How social networks are warping your memory

[Craig Good]

Human memory pretty much sucks. When multiple humans get together, it sucks worse.

[Brian Howell]

Fascinating.

I found this to be especially interesting.

 In some US states, jurors are forbidden to take notes made during a trial into the deliberation room—a legacy of historically high illiteracy rates and a belief that the group remembers more reliably than the individual. In fact, says Coman, using notes could protect jurors from retrieval-induced biases and group-level social influences. 

It is now well understood that memory is a construction: each time we recapitulate a memory, either to ourselves, or to someone else, we strengthen the neural pathways of that memory. It becomes more engrained, but it also changes over time as we emphasize or favor, and deemphasize and disfavor aspects. And our initial perceptions of it are strongly biased by a wide variety of environmental factors, including our own biases and preferences. (This is why four witnesses of the same event will give differing testimony—law enforcement officials know this and that coherent testimony from multiple witnesses therefore is frequently indicative of conspiracy.)

The act of remembering, says eminent memory researcher and psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, is “more akin to putting puzzle pieces together than retrieving a video recording.” Even questioning by a lawyer can alter the witness’s testimony because fragments of the memory may unknowingly be combined with information provided by the questioner, leading to inaccurate recall.

 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/

See also the Rashomon Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon_effect

[Craig Good]

> On Mar 13, 2017, at 09:43 AM, Brian Howell <bdho...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It is now well understood that memory is a construction: each time we recapitulate a memory, either to ourselves, or to someone else, we strengthen the neural pathways of that memory. It becomes more engrained, but it also changes over time as we emphasize or favor, and deemphasize and disfavor aspects. And our initial perceptions of it are strongly biased by a wide variety of environmental factors, including our own biases and preferences. (This is why four witnesses of the same event will give differing testimony—law enforcement officials know this and that coherent testimony from multiple witnesses therefore is frequently indicative of conspiracy.)

Eyewitness testimony should barely be allowed in court, and only with a lot of caveats. Unless backed by contemporaneous notes or recordings it’s almost guaranteed to be wrong. Self promotion alert: I did a Skeptoid episode on this subject.


https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4446



--
--Craig WWSJD?
clg...@me.com http://www.craig-good.com

"An expert is someone who has made all the mistakes which can be
made in a very narrow field."
--Edward Teller

[jack saunders]

---

From: Craig Good <clg...@me.com>
To: Brian Howell <bdho...@gmail.com>
Cc: Ipse Dixit <Ipse-...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, March 13, 2017 10:50 AM
Subject: Re: [Ipse Dixit] How social networks are warping your memory

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ON  MEMORY RELIABILITY -- I have read these memory-skeptical articles before and find them fascinating.  They point, for me, in the direction of "all perception, and beliefs derived from them, are a made-up product of the mercurial mind."  

Maybe I'm just a solitary entity drifting in space.  

I exist.  Decartes tells me so.  But I can't be entirely sure about you.

These are fun musing for pot-scented campfires.  

The problem with all such speculation is predictability....and we float a sea of almost unvarying predictability -- such that a 27-year-old Mongolian and 60-year-old German both land their planes using identical software which they learned studying the same flight manuals.  

Dams work (or fail) based on agreed principles. 

And it's not just left brain analyses.  Learned authors produce remarkably similar memoirs of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Roselyn Carter.  Different people who looked in at different times, talked to different people, consulted different records....and come away with entirely consistent accounts.  Outliers are very rare.  That does not map well for me over the view that memory is highly suspect.  I think the reverse.  It's amazingly reliable.  Of course it drops the stray crumb, but, IMHO, it servicably puts the cookies on the platter.