"We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and re-categorized with every act of recollection."
- Oliver Sacks
There seems to be a great deal of controversy these days focused on believing or not believing the remembered experiences of people. And for those who are dealing with traumatic events in their past, this must be very frustrating to them. Frustrating indeed. For if we believe, or at least try to understand, what Dr. Sachs was saying in this quote, making any sense of the past should be viewed as problematic. To depend on what we have remembered many years ago has to be challenged by anyone who might have looked at what neuroscience has shown to be true.
Now I would never discount a memory with corroborating information about something that has happened in the past. With the new technologies of the hand-held phone that has every type of recording device on it, a memory can be called up many years later and reviewed by the person with audio and visual to support a claim. However, in my past it was unlikely that such evidence of support existed outside of those rare individuals who were consistent, dedicated, and truthful diarists.
Getting over the belief that human memory is somehow consistent with the working of a video recorder is something that needs to be considered if we are to fairly weigh and interpret memory. Leading psychologists such as Dr. Sachs have found that memories are reconstructed each time that they are "played' or recalled and that many fragments, like jigsaw puzzle pieces, are filled-in with convenient or inaccurate details.
So it is with great difficulty that I find myself doubting testimonials of those in an accusatory role as well of those who are denying accusations. In my humble opinion, trust should not be placed in people's memories when they are offering corroborating testimony as eyewitnesses as well. In these instances, we human beings are trying to reassemble what has been imprinted in a brains neurons. However, those neurons have been colored, altered and reinterpreted by life experience, trauma, physical changes, psychological impacts, and the list goes on.
The one time I sat on a jury it was one of the most awful experience in my life, and this was even before I put much thought in things like the reliability of memory.
So how will we judge or decide about a issue or person when faced with testimony relying on a human memory from the past. I don't have an easy answer. Go with the gut? I just don't know.
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