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Reconstructive Memory
Feb. 8th, 2005 02:36 amSince Nineweaving asked about my work:
You've got to begin somewhere. I started life as a misanthrope, without much sympathy or appreciation for my species—indeed, without much certainty that I was really one of them. Over the years, as I've practiced both my art and my science, I’ve come to love my species in the way that one can only love someone with a full understanding of their flaws. Both writing and psychology, in their own way, are fundamentally about feeling that way about humanity. Like the best characters, our weaknesses are inseparable from our strengths.
Our memories inform every other aspect of our cognition. What you do, every moment, is informed by what you did before, or what was done to you. Rather, it's informed by your recollection of this, which is not the same thing. When you encounter the world, only some of what you sense and think is recorded. There are fuzzy spots, missing pieces, and times when you were simply looking the other way. However, we are, as I tell my freshmen, meaning-making machines. Another way of saying this is that we are story-making machines. We want our memories to form a cohesive, interesting narrative—one that not only acts as a useful guide to what may happen next, but that has us as the protagonist. To this end, we fill in the blanks, reconstructing what seems most plausible or desirable in them. We rewrite other parts, based on what experience or wishful thinking tells us ought to be the case, or on the beliefs we expect to find evidence for, or on what our friends remember about the same incident. This last part allows us to construct cohesive narratives at a societal level—vital for holding the tribe together, but dangerous when the narrative says (as it usually does) that our tribe is the best, bravest, and most noble of all the tribes in the world.
When I first describe this process to people, many of them think that this sounds like a problem—that eidetic memory would be a much better idea. Of course, if we created a perfect record of our sensory impressions, uncolored by inference or rumor or emotion, there would be some definite advantages. The logarithmic table that you were forced to memorize in high school would be available to you eternally, and even after a bad break-up, it would be just as easy to recall the good times as the bad times. The problem is that the processes and structures that cause memory to work this way are the same ones that allow us to draw inferences in other circumstances. This game of "fill-in-the-blanks" is at work when you recognize that the voice on the phone is your lover, and can picture her exact expression as she talks to you. It's at work when a scientist sees a falling apple and thinks of an equation to explain it. It's at work when you look for your parked car, and recognize it by the rear bumper poking out from behind the SUV. It's at work when a writer makes a new story out of the composted bits of childhood and half-remembered dreams and the drunk who was ranting about Kennedy on the streetcorner last week. Every imaginative process is dependent on the imperfection of our memories, and the ways we compensate for it.
More specifically: The parts of this that I focus on are the bits where I talk about desire and wishful thinking and prior belief. I look at how we rewrite the world to make it more like we want it to be. My early work shows how people sometimes remember that they learned information they want to be true from sources that are usually right (even if they didn't), and information they don’t want to be true from sources that are usually wrong (even if they didn't). In moderation, this sort of error can be a good thing—optimism is often self-fulfilling. However, sometimes it can lead to lousy decision-making, because you’re acting on a false model of the world.
My pet project at the moment is source credibility judgments—i.e., how do you decide that the New York Times is more trustworthy than the National Enquirer (or, depending on your preferences, that Indymedia is more trustworthy than the New York Times)? Why can't your grandmother (by which I mean, my grandmother) tell that Publisher’s Clearinghouse sweepstakes notes are *not* trustworthy? Eventually, I want to find ways to train people to be better at this, so that a cancer patient researching the latest findings on the web, or my grandmother, can tell good information from scams.
Ideally, I'd say the ultimate goal of psychology is the cure for human stupidity. I'm not at all certain, given what I said above, that it's likely or even desirable that we'll actually reach it, but I believe in the value of impossible goals. Reaching for this one makes it that much more likely that we'll survive our weaknesses long enough to fully enjoy our strengths.
You've got to begin somewhere. I started life as a misanthrope, without much sympathy or appreciation for my species—indeed, without much certainty that I was really one of them. Over the years, as I've practiced both my art and my science, I’ve come to love my species in the way that one can only love someone with a full understanding of their flaws. Both writing and psychology, in their own way, are fundamentally about feeling that way about humanity. Like the best characters, our weaknesses are inseparable from our strengths.
Our memories inform every other aspect of our cognition. What you do, every moment, is informed by what you did before, or what was done to you. Rather, it's informed by your recollection of this, which is not the same thing. When you encounter the world, only some of what you sense and think is recorded. There are fuzzy spots, missing pieces, and times when you were simply looking the other way. However, we are, as I tell my freshmen, meaning-making machines. Another way of saying this is that we are story-making machines. We want our memories to form a cohesive, interesting narrative—one that not only acts as a useful guide to what may happen next, but that has us as the protagonist. To this end, we fill in the blanks, reconstructing what seems most plausible or desirable in them. We rewrite other parts, based on what experience or wishful thinking tells us ought to be the case, or on the beliefs we expect to find evidence for, or on what our friends remember about the same incident. This last part allows us to construct cohesive narratives at a societal level—vital for holding the tribe together, but dangerous when the narrative says (as it usually does) that our tribe is the best, bravest, and most noble of all the tribes in the world.
When I first describe this process to people, many of them think that this sounds like a problem—that eidetic memory would be a much better idea. Of course, if we created a perfect record of our sensory impressions, uncolored by inference or rumor or emotion, there would be some definite advantages. The logarithmic table that you were forced to memorize in high school would be available to you eternally, and even after a bad break-up, it would be just as easy to recall the good times as the bad times. The problem is that the processes and structures that cause memory to work this way are the same ones that allow us to draw inferences in other circumstances. This game of "fill-in-the-blanks" is at work when you recognize that the voice on the phone is your lover, and can picture her exact expression as she talks to you. It's at work when a scientist sees a falling apple and thinks of an equation to explain it. It's at work when you look for your parked car, and recognize it by the rear bumper poking out from behind the SUV. It's at work when a writer makes a new story out of the composted bits of childhood and half-remembered dreams and the drunk who was ranting about Kennedy on the streetcorner last week. Every imaginative process is dependent on the imperfection of our memories, and the ways we compensate for it.
More specifically: The parts of this that I focus on are the bits where I talk about desire and wishful thinking and prior belief. I look at how we rewrite the world to make it more like we want it to be. My early work shows how people sometimes remember that they learned information they want to be true from sources that are usually right (even if they didn't), and information they don’t want to be true from sources that are usually wrong (even if they didn't). In moderation, this sort of error can be a good thing—optimism is often self-fulfilling. However, sometimes it can lead to lousy decision-making, because you’re acting on a false model of the world.
My pet project at the moment is source credibility judgments—i.e., how do you decide that the New York Times is more trustworthy than the National Enquirer (or, depending on your preferences, that Indymedia is more trustworthy than the New York Times)? Why can't your grandmother (by which I mean, my grandmother) tell that Publisher’s Clearinghouse sweepstakes notes are *not* trustworthy? Eventually, I want to find ways to train people to be better at this, so that a cancer patient researching the latest findings on the web, or my grandmother, can tell good information from scams.
Ideally, I'd say the ultimate goal of psychology is the cure for human stupidity. I'm not at all certain, given what I said above, that it's likely or even desirable that we'll actually reach it, but I believe in the value of impossible goals. Reaching for this one makes it that much more likely that we'll survive our weaknesses long enough to fully enjoy our strengths.
