Comments on: Five myths about memory (and why they matter in court)

By: Peter

Peter — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 14:52:29 +0000

Our peripheral vision is fuzzy at best; what light does fall on the fovea is then filtered by the brain and stored with “lossy compression”. We can completely, though unconsciously, ignore the gorilla. Upon uncertain recall, we re-evaluate the data,and store the changes as original. Hypnosis can help up remember things that never happened. (Alien abductions, for example.) I agree with Glen; eyewitness testimony would almost certainly not sway me. I find it amazing that I can remember anything at all!

By: Glen

Glen — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 13:28:30 +0000

at least 90%, possibly more of all wrongful convictions involve witness identification.
If I’m evber on a jury, and it is a case involving any kind of sexual assault or involving a known weapon, as far as I am concerned, no DNA, no proof!!

By: floodmouse

floodmouse — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 18:09:48 +0000

I just watched the “Nova” episode on memory on-line. They use the example of stage magicians Penn & Teller, who can distract the audience with hand motions to prevent them from noticing a movement off-center that would otherwise be very obvious. (Reminds me of Iain’s gorilla.) I think the researchers should have re-worded their survey question about hypnosis: Not “can” it improve memory, but “does it usually” improve memory? Hypnosis has mixed results depending on the subject and the situation. I personally believe hypnosis might sometimes improve memory, but it very often distorts memory instead. The wording of the questions might change the statistical results.

By: Iain

Iain — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 23:16:11 +0000

People are stupid. Get that through your heads.
Your vision is not a camera. Not at all, the eye sees, but it doesn’t record, the brain does that, BUT the brain filters its information. Unlikely visual events are for the most part ignored. There was an experiment where something interesting was going on, a person in Gorilla suit sauntered onstage, took something non essential to the scene and moseyed off. 90% of the people didn’t notice the Gorilla! It was filtered out.
So your eyewitness is unreliable by definition, unless of course they have a video of the event. Which then makes it a video recording, not an eyewitness.
PJ the only way that human memory represents RAM is that it is random access.

By: badnicolez

badnicolez — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 18:23:01 +0000

Wouldn’t even a “photographic” memory be just that: a series of snapshots (however accurate) vs. a video/movie-like recollection?

Perhaps a test using these questions should be given to potential jurors prior to serving on a case. If you fail, you cannot serve unless you acknowledge your utterly false assumptions about the accuracy of memories.

By: Jimmy Bones

Jimmy Bones — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 01:52:05 +0000

I’ve never studied psychology in my life and realise how inadequate our brains are at recalling events and other visual/aural etc. information and how it changes over time. I’ve experienced it personally many times and try to analyse it to give myself a good and healthy amount of self doubt (or at least remain somewhat critical of my own memories, be that general information or recalling events). I find it pretty crazy that some people trust there brains so much and really think that it’s important for people to maintain a good amount of humility.

By: Bob Snyder

Bob Snyder — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 17:12:37 +0000

@AntonyIndia, that is not scientific fact. Quite the contrary, it is highly debatable whether anybody has that type of memory or not. But even in the unlikely event that a handful of people do have photographic memories, the article was about the general public and the misconceptions they have about their own memories.

By: AntonyIndia

AntonyIndia — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 13:48:09 +0000

Some people DO have a photographic memory: Kim Peek (the real Rainman) comes to mind;
so it is possible. How does this affect the “Scientific consensus” on this topic?

By: PJ

PJ — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 05:53:56 +0000

Brian has a good point, but I’m not sure I can think of a better analogy.

Kind of like RAM, in that it fades if you don’t periodically refresh it (read it, and write it back out).

Also, every time you bring it into your working memory it gets changed slightly, and those changes get written back to the long-term storage.

It’s like vector-based graphics: Instead of storing an image pixel-by-pixel, you store instructions for making the image.

Fidelity isn’t usually important, so your brain only keeps the parts that it thinks are important. (Do most people know what “lossy compression” means?)

If you try to recall something that wasn’t completely stored, your brain tries to fill in the blanks with whatever makes the most sense. Then it incorporates the interpolated data into the memory, just as if it were part of the original. It’s difficult to tell whether any part of your own memory is something you experienced or something you made up. That strikes me as something people would find hard to swallow, no matter how many papers are published in reputable journals demonstrating it. And I can’t think of any other system that works like that.

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 12:26:41 +0000

I’m not a psychologist, but I would guess one reason these myths persist is that articles about them do a poor job of presenting a better alternative. For example, if there were a wide misperception that Montreal is the capital of Canada, I wouldn’t try to correct that just by telling people Montreal is not the capital of Canada. I would tell them that Ottawa is the capital. If you tell them memory doesn’t work like a video camera but don’t give them an alternative analogy, then you shouldn’t be surprised if they keep thinking it works like a video camera.