Do you remember when...

I am currently reading a most fascinating book, "A General Theory of Love", by Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., Richard Lannon, M.D.

I'm a little over halfway through and keep reading things that relate to things that are going on in my life. Right now I am at the part talking about memory. The authors say, "Although most people do not realize it, they are incapable of remembering events as they happened. In study after study they incorporate fragments from earlier or later incidents, general expectations and implications gleaned from leading questions into their memories of what they saw and heard. The resulting ragout of fact, fancy, suggestion, and innuendo feels as convincing as a more accurate memory would." The authors then go on to cite a study where people were asked to remember where they were right after the space shuttle Challenger exploded. They were asked again two and a half years later. None of the later accounts correlated entirely with the originals and fully a third of them were "wildly inaccurate." The students were cheerfully ignorant of the fabrication that passed in their minds for a memory; many insisted that the recent, wrong versions were actually right. "As far as we can tell," Neisser observed, "the original memories are just gone."

A recent example of this fabrication of memory happened to me at work the other day. Pookie went outside after a tremendous rainstorm and spotted a huge slug on the patio. She was so excited and urged me to come and look! I did and as I went back towards the door to go back inside I spotted a very large, striped centipede crawling in the corner. I shouted, "Pookie! Come look at this!" which set off an excited search for more life forms that were not usually found on the porch. Later when she was telling her mother of all the things we had found she made a point of telling her mother proudly that SHE had found the centipede in the corner.

This explains why when Bonnie or I re-tell the memory of when I threw a butcher knife at her as kids (yes, this really happened), she says it missed her by inches and I say it missed her by over a foot (which to be accurate is still inches, but nevertheless...). Her memory comes from the expectation that I was angry and wanted to hurt her and that I intended to hit her with it. My memory comes from being angry, wanting to vent and make a point, but truly not wanting to hurt her and making sure I did not throw it directly at her. Admittedly it was a risky maneuver and not one I would repeat, but it shows that our expections and physical perceptions skewed our memories. Maybe the knife did come within inches. Maybe it really missed by a foot and a half. We may never know.

Also from the book:
"Because human beings remember with neurons we are disposed to see more of what we have already seen, hear anew what we have heard most often, think just what we have always thought. Our minds are burdened by an informational inertia whose headlong coarse is not easy to slow. As a life lengthens, momentum gathers. A wistful aside from two neuroscience researchers: [In] scientific work, we find that new theories are understood only by the graduate students, whose intellectual identities are then wholly transformed....In contrast, the senior professors are burdened with such connectional inertia that when they encounter new ideas there is no apparent effect, other than an occasional vague irritation."

It explains how an innocent act of one can be percieved as malicious by another. It happened to me quite often in my marriage. It was as if my spouse expected me to act maliciously and so any action that was questionable automatically was seen as such.

These are good things to remember when we are relying on faulty mechanisms such as memories. We should probably give people the benefit of the doubt sometimes, maybe most times and assume that neither person is totally correct in what they remember.

So what do we do then when something comes up that causes people to be so strongly divided based on memories they each have of an event. First we need to recognize our biases. We love this person, we trust this person (that we may be defending) and the other person loves a different person and trusts a different person. That right there automatically skews the perceptions. We have to acknowledge this before we can get to the bottom of anything.

Don't you know this is at the root of all differences? The race "wars". The religious wars. The political wars. This is the reason consultation was brought forth as a tool to help people arrive at a truth. But it only works when people set aside their own viewpoint as correct and attempt to see a situation more objectively. Try to see how the other "side" could have seen things the way they did. Get on the other end of the elephant in other words.