Memory, more specifically false memory, is a topic I wrote about for a column a few months ago. I kept the final product on the back burner before finally deciding to publish it last week. I hesitated because of the trauma that sexual abuse causes. Research into false memories has had a major impact on the victims of such abuse. This research shows how easy it is to create false memories, which in turn create false accusations that can ruin many lives. On the other hand, many traumatic memories are real. Questioning the memories of a victim of sexual or other form of abuse, especially when they really happened, creates the risk of re-victimizing them.
Acknowledging false memories does not make abuse less real. It only makes it harder to recognize.
False memories can feel so absolutely real that discovering proof to the contrary will blow you away. (Susan Schwartz wrote an excellent column in the Montreal Gazette on the same topic). Here is a recent personal experience that drove the point home to me:
Last October, I went to see the incredible thirteen year old Nikki Yanofski sing at Place des Arts. She looked and talked like my daughter, or any typical young teenager for that matter. That is, until she started to sing. Then her voice somehow morphed into the second coming of Ella Fitzgerald.
One year later I purchased the CD of that concert which came with a bonus DVD of the show. I watched the DVD with my wife, who was with me at the concert, and her parents, who were not. I told my in-laws that if this was the same concert I attended, she would be wearing a sleeveless black dress in the first half, and a white frilly dress with a big bow at the back during the second half. When Nikki appeared in a black pantsuit, I had to check the date on the ticket stub to make sure it was the same concert. Sure enough it was. On the DVD, Nikki even spilled her bottle of water just like I remembered from the concert. When she took off her jacket, she had a sleeveless blouse on.
Okay, okay, so I was wrong about the pants. At least I got the sleeveless part right. Still…for sure she would come out for the second half with the white frilly dress with the big bow at the back. Unbelievably, she came out in a blue dress with a big bow at the back. The dress wasn’t even frilly. I had to double check the dates again.
The story about the mistaken memories from my childhood that I wrote about in my column below were over 40 years old. They were understandable. But the dresses that Nikki wore? It was only a year ago. Is my memory that bad?
After watching the concert DVD, I was able to piece together what happened. The black pantsuit with the sleeveless blouse under the jacket got mixed up in my mind with the black sleeveless dress my daughter, Amy, wore for her elementary school graduation. As for the dress Nikki wore in the second half, I had watched a YouTube video of her 2006 appearance at the Montreal Jazz Festival where she wore a frilly white dress with no bow. My brain must have merged the two dresses.
I still can’t get over how sure I was…and how so far off base I turned out to be. Now I know why couples disagree so much about the basic recounting of events, why eyewitness testimony is so unreliable, and why we always justify our opinions with a series of memories that just happen to gibe perfectly.
When we are unhappy and are trying to understand why, we sometimes think back to childhood experiences in search of traumatic or unpleasant events to explain our feelings. The problem is that we do so from a perspective of unhappiness and, as a result, we will often paint a negative slant on those events. This negative slant will fill in the gaps in our memory with unpleasant images. Words spoken by others, and even the tones of voice used, also get distorted.
Memory teaches us and gives us perspective. It can nourish us with pleasant images from the past, or pain us with traumatic ones. Regardless of the feelings it produces, memory remains our most valuable asset. Unfortunately it is not the infallible historical record that we wish it to be.
Here is last week’s column:
What colour was that blue sofa?
(source: Journal Métro; De quelle couleur était donc ce canapé bleu? November 4, 2008)
I remember my old home where I grew up. I pictured it hundreds of times in my mind. One day, as an adult, I came across an old picture of our living room. The sofa, which I had vividly remembered as being blue, instead was brown in the picture. It was worse was when I had the opportunity to visit the old house some time later. I had a clear image in my head of the front room where I had spent most of my childhood. Yet when I walked into that room it turned out to be completely different. Even the door was in the wrong place! How could this happen? How could my vivid memories of things have been so wrong?
I think my experiences are actually quite common and illustrate the true nature of past memories and what happens when we try to recollect them. All of our brains are imperfect. We recall some things clearly but other facts become blurred over time, leaving gaps in our memory. When we picture things like a sofa in a living room, and try to recall its colour (was it brown…or blue?), we take a best guess to fill in any gap in our memory. Even if that guess is wrong (I think it was blue), we still use it when picturing the room. We may even confuse it with a sofa from a different time and place. After that, we are more likely to see the sofa in its new colour every time we picture the room. Over time we become convinced it was blue. Seeing a true picture years later will always surprise us.
Perhaps the color of a sofa or the exact location of a door is not going to change anyone’s life but the same process occurs when we try to recall more important events or even unpleasant or abusive ones. Our memories do not always reflect what actually happened. Instead, the incomplete mix of images, scenarios and general impressions evolve over time to form our current mental pictures. These images, a combination of real and imagined events, become our new memories that feel more and more real over time. This is one of the reasons why eyewitness testimony is so notoriously unreliable. Or why we now take extra care not to make suggestions when questioning a victim of abuse.
This doesn’t mean that all our past memories are wrong. It’s just that we can’t know for certain which ones are true unless we have some proof. I was lucky enough to come across proof in that old picture. Now I know that I was wrong about the colour of my old sofa. On the other hand I can now say with certainty that I was right about one thing. That brown sofa was damned ugly!
Tagged as False memories, Nikki Yanofski, sexual abuse.
Posted in Human nature, Life.
Posted on 11 Nov 2008
