THAT'S MEN:It had taken less than 36 hours for my mind to edit the memory, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN
ONE NIGHT recently I encountered a fox in the grounds of St James’s Hospital in Dublin and learned a lot about the unreliability of memory. As I recall, the fox was standing in front of a semicircle of bushes beside the ambulance park.
We eyed each other for a while. I got out my phone to take a picture and the fox trotted off into the bushes.
About 36 hours later I was walking through the hospital grounds in the daylight and I glanced over to look at the place where I had seen the fox.
The place wasn’t there. I walked up and down but couldn’t find that semicircle of bushes from which the fox had emerged and into which he or she later vanished. I could see a bicycle shelter beside a low hedge at the edge of the ambulance park but I was quite sure the fox had not been standing in front of a shelter.
I got my phone out again to look at the photograph I had taken and there was the fox and there was the bicycle shelter.
It had taken less than 36 hours for my mind to edit the memory. A bicycle shelter didn’t fit. Bushes did. Out with the shelter, in with the bushes.
The experience confirmed me in a recent resolution to stop using sentences that begin with the words “I remember”. It’s a phrase you use more often the older you get. Sometimes, I suspect, the “memory” I am inflicting on my listeners is one they have heard many times before.
And the worst of it is that the memory I am so enthusiastic to repeat probably never happened. For instance, I can see myself standing on the balcony of the Commodore Hotel in Cobh proposing to my wife. The sun is going down and we are overlooking the sea on a warm evening. On the other hand, my wife says I proposed to her in Kinsale and that my Cobh memory is a fantasy.
I am quite certain about Cobh but that doesn’t help at all. Studies show that people who are very sure of their memories can be just as mistaken as those who are unsure.
A memory is not like a photograph or a movie which you can take out and look at. Those psychologists who investigate such things suggest that the brain reconstructs the memory each time we recall it.
In that process a lot can change. Yes, I proposed to my wife in a seaside town on the south coast. But in the reconstruction process either her brain moved the event to Kinsale or my brain moved it to Cobh.
I am not alone in this. Eyewitness accounts are startlingly unreliable. In the US, 75 per cent of prisoners whose convictions have been overturned since DNA evidence became available had been wrongly identified by eyewitnesses.
So-called “flashbulb” memories such as (for the older generation) where you were when you heard President Kennedy had been shot, have also been shown to be unreliable. The memory changes over the years but the new, false memory “feels” right.
This is scary stuff. It means the life you think you have had so far – and, yes, I do mean you dear reader – did not happen. You have had a life and you had a childhood and you went to school and met people but the details have changed. For instance, that first kiss didn’t happen quite the way you think it happened. Your brain has been mixing and matching scenery, colours, sounds, emotions and whatever else it finds lying around every time you recall your cherished “memory”.
The past is, to that extent, an illusion.
Back to St James’s Hospital: is it possible my brain actually started editing the fox scene while I was still standing there?
If that is so, then even the present moment is an illusion.
Are we here at all?
Padraig O’Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Light Mind - Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas. His monthly mindfulness newsletter is available free by email.