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I don't normally read the Family section of The Guardian on Saturdays. I'm afraid that I am usually put off by the typical front-page story as seen today -- that of a 52-year-old woman who has never, yes, never, lived alone. Unsurprisingly, now that the last of the children has fled to independence, she feels maudlin. But what did she expect, when she has probably spent her entire life only defining herself in terms of other people? I think that, just as there are millions of us who are looked down on because we have spent so much time living alone that we probably couldn't manage living in any other way, so there are an equal number of millions who are completely incapable of relying solely on their own company of an evening.
I see many guys like this. A relationship breaks up, and they are in another one within three months, which quite often (to the outsider) is impossible to distinguish from the previous relationship. This is often described as a positive "move forward", but far too often I get the feeling that it's motivation is negative, an absolute desperate urge to get away from finding themselves alone of an evening. The person who can't live alone is no better nor worse than the person who can't live with anyone. Both end up making mistakes for all the wrong reasons.
This morning, perhaps because I made myself delve into The Guardian before I went to the Financial Times, I had a glance through the Family section, and I found an interesting piece on memory. A man had no childhood memories of his mother, despite the fact that he was 23 when she died, after a seven-year battle with breast cancer.
He did some research into the possible causes of this and found that, even if we do have strong memories of childhood, there are good chances that they are false. In a 1,600-strong survey, 20% of people had childhood memories that could be proved to be false.
But our subject, quite refreshingly, I thought, said that he would quite like some memories, even if they were inventions of his own brain.
So they tried "contextualisation" -- the technique used in crime cases where reconstruction is used to "jog" people's memories. My theory here is that the memory that is "jogged" is just as likely to be false as it is to be accurate. So you get a situation where a witness remembers something that didn't happen.
People place far too much reliance on two things, our memory and our sight. The eye is quite definitely not a camera, and the brain is not a hard disk. In fact the reality that we "see" is a quite remarkable feat of invention on the part of the brain. How can a two-dimensional picture (e.g., a photograph) be interpreted by our brain as a representation of a three-dimensional event? Simple (or, rather, not so simple). Our brain "learns" to interpret it as such.
You've probably all heard of the gorilla walking across a basketball court and how many of the subjects of the experiment did not see the gorilla, because they were too busy counting the number of passes. What you perhaps might not know is that I think this experiment was also tried in real life (i.e., rather than watching a film of the event). When this happened, absolutely no-one missed the gorilla. This, I think, is a good example of how our translation of a two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional memory involves far more creativity on the part of the brain than we think.
And, once that "reality" is put into the brain, the way that it is stored is unreliable indeed. I'm as vulnerable as the next guy when it comes to fake memories. My one advantage is that I am aware of my own fallibility. Worryingly, our entire legal system places far more faith in people's memories and what they believed they saw. And the more "certain" the witness, the more weight they place on it.
But things are different for the kids of today. Many of us say how glad we are that we are not a child now, but I suspect that we oldies overstate the bad things which are happening in life (the mediocrities have taken over the world; the "safety-first" matriarchal tendencies are beating the "let's have fun even if it's a risk" patriarchal style; it's a big-brother world where conformity with the norm is valued more than is sparky individuality) and we understate the good things.
One of those good things, I think, is that very few children in the first world today will have to worry about false childhood memories, because so much of their life will have been recorded on film. Will adults today be able to "remember" far better when they were four, three, even two years old, simply because there will be a large number of videos of them at that age, which they will have watched again and again as they are growing up? My hunch is that they will. Repetition will imprint these events and the events surrounding them on the brain so that they remain into adulthood.
There are remarkably few photographs of me when I was young and, obviously, absolutely no moving images. As such my memories are already getting hazy, not just of my childhood, but of my 20s and 30s. A while ago someone started talking about an event which I had completely forgotten (a sawn-off banister in 39 Handforth Road because that was the only way to get a piano up to the first floor). Weirdly, I can remember a little African statuette that stood on the shelf opposite that (ex) banister better than I can remember the dead banister itself.
Part of the reason we forget so much of the past is, as the research to which I allude above found, because a large amount of our childhood is mundane, repeated, automatic stuff. When did I start wearing long trousers? I can't remember, although I remember hating having to wear short trousers "again" when I was in the first year of grammar school. When I was about five I had my adenoids seen to at a hospital on, I think, the Euston Road, but I only recall being most upset at being allocated a cot (I got a bed eventually), being allowed to go home earlier than some other children in the ward (because I didn't go outside when I had been told not to), being upset when my parents were leaving, and, most remarkably and most strongly, actually getting in a mini-cab to go home. I had never been in a mini-cab before, and it was a weirdly-shaped French car that I had seen before on the streets, but which I had never been inside.
So, here we have a fairly traumatic event in my life, and yet my memories of it are hazy in the extreme. Little wonder that I can't remember things like walking to school, or what I used to have for tea.
I kind of envy the kids of today that there will be a much more detailed record of their childhood and youth. For them, the past will always be present, while for me, most of it is in my head. And I know how unreliable my head is.
______________
I see many guys like this. A relationship breaks up, and they are in another one within three months, which quite often (to the outsider) is impossible to distinguish from the previous relationship. This is often described as a positive "move forward", but far too often I get the feeling that it's motivation is negative, an absolute desperate urge to get away from finding themselves alone of an evening. The person who can't live alone is no better nor worse than the person who can't live with anyone. Both end up making mistakes for all the wrong reasons.
This morning, perhaps because I made myself delve into The Guardian before I went to the Financial Times, I had a glance through the Family section, and I found an interesting piece on memory. A man had no childhood memories of his mother, despite the fact that he was 23 when she died, after a seven-year battle with breast cancer.
He did some research into the possible causes of this and found that, even if we do have strong memories of childhood, there are good chances that they are false. In a 1,600-strong survey, 20% of people had childhood memories that could be proved to be false.
But our subject, quite refreshingly, I thought, said that he would quite like some memories, even if they were inventions of his own brain.
So they tried "contextualisation" -- the technique used in crime cases where reconstruction is used to "jog" people's memories. My theory here is that the memory that is "jogged" is just as likely to be false as it is to be accurate. So you get a situation where a witness remembers something that didn't happen.
People place far too much reliance on two things, our memory and our sight. The eye is quite definitely not a camera, and the brain is not a hard disk. In fact the reality that we "see" is a quite remarkable feat of invention on the part of the brain. How can a two-dimensional picture (e.g., a photograph) be interpreted by our brain as a representation of a three-dimensional event? Simple (or, rather, not so simple). Our brain "learns" to interpret it as such.
You've probably all heard of the gorilla walking across a basketball court and how many of the subjects of the experiment did not see the gorilla, because they were too busy counting the number of passes. What you perhaps might not know is that I think this experiment was also tried in real life (i.e., rather than watching a film of the event). When this happened, absolutely no-one missed the gorilla. This, I think, is a good example of how our translation of a two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional memory involves far more creativity on the part of the brain than we think.
And, once that "reality" is put into the brain, the way that it is stored is unreliable indeed. I'm as vulnerable as the next guy when it comes to fake memories. My one advantage is that I am aware of my own fallibility. Worryingly, our entire legal system places far more faith in people's memories and what they believed they saw. And the more "certain" the witness, the more weight they place on it.
But things are different for the kids of today. Many of us say how glad we are that we are not a child now, but I suspect that we oldies overstate the bad things which are happening in life (the mediocrities have taken over the world; the "safety-first" matriarchal tendencies are beating the "let's have fun even if it's a risk" patriarchal style; it's a big-brother world where conformity with the norm is valued more than is sparky individuality) and we understate the good things.
One of those good things, I think, is that very few children in the first world today will have to worry about false childhood memories, because so much of their life will have been recorded on film. Will adults today be able to "remember" far better when they were four, three, even two years old, simply because there will be a large number of videos of them at that age, which they will have watched again and again as they are growing up? My hunch is that they will. Repetition will imprint these events and the events surrounding them on the brain so that they remain into adulthood.
There are remarkably few photographs of me when I was young and, obviously, absolutely no moving images. As such my memories are already getting hazy, not just of my childhood, but of my 20s and 30s. A while ago someone started talking about an event which I had completely forgotten (a sawn-off banister in 39 Handforth Road because that was the only way to get a piano up to the first floor). Weirdly, I can remember a little African statuette that stood on the shelf opposite that (ex) banister better than I can remember the dead banister itself.
Part of the reason we forget so much of the past is, as the research to which I allude above found, because a large amount of our childhood is mundane, repeated, automatic stuff. When did I start wearing long trousers? I can't remember, although I remember hating having to wear short trousers "again" when I was in the first year of grammar school. When I was about five I had my adenoids seen to at a hospital on, I think, the Euston Road, but I only recall being most upset at being allocated a cot (I got a bed eventually), being allowed to go home earlier than some other children in the ward (because I didn't go outside when I had been told not to), being upset when my parents were leaving, and, most remarkably and most strongly, actually getting in a mini-cab to go home. I had never been in a mini-cab before, and it was a weirdly-shaped French car that I had seen before on the streets, but which I had never been inside.
So, here we have a fairly traumatic event in my life, and yet my memories of it are hazy in the extreme. Little wonder that I can't remember things like walking to school, or what I used to have for tea.
I kind of envy the kids of today that there will be a much more detailed record of their childhood and youth. For them, the past will always be present, while for me, most of it is in my head. And I know how unreliable my head is.
______________
