MEMORY'S FUTURE

Technology seems to be changing just about everything these days. Can it ultimately change how human memory works? Two experts from the University of Washington in Seattle, Elizabeth Loftus and William Calvin, got together recently to review and speculate. Loftus, perhaps the world's leading expert on memory malleability, is a professor of psychology and adjunct professor of law. She has written 18 books, including Eyewitness Testimony, The Myth of Repressed Memory, and her prophetic 1980 Memory. William Calvin, a renowned expert on the brain, is an affiliate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. Calvin's recent books include How Brains Think, The Cerebral Code and Lingua ex Machina. Here are highlights of their discussion.

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: A flimsy curtain separates memory from imagination. Suggestions, strong and subtle, can make people believe that they had experiences in childhood that they almost certainly did not have.

WILLIAM CALVIN: Yes, we've long known how false memories can be created. Human memory is always having to contend with the power of suggestion. After all, most happenings aren't "good stories" that fit our narrative expectations, so with retelling they get "improved."

EL: But who is most susceptible to "adopting" a memory? And who is most resistant? There ought to be a lot of individual variability in the susceptibility to false memories. Maybe it correlates with genetics, intelligence and other individual differences. Perhaps we'll develop recipes for what works with various personality types.

WC: Who am I, if not my memories--and if they're not mine, what does that say about me? It must be threatening to a lot of people, to think that their memories aren't their own.

EL: Memory is creative. There, I've said it all.

WC: But human memory isn't supposed to be creative. Facts are facts, and the past is finished. So when memory scrambles things, you get annoyed.

EL: I was very annoyed when my laptop's RAM started to shuffle the files on my hard disk. I was amazed that it could be fixed, just by removing the memory.

WC: You might think that computer memory would be a useful analogy for how human memory works. And, to some extent, it is. At first, human memory seems to be a lot like the computer's three versions: type-ahead buffer, RAM and hard disk. We, too, have a sensory buffer called immediate memory, usually seen as a ghostly image of a flashbulb, rather like the keyboard's type-ahead buffer. And we also have working memory, part of which is a short-term memory store much like the computer's RAM. It is also as volatile, because its contents can be lost following a concussion or seizure. The "consolidation" of episodic human memories is a lot like transferring files from RAM to a new file on the hard disk. In humans, the process takes days or weeks to complete, most likely because you have to strengthen synapses into a new pattern.

EL: Unfortunately, the analogy ends there. And, as the adage says, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

WC: The big difference is that the human brain has no pigeonholes for data, like RAM. Human memory is cluttered. Memories don't get lost so much as they become distorted or hard to find. We may like to say that we've lost something--but often, an hour later, it pops uninvited into our consciousness, where it has been lurking all along. The serious difference between computer and human memory is that we don't pop out a pristine copy of the original event, the way a computer does. Instead, we reconstruct things as best we can from all the clutter. We guess. Often that isn't good enough, especially for a fair judicial process. Or just one's self respect, it's embarrassing to be badly wrong and we'll deny an error even to ourselves.

EL: Twenty years ago, I tried predicting memory's future. It was back in the days before eyewitness fallibility and "recovered" memories became the stuff of courtroom contests. I imagined a future world in which people could go to a special kind of psychologist or psychiatrist--a memory doctor--and have their memories modified. Little did I know.

WC: Just shows you that expertise does not equal foresight. Even you didn't foresee who the "memory doctors" of today would turn out to be, or how reckless they'd become. Or how our own state legislature would pave the way for them. Washington state was the first to waive the statute of limitations for "recovered memories" during the do-something panic over child abuse.