When Bill Clinton first ran for president, he gave America sketchy and contradictory reasons for why he never served in Vietnam. But it set off a furor when records revealed that he had used "political pressure"--including calls from a U.S. senator and the governor's office--to dodge military service. The right wing had a field day branding Bill a liar.
But Clinton may have gotten the memory part right. An emerging understanding of memory reveals that it is not laid down forever like a movie, with the same events occurring in the same order every time. Rather, it is an ongoing process of distillation and revision, more like watching a live version of the TV improv show Whose Line Is It Anyway? There's a theme, but no script; every performance is at once similar and different.
Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau learned this in a very public way. When the right wing pilloried Clinton for his Vietnam story, Trudeau wondered aloud if the inconsistencies might instead be a simple case of faded memory. He sat down to write about his own draft experience for the New York Times. But his research disclosed a very different story than the one he had been telling friends for the previous 20 years.
In that version, Trudeau had drawn a low number in the draft lottery and his three-year student deferment had run out, which meant his call-up was imminent. He spent hours on the phone in emotional calls to friends and family Then he tried to obtain another deferment and interviewed at his local draft board--for which, Trudeau noted, "I received a memorable haircut." Eventually he went home where his father, a physician, diagnosed an ulcer and sent the evidence off to a doctor in New Hampshire. Then Trudeau got his deferment. Or so he thought that's how it went. (Read on to learn what really happened.)
The "autobiographical memories" that tell the story of our lives are always undergoing revision--precisely because our sense of self is too. We are continually extracting new information from old experiences and filling in gaps in ways that serve some current demand. Consciously or not, we use imagination to reinvent our past, and with it, our present and future.
What's in a Memory Anyway?
If memories aren't reliable, why do we have them at all? Memory allows us to learn from our experiences without having to repeat them endlessly Indeed, it allows us to survive. If Fred Flintstone remembers that it's bad to toss rocks at a saber-toothed tiger, he won't commit the same offense a week later.
Very few scenarios repeat exactly, so our memories work mostly by extracting the essence of those scenarios. After all, if Fred learns that it's bad to throw rocks at saber-toothed tigers, he'll live longer than if he learns only to avoid throwing those rocks at that tiger.
But memory is more than a survival tool. Psychologist Ulrich Neisser, Ph.D., contends it is a kind of social glue. According to the Cornell University researcher, it's less important to remember life events accurately than to preserve more enduring information about people, relationships and the continuing aspects of events, all of which form the core of human experience.
Think about how quickly Thanksgiving dinner descends into conversations that begin, "Hey, remember when we .... " These shared personal histories keep our relationships going. As anyone who has ever sat around swapping stories until the wee hours of the morning knows, what really happened is less critical than what everybody thinks really happened.
Enter Imagination
But what if one of your siblings interrupted your recounting of a cherished childhood memory and said, "That never happened to you. No way You're wrong."
How would you find out the truth? In research we conducted with psychologist Helene Hembrooke, Ph.D., we asked people this very question. We found that many would not necessarily look for proof, such as photos or medical records, because it seems like too much of a bother. Instead, people imagine the event, and then see if it "feels" as though it were a real experience that happened to them.
This is an easy strategy, but not a smart one. Research shows that imagining fictitious events, especially ones from childhood, tends to increase our confidence that the events really happened.
Imagination Inflation
In 1996, along with psychologists Charles Manning, Ph.D., and Elizabeth Loftus, Ph.D., of the University of Washington and James Sherman, Ph.D., of Indiana University, one of us (Maryanne Garry) looked specifically at imagination's effect on autobiographical memory. We gave people a list of common childhood events (e.g., got in trouble for calling 911, broke a window with your hand) and asked them to rate their confidence that each had or had not happened to them before age 10.
Weeks later, we asked the same people to imagine some of the events in the survey. An experimenter guided them through the exercise: "Imagine that it's after school and you are playing in the house. You hear a strange noise outside, so you run to the window. As you are running, your feet catch on something and you trip and fall. As you're falling, you reach out to catch yourself and your hand goes through the window. As the window shatters, you get cut and there's some blood." Then we asked the participants again to rate their confidence of the same childhood memories.
We found that simply imagining a childhood event for about a minute boosted people's confidence that the events had really happened. We called this effect "imagination inflation."
Tags:
different story,
doonesbury cartoonist,
draft board,
draft lottery,
experience,
faded memory,
furor,
garry trudeau,
haircut,
identity,
imagination,
improv,
inconsistencies,
Memory,
military service,
process of distillation,
right wing,
self,
student deferment,
ulcer,
vietnam story,
whose line is it anyway
