Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [35]
The metaphors of memory fit our times and technology. Centuries ago, philosophers compared memory to a soft wax tablet that would preserve anything imprinted on it. With the advent of the printing press, people began to think of memory as a library that stores events and facts for later retrieval. (Those of us of a certain age still think of it that way, muttering about where we “filed” information in our cluttered mental cabinets.) With the inventions of movies and tape recorders, people started thinking of memory as a video camera, clicking on at the moment of birth and automatically recording every moment thereafter. Nowadays we think of memory in computer terms, and although some of us wish for more RAM, we assume that just about everything that happens to us is “saved.” Your brain might not choose to screen all those memories, but they are in there, just waiting for you to retrieve them, bring out the popcorn, and watch.
These metaphors of memory are popular, reassuring, and wrong. Memories are not buried somewhere in the brain, as if they were bones at an archeological site; nor can we uproot them, as if they were radishes; nor, when they are dug up, are they perfectly preserved. We do not remember everything that happens to us; we select only highlights. (If we didn’t forget, our minds could not work efficiently, because they would be cluttered with mental junk—the temperature last Wednesday, a boring conversation on the bus, every phone number we ever dialed.) Moreover, recovering a memory is not at all like retrieving a file or replaying a tape; it is like watching a few unconnected frames of a film and then figuring out what the rest of the scene must have been like. We may reproduce poetry, jokes, and other kinds of information by rote, but when we remember complex information we shape it to fit it into a story line.
Because memory is reconstructive, it is subject to confabulation—confusing an event that happened to someone else with one that happened to you, or coming to believe that you remember something that never happened at all. In reconstructing a memory, people draw on many sources. When you remember your fifth birthday party, you may have a direct recollection of your younger brother putting his finger in the cake and spoiling it for you, but you will also incorporate information that you got later from family stories, photographs, home videos, and birthday parties you’ve seen on television. You weave all these elements together into one integrated account. If someone hypnotizes you and regresses you to your fifth birthday party, you’ll tell a lively story about it that will feel terribly real to you, but it will include many of those postparty details that never actually happened. After a while, you won’t be able to distinguish your actual memory from subsequent information that crept in from elsewhere. That phenomenon is called “source confusion,” otherwise known as the “where did I hear that?” problem. 5 Did I read it, see it, or did someone tell me about it?
Mary McCarthy made brilliant use of her understanding of confabulation in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, which is a rare exception to the way most of us tell our stories. At the end of every chapter, McCarthy subjected her memories to the evidence for or against them, even when the evidence killed a good story. In “A Tin Butterfly,” McCarthy vividly recalls the time her punitive Uncle Myers and Aunt Margaret, the relatives who took her and her brothers in when their parents died, accused her of stealing her younger brother’s Cracker Jack prize, a tin butterfly. She hadn’t, and a thorough household search failed to uncover it. But one night after dinner the butterfly was discovered under the tablecloth on the