapter with a plea to set aside the category of knowledge, I want to emphasize that my claim, in making that plea, is only that “knowledge” isn’t a useful category for thinking about error, not that it isn’t a useful category at all. In everyday life, we use phrases like “I know” to indicate that we don’t feel any uncertainty and phrases like “I believe” to indicate that we do—distinctions that are extremely helpful, and that we cannot jettison without resorting to the notoriously impractical and unpalatable option of complete capital-S Skepticism. My point here is only that knowledge, as a category, has limitations and assumptions we should come to understand—and that error is predicated on belief, which is, accordingly, a more useful conceptual tool for a book about wrongness.
Justice William Douglas. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Penguin, 2003) 265.
the brain mistakes an idea in the mind…for a feature of the real world. Specifically, scientists think that denial of disease arises when a part of the brain called the supplementary motor area remains unaffected by a brain injury. The supplementary motor area is responsible for mental simulations of physical actions; it’s what you use when you lie in bed at night picturing yourself raising your hands in triumph as you cross the finish line of the New York marathon. For paralyzed patients who deny their paralysis, this part of the brain works just fine, while damage