Nothing is as responsible for the good old days as a bad memory. Anatole France

Elephants remember a person who harmed them and if they meet him after years, they know how to repay him. While reading The Illusion of Memory by Julia Shaw1, it occurred to me that this may be because they do not burden the memory with noise, because they never narrate it. But it could all be otherwise, as is often the case in the world.

What exactly caused the bad memories of Eileen Franklin to awaken after twenty years, so that she reported that her father had murdered her friend in 1969, is difficult to ascertain today. Her father was convicted because the jury believed the witness2, but a debate erupted among psychologists, physiologists, and psychotherapists that sparked a wave of experiments seeking answers to questions concerning the possibilities of human memory, especially its reliability.

Scientists soon discovered that human memory is not only cruelly unreliable with regard to experienced realities, but that it can be tricked so that memories of things that never happened can be inserted into it. And these need not be just innocent events, but perhaps the fact that someone committed a robbery in their adolescence, for which they had serious trouble with the police and the courts.

These experiments began in the 1990s, innocently at first. Researchers approached the parents of a test subject, who was at that time somewhere between 20 and 30 years old, and learned about some probably emotionally more strongly charged experiences from when their subject was five to six years old, for example, a visit to the zoo, a circus, a steamboat trip, etc. Then to these authentic events they added one fictitious one, about how their test subject got lost in a department store before Christmas. The subject then repeated week after week what they recalled, details multiplied and certainty grew, and when they learned that one memory was not based on truth, they often did not choose correctly in identifying it. When the department store was identified as false, they defended it with all their energy. Almost like our Mr. President's non-existent Peroutka article about the gentleman Hitler.

Since the 1990s, several interesting books devoted to this topic have been published3,4,5; the publication discussed here is the work of a British forensic psychologist published last year in London. It covers everything from the basics of physiology (calpains and prions in forming memory traces, why sleeping pills worsen memory) to models and experiments from social psychology (conformity with the group), mainly the extent to which we can or cannot rely on our memory, to what extent our past belongs to us as we remember it, and to what extent it is better to just write everything down to be safe.

It must be said that viewing memory mechanisms through so-called common sense is completely misguided, that the brain works entirely differently from a computer, from a camera, even differently from a copier. The idea that memory is some kind of stable entity is mistaken. From the very beginning, when we store fragments of reality not according to importance, but mainly according to an emotional key and also according to what we manage (or fail) to capture from reality and in what quality. A high degree of emotional arousal can cause "appropriation" of a memory, as shown by the repeatedly cited case of elite journalist Brian Williams6, who during the Iraq War found himself in his imagination and later accounts in a helicopter that had been hit, although he was flying in a completely different one.

There is consensus today that it is impossible to recall memory traces from the first years of life, that is, memories from the maternity ward and the like, practically throughout the entire preverbal period. For the age up to six years, there are a few emotionally colored experiences. This does not mean that children do not remember, but that after several rounds of "pruning" of brain structures, most of the previous recordings, which would overwhelm us with their quantity and irrelevance, are deleted. Remembering everything is, in fact, extraordinarily disadvantageous, as exemplified by people suffering from hypermnesia. They also inform us that memory is not a single entity, because despite the fact that those affected remember what they did on June 8 five years ago, they forget phone numbers, deadlines, and other essential things of everyday life.

Inevitably, the question arises of how reliable recollection is in dynamic psychotherapy, how real the memories are, and how false and completely erroneous memories affect us in our experience and behavior. In this context, the author touched upon hypnosis, which she does not believe in because she has never succumbed to it. Despite the nullification of this phenomenon, hypnosis exists. That it does not work on someone is not an argument. But what definitely does not work is learning during sleep.

We discover the unreliability of memory not only over time, but also immediately, for example in identifying people, and the more we think we are reinforcing it by verbal reminding, the more unreliable it becomes. This, on the contrary, reduces its accuracy. This feature brings practical problems in the identification of suspects, and that mistaken identifications have repeatedly occurred is documented not only by the author. The main role – besides the inaccuracy of memory – is played here by the affective component.

Time everywhere digs with its evil nail, as the poet assures us, and its effect manifests itself on the memory trace even when it concerns experiences from a strongly charged emotional category such as: where were you on September 11, 2001? These, like traumatic experiences with the consequences of post-traumatic disorder, evoke the theme of dissociation, which the author takes as equivalent to depersonalization, which does not correspond to our conception of these two terms. Her criticism of treatment procedures for post-traumatic disorder is justified for a portion of patients – for a larger portion, on the contrary, current treatment by repeating the event that caused extreme stress is useful.

Mostly we overestimate our memory, I can sign off on that, and therefore it is very advantageous to write down necessary things (HOSIPA IKSITOP – a well-known acronym of the saying: HO... Remember, Even Though I'm Writing It Down), or to use my favorite method of mnemonic aids. Then rote learning is a much safer preservation than storing data in electronic extensions of our cognitive functions, which in fact suppress these functions. As is the attempt to do five things at once, which is fashionably called multitasking.

The book is a useful and well-written educational and demystifying publication, the translation is good except for minor issues (frequent use of English terms in the text, which is however a standard bad habit of today's times picked up from the nannies of the fashion police). What I would also like to read somewhere sometime is the issue of commemorative memory (the idea that our current reaction to an emotional state evoked by a memory is the true memory trace), I would be very interested in further opinions on the evolutionary significance of false memories, including recommendations on how to handle them, especially in psychotherapy, and also hypotheses about where memory traces from the first two years of life are stored, from the period when the attachment bond is formed between the newborn-infant-toddler and the mother, which is responsible for how secure the individual will feel with themselves and among other people, or how many psychopathic or neurotic traits they will carry from this period7.

Author: MUDr. Radkin Honzák, CSc.

1 Shawová J: The Illusion of Memory. False Memories and Why We Believe Them. Paseka, Prague, 2017 2 https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=3221su 3 Murdock M: Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory. Seal Press, Berkeley, 2003 4 Mlodinow L: Subliminal. How your unconscious mind rules your behavior. Vintage Books, New York, 2012 5 Levine PA: Trauma and memory. North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, 2015 6 http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/brian-williams-msnbc-11th-hour-trust-trump-1202597588/ 7 Hašto J: Attachment Bond, To the Roots of Love and Anxiety. Nakladatelstvo F, Trenčín, 2005