TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102891/1028360.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 11.1 KB | 226 lines

                                                                                BEHAVIOR, Page 86

When Can Memories Be Trusted?


The remembrance of things past can be a mysterious process, with
realities and myths blending into a vivid picture

By ANASTASIA TOUFEXIS -- Reported by Ann Blackman/Washington,
Barbara Dolan/Chicago and D. Blake Hallanan/San Francisco


    Less than two weeks ago, Americans were spellbound before
their television sets, watching Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas
clash over their recollections of events a decade past. The
Senate Judiciary Committee hearings are still fresh in our
minds, but how many of us remember exactly what the two
adversaries said, what they wore, the expressions on their faces
and the tone of their voices? And 10 years from now, when we
think back, how faithful will our memories be? Will we remember
Hill's tears at one particularly painful disclosure of sexual
harassment, and Thomas thumping the table as he decried the
hearing as a high-tech lynching of an uppity black?

    Those with sharp memories will have noticed two errors in
the preceding paragraph: Hill's voice may have sometimes
wavered, but she never cried, and Thomas may have thundered with
his voice but never with his fist. Even if memory fails to
retain these details, how many Americans will accurately retain
the essence of the events? Will our memories reflect the truth?

    Psychologists and lawyers are finding that more and more
cases turn on the question of how reliable memory is. Last
November in Redwood City, Calif., George Franklin was convicted
of killing an eight-year-old girl in 1969; the case was based
largely on the testimony of his daughter Eileen Franklin-Lipsker,
who had repressed the memory of her playmate's murder for 20
years. This month in Pittsburgh, Steven Slutzker is scheduled to
go on trial for the 1975 fatal shooting of John Mudd Sr.
Slutzker was charged after the victim's son, who was 5 when his
father died, claimed he had a flashback memory of the murder.

    Fueling the debate over the certainty of memory has been
the parade of men and women -- among them Roseanne Arnold and
former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur -- with newly surfaced
recollections of being sexually abused as children. Many of the
victims are suing their alleged molesters, including parents,
relatives and therapists. Paula Pfiefle of Monroe, Wash., this
spring received $1.4 million from her church-run school in
settlement of her claim that a teacher repeatedly raped and
sodomized her two decades ago. As is often the case with
repressed memories, the events came flooding back during an
emotional, evocative moment. For Pfiefle, it was while making
love to her husband on their wedding night five years ago.

    The validity of such memories has divided psychological
and legal circles. "By and large, long-term memory is extremely
credible," maintains Jill Otey, a Portland, Ore., attorney
whose office receives five calls a week from women saying they
have suddenly remembered childhood abuse. "I find it highly
unlikely that someone who can remember what pattern was on the
wallpaper and that a duck was quacking outside the bedroom
window where she was molested by her father when she was four
years old is making it up. Why in the hell would your mind do
this?" Reflecting that faith, at least a dozen states since 1988
have amended their statute of limitations for bringing charges
to allow for delayed discovery of childhood sexual abuse.

    People -- not to mention juries -- place unwavering trust
in the human ability to recall events, especially those that
have had a strong emotional impact. But such confidence is
often misplaced. "Our memory is not like a camera in which we
get an accurate photograph," says psychologist Henry Ellis of
the University of New Mexico.

    Consider the Challenger explosion. As with the
assassination of John F. Kennedy, most people claim to remember
where they were when they heard the news of the shuttle
disaster. Ulric Neisser, a psychologist at Emory University,
tested that assumption. The day after the 1986 accident he asked
106 students to write down how, when and where they learned the
news. Three years later, he tracked down nearly half the group
and asked them to describe their memories of the explosion.
Though many claimed to recall it clearly, "often the memories
were completely wrong," says Neisser. Many students said they
had received the news from television, though they had actually
heard it elsewhere.

    Memory is a complicated physiological phenomenon that is
only slowly being deciphered. "Everything we are is based on
what we are taught, experience and remember," says neurosurgeon
Howard Eisenberg of the University of Texas Medical Branch in
Galveston. "Yet there's no universally accepted theory of how
memory works." Some activities, like remembering a number looked
up in the telephone directory, are retained for only a brief
time. Soon after you dial the number, the brain discards this
"working memory."

    But other, more momentous events make a biochemical
impression in the brain, specifically in a middle portion known
as the hippocampus. To file them away permanently, the
hippocampus shunts the elements of the experience -- the sounds,
smells and sights -- through a network of nerve cells to
different areas of the brain. "It's a whole cascade of
processes, physiological and chemical, that sensitizes the
neurons to transmit messages," notes Mortimer Mishkin, chief of
the neuropsychology laboratory of the National Institutes of
Health. The proper stimulus, say, a whiff of a perfume or a
glimpse of a familiar place, trips the relay, firing the neurons
and bringing a past event to consciousness.

    Disease, alcoholism or an injury to the brain can prevent
an experience from being imprinted into the neural network. The
Central Park jogger has no memory of being attacked, say
neurologists, not because she repressed the event but because
her injured brain never had a chance to physically create the
memory.

    One of the many controversies concerning memory is how far
back people can remember. TV star Roseanne Arnold, for example,
claims that she has a vivid memory of being sexually abused as
an infant by her mother. This summer Tina Ullrich, 36, a Chicago
design-firm executive, abruptly recalled images from her infancy
of her grandfather sexually molesting her while he changed her
diapers. "I didn't have any words to describe the experience,
so I began drawing my feelings," says Ullrich, who has created
35 surreal pictures. But many researchers are skeptical of such
early recall. Most people's earliest clear recollections date
back to around age 4 or 5. Before that, they believe, the mind
holds at best primitive pictures but no coherent memory. "Under
a year, a child doesn't have the mental structure to understand
how events hang together," says Neisser. "I wouldn't give you
a nickel for memory in the first year of life."

    Memory's workings are equally complex on the psychological
level. "We see things in a context. We select what we observe,
and then we may distort that for a purpose," says
neuropsychiatrist David Spiegel of Stanford University. Events
can be altered, even as they occur, simply through lack of
attention. What is not seen, heard or smelled will not register
in the brain. For example, a man might remember being introduced
to a woman he finds attractive, but she might not have any
memory of him if she did not consider him appealing.

    Experiences can be altered as they are hauled out of
memory. Remembering is an act of reconstruction, not
reproduction. During the process, normal gaps and missing
details often get filled in. When Senators asked law professor
Joel Paul to describe how Hill sounded years ago when she first
told him about being sexually harassed by Thomas, Paul hesitated
and then said Hill had sounded embarrassed. "He could have been
falling back on a scripted memory of how he would expect someone
to act in that circumstance," explains psychologist Douglas
Peters of the University of North Dakota. On the other hand,
experts are not the least bit disturbed because Hill's story
grew and became more detailed as the hearings proceeded.
Remembering incidents is an accretion process, psychologists
say, and one image evokes another.

    Memory integrates the past with the present: desires,
fantasies, fears, even mood can shade the recollection. People
have a tendency to suppress unpleasant experiences and embellish
events to make themselves feel more important or attractive.
"Some of us like to see ourselves in a rosier light," observes
psychologist Elizabeth Loftus of the University of Washington,
"that we gave more to charity than we really did, that we voted
in the last election when we really didn't, that we were nicer
to our kids than we really were."

    Loftus, co-author of Witness for the Defense (St. Martin's
Press; $19.95) and an expert witness on memory in the cases
involving the McMartin Preschool, Oliver North and the Hillside
Strangler, speculates that such prestige-enhancing revisionism
by Thomas could be one explanation for why his memory differs
so radically from Hill's. Thomas is a "rigid person who insisted
on the prerogatives of his position," observes Emory's Neisser;
such people can be "good repressers" of unpleasant memories. As
for Hill, Loftus suggests that it is possible she unconsciously
confused some past experiences. "Could she have gotten the
information elsewhere and created this story?" asks Loftus.

    Suggestion is a potent disrupter of truth, as Jean Piaget
once noted. The renowned child psychologist wrote that for
years he recounted the memory of how his nurse foiled an attempt
to kidnap him from his carriage when he was two years old. But
years later, the retired nurse sent his parents a letter saying
she had made up the incident to impress her employers. The
young Piaget had heard the story so often that he had created
his own memory of the event.

    In the same vein, witnesses can be led astray --
intentionally or inadvertently -- by the questions posed by
police or lawyers. "If you ask a person who has just witnessed
an accident how fast the green car was going when it slammed
into the parked UPS truck, you have said it was a green car,"
notes Peters. Chances are the witness will declare that the car
was green even if it was blue. Critics charge that misleading
questions as well as the publicity given childhood sexual abuse
frequently plant the idea of molestation in the minds of
susceptible children and adults, though no abuse has taken
place.

    Alas, there is no easy way to distinguish fact and fiction
in many memories. The best method is to find corroborating
evidence, from witnesses or written records, say, diaries or
hospital charts, that can document the event. Years from now,
videotapes of the Hill-Thomas hearings may verify the sights and
sounds of their testimony, but the heart of their dispute is
likely to remain unresolved. Whose memory told the truth?