Tuesday 28 August 2001

Pic of the day: I clearly remember crawling through this concrete pipe (on a warmer day, admittedly) when I was a teen boy. It went on for a long way, and the acoustics were fantastic, and I ripped the knees of my trousers. But did I really do it? And if no one believes me, does a tree that falls in the forest still make a sound?

Attitudes and memories

This is kind of scary, in a very intellectual way. I am not sure whether I should write about it, but I guess the truth is out there anyway so I may as well discuss it here. It is about memories again, and attitudes, and how reality is not necessarily objective after all.

What made me think was two articles I recently read in scientific magazines. One (in the Norwegian magazine Illustrert Vitenskap was about how optimists outlived pessimists. This is old news, you may say, but the interesting thing was what happened to the pessimists. They tended to die suddenly and violently, in crime or accidents. One theory was that pessimists would take more risks, since they supposed it would all go to heck anyway. But that sounds kind of strange too. When I am pessimistic, I take all kinds of precautions. Oh well. More research needed.

The other was about cancer patients and their attitude, and was rather surprising. It is well known that a positive attitude helps people to survive cancer. Former cancer patients who have overcome the disease often point out their optimism and their will to live as a major factor in their survival. Well, this new study took a different angle. They interviewed patients who had recently been diagnosed with the same type of cancer, and grouped them according to attitude. Then they waited until the therapies were over and checked who had survived. It turned out that there was no significant connection between survival and the attitude they had at the start.

Basically, the people who survived the cancer realized that they must after all have had a positive attitude, and so they remember this as a fact, regardless of what they may have felt earlier. This may sound kind of callous, I admit, but it is consistent with what we know about memories.

***

Modern memory research, such as the work of Dr Loftus and her associates, show that it is easy to implant false memories in most people. What you need is a person they trust, in the connection of the memory. For instance, a parent or older sibling "reminds" you of something that should have happened during your childhood (but actually didn't). Then, a few months later, you not only claim to remember it yourself: You can even add details of the time, place and circumstances around the event. The level of detail varies from person to person, but it does not vary between real and implanted memories. They are equally detailed, and the test subject is equally convinced of their reality.

Loftus' demonstrations have changed the attitudes of many juries in the United States, where there recently was a flood of "recovered memories" from therapy used to accuse male relatives of incest during childhood. Today there is severe doubt about whether childhood trauma is ever forgotten by non-dissociated people. Hopefully Loftus' research can save more innocent fathers and grandfathers from going to prison on the say-so of a psychiatrist. Of course, we can now expect the pendulum to swing to the other opposite. A good idea may be to stick with good old Moses' rule: Two or three witnesses before someone is found guilty. Few criminals have the strength of will to limit themselves to only one victim, after all.

***

It is kind of scary to know that our childhood memories may be Just Plain Wrong and perhaps never happened. Our memories, after all, are us. I think, therefore I am; but I remember, therefore I am me. Without our memories, we are adrift. A blackboard continually erased and rewritten, with no way of controlling what is written there.

When I was a child and a bit into my youth too, I vividly remembered flying. I could recall the feeling, and see the place where it happened, but somehow I was never able to do it again. When I grew up, I realized that it must have been dreams, or that I must just have been running and forgot to notice my feet. (I never flew high, after all.) But what if I actually did fly? What if we did, all of us who had such memories? What if it all was true: The crawling things under your bed, the huge lumbering shadows outside in the dark, the invisible hands who caught us when we were about to fall to our doom? What if we remembered correctly first, but then we trusted our parents and teachers and preachers, and we forgot what was real? What if we have forgotten who we really are?

And on that insanity-inducing note, I wish you all a good night. Do not forget to take your medication ...