In the article, Daniel Greenberg presents a variety of compelling evidence from a variety of psychological studies over more than 100 years and well known examples of President Bush's dubious mental efforts after 9/11, when terrorists flew planes into New York's World Trade centre in 2001, to show how very unreliable, and how subject to change, are our memories of what we see, hear, feel, and so on. I guess we all, naturally, think that if it's our own clear and strong memory of an event, that it must be correct, that it must accurately record what we were doing, seeing, hearing and feeling at the time, but the evidence suggests that we should not have such confidence in our memories.
As Greenberg himself notes, the false memory phenomenon "proves particularly vexing to police officers and lawyers," (2010, "The False Memory Phenomenon", ¶ 3) casting especial doubt on the veracity of eye-witness accounts of crimes. It is worrying that eye-witnesses are often wrong, and yet trusted so much in courts. I think it is a very good thing that psychology is now providing solid reasons to tell us when we should doubt the truth of what eye witnesses honestly report; sincerity and honesty do not make things true. Getting back to the GT200 scandal and the argument with my friend, he believes in dowsing, that something like the GT200 can be used to detect things underground, specifically, that someone walking around with a stick of wood held out in front of them could find underground water. I don't believe this. As evidence, he offered his grandmother's memory of someone who came to her home and very accurately traced out the underground water pipes via dowsing. The story he told was certainly very compelling, and well designed to answer any objections I might make that it was not really good evidence at all. And that was the problem: it was so good a story that I'm sure it was not true. This suggestion upset my friend, who thought I was accusing his grandmother of lying. Even when I had explained that I was sure she was not lying, he wasn't very happy; I am sure that her memories and honestly told reports of them were not what really happened on the occasion. The story was so amazing that I could only believe it with some more solid, objective and reliable evidence. The far more likely explanation is that something different to her memories is what actually happened. (We are still friends, and my friend has conceded that although accounts such as his grandmother's are interesting and worth considering, they are not good enough evidence to prove that dowsing can really work as claimed by many.)
My own interest, from a philosophical point of view, were the implications that Greenberg's ideas have for our own identity as persons, since, much of our concept of ourselves as a person is based on our memories. If those memories are so unreliable and subject to change, what does this mean for the idea that we are one person from birth through death? And that reminds me of movies like Total Recall and The Bourne Identity, where someone has their memory completely erased, and a new one created or a mind left blank. Is the body and brain with the new set of memories still the same person? How stable and enduring do our own memories have to be for us to be able to say that we are the same person we were ten years ago? Are we the same person?
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Although I posted this at 10:48 AM while you were busily writing your summary paragraphs, I wrote it before class this morning, when I saved it as an unpublished draft. I spent about 20 minutes writing it, and made a few minor corrections when I proofread it just before publishing.
ReplyDeleteI saw the article a couple of days ago and though it very interesting, so I emailed myself the link for reference. Most online articles these days offer the option of emailing a link to friends, which I almost only ever use to email something to myself as a reminder so that I can go back and read it again later.
eSkeptic is not on my list of preferred sources in the "Looking for Something to Read?" section on the right, but it is a reliable publication, with citations to solid academic journals and other sources. If you would like to have a look, the eSkeptic homepage is at http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/
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ReplyDeleteAs I have read the report "Flashbulb Memories" in eSkeptic and your comment, the first person that I think of is my father who works as a judge and I will share him this beneficial information so that he can be aware of people’s false memory and may think of other possible solid evidence to consider. Furthermore, this also reminds me of one of my favourite psychological research concerning reading the emotions by Dr.Paul Ekman. I believe that if people can gain an ability to read emotions, it will, at least in part, be beneficial for them to circumvent many unintentional misunderstandings, which create healthy communication. Therefore, I am of the opinion that psychology can play an important role in our personal and professional lives.
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