The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [68]
There are many other examples, some - a spurious memory of being lost as a child in a shopping mall, for instance - of greater emotional impact. Once the key idea is suggested, the patient often plausibly fleshes out the supporting details. Lucid but wholly false recollections can easily be induced by a few cues and questions, especially in the therapeutic setting. Memory can be contaminated. False memories can be implanted even in minds that do not consider themselves vulnerable and uncritical.
Stephen Ceci of Cornell University, Loftus and their colleagues have found, unsurprisingly, that preschoolers are exceptionally vulnerable to suggestion. The child who, when first asked, correctly denies having caught his hand in a mousetrap later remembers the event in vivid, self-generated detail. When more directly told about ‘some things that happened to you when you were little’, over time they easily enough assent to the implanted memories. Professionals watching videotapes of the children can do no better than chance in distinguishing false memories from true ones. Is there any reason to think that adults are wholly immune to the fallibilities exhibited by children?
President Ronald Reagan, who spent World War Two in Hollywood, vividly described his own role in liberating Nazi concentration camp victims. Living in the film world, he apparently confused a movie he had seen with a reality he had not. On many occasions in his Presidential campaigns, Mr Reagan told an epic story of World War Two courage and sacrifice, an inspiration for all of us. Only it never happened; it was the plot of the movie A Wing and a Prayer - that made quite an impression on me, too, when I saw it at age 9. Many other instances of this sort can be found in Reagan’s public statements. It is not hard to imagine serious public dangers emerging out of instances in which political, military, scientific or religious leaders are unable to distinguish fact from vivid fiction.
In preparing for courtroom testimony, witnesses are coached by their lawyers. Often, they are made to repeat the story over and over again, until they get it ‘right’. Then, on the stand what they remember is the story they’ve been telling in the lawyer’s office. The nuances have been shaded. Or it may no longer correspond, even in its major features, to what really happened. Conveniently, the witnesses may have forgotten that their memories were reprocessed.
These facts are relevant in evaluating the societal effects of advertising and of national propaganda. But here they suggest that on alien abduction matters - where interviews typically take place years after the alleged event - therapists must be very careful that they do not accidentally implant or select the stories they elicit.
Perhaps what we actually remember is a set of memory fragments stitched on to a fabric of our own devising. If we sew cleverly enough, we have made ourselves a memorable story easy to recall. Fragments by themselves, unencumbered by association, are harder to retrieve. The situation is rather like the method of science itself where many isolated data points can be remembered, summarized and explained in the framework of a theory. We then much more easily recall the theory and not the data.
In science the theories are always being reassessed and confronted with new facts; if the facts are seriously discordant -beyond the error bars - the theory may have to be revised. But in everyday life it is very rare that we are confronted with new facts about events of long ago. Our memories are almost never challenged. They can, instead, be frozen in place, no matter how flawed they are, or become a work in continual