“Tell the jury what you saw," the prosecutor asks the man
on the witness stand. We have seen this
happen many times in movies and in crime shows on TV and read it in scores of crime novels. Nothing is as convincing to a jury as an
eyewitness report.
We know from Caro’s fascinating post a few months ago,
though, how unreliable the hindsight of eyewitnesses can be. If you missed her report or (ahem!) don’t
remember it well, you can find it here:
This morning, while fixing myself breakfast, I listened to
an episode of my favorite radio show. It's
called Radio Lab and reports on social and physical science and often about how
they intersect and interact. All the episodes are available as podcasts, so I
can tune one in whenever I want to hear something to stimulate the little gray
cells. This morning, it was the show called "Memory and
Forgetting,” which deals with, among other things, some notions very useful to
the crime writer. Like the fact that memory is dynamic. One
does not put away one’s experiences like storing a can of tomato soup in the
kitchen cupboard—with the ability to take out the exact same thing you put in.
Decades before the scientists proved what really happens to
memories, Fredrick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner instinctively knew that the more often
one accesses a memory, the less likely we are to remember it accurately. Viz--
Those two characters must have been truly in love and often thought
back on their love affair. That’s why
their memories of it are so different.
Science can show us that now.
This means that the more the police repeatedly question the witness,
the more degraded will be the quality of the testimony. But maybe that is what the investigators
want?
And memories can be planted.
Scientific investors have been doing that quite successfully for a long
time. All it takes is to tell the
subject about a childhood memory reported by, say the his parents or by her
older siblings and, bingo, most people will report details of the scene,
filling in with memories of other places, the mall where they “remember” having
gotten lost. What never happened begins
to feel absolutely real.
If you want to hear the radio show in question, you can find it
here: (I warn you, you will likely
become addicted to Radio Lab and be a smarter person for it.)
At the very least, if you listen, you will learn that the human memory—while precious beyond words and the source of our sense of ourselves—is not one hundred percent reliable. Try to keep that in mind.
Annamaria - Monday
