I mentioned in an earlier post that I had been a LiveJournal blogger many years ago. With a little help from a friend I re-discovered those old posts and came across one that puzzled me, Below is the post:
Jul. 8th, 2005 08:18 pm
This time next week I should be winging my way to the other side of the world for the first time ever. At this present moment I’m having an attack of nerves. Have managed to happily keep myself busy for the last week and have had no problem with nerves at all. And it’s taken about 24 hours for the shock of the London explosions to wear off. The reality of the thing has now risen to full consciousness. All of us in NZ know we’re lucky. We live on a set of temperate islands thousands of miles from the nearest landmass and we are neither economically nor strategically important enough for anyone to even really notice us. And we like it that way – it means we are relatively safe in these rocky times. And what do I have to go and do? I decide to go for a little wander to that side of the world in which all the big important countries wave to the heavens and yell “hey look everyone. Here we are ! Notice us!” And they do get noticed – boy do they get noticed! And what is really concerning – it makes no difference, I still want to go. Admittedly I have no plans to go to any big city anywhere but I’m still going to end up closer to hotspots than I would normally consider being. There’s this nutter pushing aside the sensible personalities saying “See, you thought you had escaped me all those years ago. Guess again chump, I’m still here and this time you are not going to stop me.” Oh well, c’est la vie.
And why did this puzzle me?
In my previous post, Snapshots of a Small City 1, I described the morning of the London bombings. When I wrote the essay in 2018 I had to search the net to remember what the date of those bombings was, I remembered that it was in July and in 2005 but I wasn’t able to remember the exact date. The 7/7 London bombings were – surprise, surprise – July 7 so I assumed that was what I was remembering from that long ago trip. Even when I wrote the piece in 2018 however, it seemed odd that I was in the US that early in July when I was under the impression that I had arrived there about mid-July. As it turns out, what I was remembering was not the 7/7 London bombings but the second, unsuccessful attempt at a bombing two weeks later. July 21
In one of the classes I teach we look at how accurate – or otherwise – our long term memories are. In that class we replicate a 1995 study by Roediger and McDermott in which students are shown six lists of words and are asked to recall as many words as possible after the list presentation. The words in each list are semantically related to each other. One such list contained the following words:
thread pin eye sewing sharp point prick thimble haystack thorn hurt injection syringe cloth knitting
Semantic relatedness means that within our memory these words are linked in some way. For example: ‘thread’ is related to ‘sewing’ as is ‘pin’ because both thread and pins are used when we sew. A pin is sharp and a thorn is sharp. We can get hurt if we are pricked by something sharp. This ability to find all sorts of relationships between things is very useful when we try to remember things but, it can also make it more likely that we will remember some things incorrectly.
In the final part of the experiment our students are shown words one at a time and asked to rate how confident they are that each word appeared in one of the six lists. About half the words are from the lists and about half are not but there were 6 words shown which, although they could have easily belonged to a list, were not actually members of the original lists. An example of one of these ‘lures’ is the word ‘needle’. Nearly every person who tries doing this experiment thinks they saw the word ‘needle’ in the list. Their own memory processes tricked them into creating a false memory.
The point is not that we have lousy memories it is rather that our memory doesn’t act like some sort of sound or video recorder, capturing everything about an event. We remember the important points of the event and when asked to recall the event later we reconstruct our memory of it based on those points. The important points are usually remembered well but to create a full bodied memory we add things. This was what happened to my memory of that day in Iowa CIty. In 2018 I clearly remembered staring silently at the TV with a group of fellow guests, I could even vaguely recall the layout of the breakfast room and the smell of, among other things, breakfast waffles, even after 13 years. I remembered that we were watching a news account of a bombing in London. I did not remember that it was the unsuccessful second bombing however. My memory reconstruction of that event was not accurate, I added information I found while writing that essay (the date of the 7/7 bombings) to my reconstruction of the Iowa City memory and in doing so the memory of the event ended up being shifted two weeks backwards in time. (By the way, I have edited the Iowa City essay in the interest of historical accuracy.)
The Science Attic 