The Woman Who Can't Forget by Jill Price Read Free Book Online

absentmindedness clears the way for our brains to be more creative, that the brain is working away on ideas while the mind seems to have checked out. I am never absentminded. I’ve never lost a single key. In fact I still have the house key my parents gave me when I was ten years old, which I used until I was thirty-seven, when we moved. I’ve never lost an ATM card or credit card, and I had the same driver’s license until I was twenty-seven, when I had to renew it. I never find my mind wandering in this way; to the contrary, it’s always crammed full of remembering. There are never times when the “film” isn’t running and I can focus exclusively on the present moment.
    One of the sins I find hardest to relate to is what Schacter calls blocking, which he describes as a tip-of-the-tongue feeling when you know you know something (like the name of an acquaintance or the answer to a trivia question) but you just can’t get it out. For the period of my strong memory, from when I was fourteen on, I don’t think I ever block the way he describes the sensation. Usually my memories come flying right out. For the earlier period when my memory was still developing, between about ages eight and fourteen, I sometimes have to think for a moment, but I don’t have that tip-of-the-tongue sensation as I’m working on it.
    Schacter calls these first three memory mechanisms “sins of omission.” The four others he calls “sins of commission,” which are a good deal trickier, even insidious. Misattribution is the sin when we remember doing things we didn’t do, or jumble up our memories, like remembering that a friend was at a party when in fact you saw her for dinner the week before that, or thinking you’ve told one friend something when in fact it was a different friend you shared that story with. If you’ve ever watched an old movie that you absolutely clearly remember starred Gregory Peck only to discover when the opening credits roll that it stars Cary Grant, you were misattributing.
    I found this a particularly intriguing distortion to read about, because I make note of the people in my life misattributing all the time and find it amazing, especially that they clearly really believe they’re remembering correctly. I’ve learned that I have to stop myself from correcting people in most cases, which I used to do a fair amount of as a child. In fact, one of the facts about memory that Schacter reports is that people tend to privilege their own memories for events over the recollections of others. Most of the people close to me in my life pretty much gave up on doing that with me a long time ago.
    It’s hard to fathom how people’s minds play this trick of misattributing, but an interesting theory about how autobiographical memories are recalled may go a long way toward explaining it. The theory is that our autobiographical memories are not stored all in one place in our brains; rather, we re-create them in an elaborate and delicate reconstruction process whereby different parts of an experience that have been filed away in different sections of our brains are pulled together again. This process is said to take up to 10 seconds, and it is vulnerable to errors. When we misattribute, we may be pulling together pieces of different experiences and fusing them into what seems to us to be a totally clear, accurate memory.
    One of the sins that is most appalling to me is related but different; Schacter calls it suggestibility. This is the creation in our minds of outright false memories, such as through others’ suggestions. The key is that the false recall comes from outside information, not from information stored away in our brains. Children are especially vulnerable to forming such false memories, as seen in a number of child abuse trials in which prosecutors unearth memories from children about sexual crimes that never happened. Not only is this false