Following Stephen's account of a false memory of his own, here's one of mine. When I was in my 20s a friend of mine (A) and I decided to play a childish joke on friend B, who taught English as a foreign language in the same College. Friend A wrote a letter purporting to be from an old student of B's, thanking him for having taught him English so good [sic] and full of appalling blunders of spelling and grammar. (To add flavour to the joke, friend A smeared some garlic on the letter to make it authentically from a foreign student - I said it was a childish joke.)
At the time I shared a flat with friend B, and years later my memory was that I recalled him opening the letter in our shared kitchen, and turning to me and saying something like, Is this some kind of joke of yours? Friend A said, no, friend B opened the letter in the staff common room at our College. Now I had an image in my mind of B and myself in the kitchen when he was opening the letter, but on reflection realised A must have been right, because he wouldn't have sent the letter to B's home address (which the purported student wouldn't have been in a position to know) but to the College address. So it's almost certain that my image of friend B opening the letter in our kitchen is false, a combination of the incident occurring at our College and numerous occasions we talked in the kitchen. (The alternative possibility is that friend A had a false memory. We'd lost touch with B by then so were unable to get his version.) Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London http://www.esterson.org ***************************************************** Subject: Re: False memories From: [email protected] Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2009 09:54:11 -0500 On 17 Jan 2009 at 1:45, Allen Esterson wrote: > Chris's link to the Mind Hacks website led to my following their link to > "Remembering", which brought up a rather charming short illustration of > how one's false memories can feel true. > > "One of the delicious ironies of memory is that, even when our > recollections are utterly false, they still feel true. Consider this > wonderful tale from the upcoming season of This American Life": > > http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/05/false_memory.php Just as the blogger claimed, this is truly wonderful. Thank you, Allen. It shows that sometimes an anecdote is more than just an anecdote, it's a proof of principle. If I may add my own little story of false memory: I read the [also] wonderful book _The Kite Runner_. Then I saw the film, which I also greatly enjoyed, especially the scenes showing the sweep of the landscape, the desolate beauty of Afghanistan, the kite flying, and the grim, vivid details of the climactic event (which I won't tell, just in case there are any unfortunates who haven'n seen or read it yet). Then it came to TV, and my wife said "Let's watch it". I said, "No, we've already seen it." We argued about this, my wife claiming that we had not. We watched it again. As I watched it, I realized...no, I hadn't yet seen the film, despite my vivid visual images of it. I had only read the book. Stephen --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
