What Our Memories Tell Us About Ourselves
Do you remember the time President Obama
shook hands with Iranian president Ahmadinejad? If you took part in a recent psychological (心理學的) study, it’s possible that you will. More than 5,000 participants (參與者) were presented
(呈現) with doctored
(修改過的) photographs representing fabricated (偽造、杜撰) political
events, with around half claiming
(聲稱) to have memories for the false scenarios (Obama has, of course,
never shaken hands with the Iranian president). Part of a decades-long program
of research by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, the latest study provides a neat
demonstration of how our memories are created in the present rather than being
faithful records of the past.
The popular perception (認知) of memory
shows a considerable lag with the new scientific consensus (一致、論調). The
psychologists Daniel J. Simons and Christopher Chabris have conducted (實施) two large-scale surveys showing that roughly half of respondents (受試者) thought that memory works like a video recorder. And although many
people do recognize that their memories are fallible (容易犯錯的、不可靠的), there is
much less understanding of precisely
(精確的) how and why they fail us.
Memory is a system with many moving parts,
and thus many processes that can go wrong. The various ‘sins of memory’ (in
Daniel L. Schacter’s phrase) give us the best clues about how this complex
mental function works. Psychologist and neuroscientists have taken advantage of
these clues to explore the strong links between imagination and memory, to
demonstrate how social factors influence our recollections (回憶), and to
show how memory may actually have evolved to predict the future rather than
keep track of the past. There is arguably (可說是) little
evolutionary advantage to being able to recall the past in vivid detail; it is
much more useful to be able to use past experience to predict what comes next.
So why are we so attached (依附) to our idea of
memories as fixed, unchanging possession?
There are many reasons, but one is that memories are foundational for
our sense of self. This is particularly true for early childhood memories
(which the scientists tell us are the most unreliable of all). In her striking (引人注目的) description of lying as a small child in her cot (吊床) at St. Ives, Virginia Woolf noted that this wasn’t just her
earliest memory; it was the moment she became the person (and the writer) she
was. It is no wonder that we resist the idea that our memories are collages of disparate (不同的) sources of information, assembled (集合) and reassembled (重新集合) long after the event.
Bracing (令人振奮的) as it might be, this new way of
thinking about memory does not have to lead to self-doubt. It simply requires
that we take our memories with a pinch (一小搓) of salt, and forge (編造) new relationships with them. They may be a kind of fiction (虛構、想像的事), but the manner of their making speaks volumes about those who
create them. In the Obama-Ahmadinejad study, the researchers found that events were
more likely to be falsely recalled if they fit the individual’s political affiliations (聯繫) (conservatives were more likely than liberals to ‘remember’ the
Ahmadinejad handshake, for example). Whether the events happened or not, your biases (偏見) and beliefs shape the kind of memories you form, and thus reveal
the kind of person you are.
在這裡補充一些和文章有關的內容：
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:
伊朗現任總統，由於伊朗和美國外交上長期交惡，歐巴馬並沒有和他握過手。
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