Nigel 
August 8th, 2009
People think memory is like a camcorder with random deletions and some fuzzy bits, but it ain't
Many years ago a colleague was accused of sexual impropriety with a past student. The allegations related to some fifteen years earlier, so there was no chance of producing witnesses or alibis.
The accuser was apparently seriously emotionally disturbed, which he attributed to the way the teacher had molested him. He had been receiving counselling, which may be what led to the court case.
A keystone of the defence was that false memories can be accidentally created during counselling, and later cannot be separated from genuine memories. They are believed.
Unfortunately the expert witness briefing court on this was unable to attend in person. His evidence was read out, so most of its impact will have been lost. Friends who attended the trial said this evidence went right over the heads of the jury. Well it would, wouldn’t it. Don’t most people think of their memories as audio-visual camera which only record the truth?
I’m coming to believe we all manufacture false memories which we end up believing. Sometimes, as I’ll describer tomorrow, this can be useful. Often it doesn’t matter. Occasionally it does.
Here’s an example from my own experience:
It was the late fifties. There were few places for ordinary people to eat out because there wasn’t a lot of money around. Britain was trying to recover from post-war bankruptcy.
At the back of some waste land in town was a restaurant hastily constructed from prefabricated materials. My mother took me there for a treat, probably during one of the periods when my father had become too depressed to live with his family. I examined the menu and chose a tasty-sounding beef stew.
“You won’t like that.” my mother said.
“Yes I will. That’s what I want.”
“It’ll be all gristly, but if you must then on your head be it. Don’t complain.”
There wasn’t much variety in the shops. Real beef was a luxury. I’ll rephrase that. We were lower middle class, so we almost never had beef. Chicken was cheaper. This restaurant was not an expensive one. The beef they could get at the price was the bits posher places didn’t want.
The stew arrived.
“You won’t like it, but I don’t want to hear any complaints. You asked for it, you eat it.”
It’s gravy was okay with pieces of cabbage and potato, but no herbs or spices – but in those days I didn’t know what herbs and spices were. There was a quite acceptable amount of meat hidden in the gravy, but I began to feel ill as I examined it. I was pretty squeamish at that age. Many of the pieces had very obvious chunks of thick gristly tubing running through them. It was very obviously from a dead animal. I managed to cut off some pieces of ordinary meat, but it was stringy and tough without much taste, and anyway the bits I wasn’t eating were making me feel nauseous.
I guess I was even more stupid then than I am now. No way was I going to let Mum know she was right. Repeatedly as I ate I told her how nice it was. As I swallowed unchewable bits I sang their praises. I was probably completely transparent, but she let me delude myself.
That is how I now interpret the memories, but for some time after the event what I actually believed was what I had said. I’d visualised what I wanted that stew to look and taste like, and described how good it was, and I ended up with that in my head.
Some months later I was offered another meal out and naturally I begged to go to that place where I’d had the incredible beef stew. Mum tried to dissuade me for some reason, but I was determined. We went, I ordered, and it was the same revolting and inedible stuff as before.
I stared at it aghast, and the real memory flooded back. Now I remembered manufacturing a false version with such determination. I was astonished I could have ended up believing the lie and forgetting the truth.
It is possible with unskilled counselling to end up describing something which never actually happened. The student might have thought the teacher wanted to do all those sexual things to him, and had unwanted horror fantasies, maybe even nightmares, of it happening. Equally the student may have wanted it all to happen, and dwelled on sick fantasies of what was desired. It is frighteningly easy to move from imagining something to believing it really happened.
The teacher on trial? A mass of past pupils begged to be allowed into court to act as character witnesses for him. He was found not guilty of many of the charges, which should mean the jury did not believe everything the accuser said. It was all the word of one person against another. However the teacher was found guilty of other charges including the most serious one and was sentenced to three years in prison.
Coming up:
Creating a false memory deliberately, the weird nature of memory, and more.
