In Zimbardo's book "General Psychology of Zimbardo", Zimbardo mentioned a story. About 20 years ago, a 12-year-old girl named Donna Smith began to suffer from migraine headaches. When Na's condition was evaluated, Donna first discovered that she had been sexually harassed by neighbors at this age. The evaluation concluded that the memory of the sexual harassment deep in Donna's mind was likely a significant cause of Donna's migraine. As a teenager, Donna began treatment with a new therapist. The therapist asked Dona if she had been sexually abused by her father. Lied and claimed her father had "touched" her, which she hoped would allow the treatment to continue. The therapist immediately reported the incident to the local police and social services. As a result, the father was taken away by the police and the family's financial situation collapsed. Her father was later released in court, and Donna moved to Michigan with her adoptive parents. When Donna moved away from the system that supported her story, she regained her sanity and the courage to tell the truth, and the family came together again. Here I am not going to discuss the challenges in life and spirit that the Dona family has faced since then, but I hope to use this to reflect on our memory: Is memory really faithful to the facts? P237
In fact, the reliability of memory has long been questioned. Peng Pinling said in "General Psychology": "In court trials, in many cases, judges and juries make judgments based on the testimony of eyewitnesses. It is generally believed that the testimony of eyewitnesses is correct and reliable, but Munsterberg (1927) found that different eyewitnesses would describe the same event differently, thereby expressing concern about the credibility of witness testimony in cases." P231 Akira Kurosawa's film "Rashomon" reproduces the variability of witness testimony in court trials in a cinematic way. As "Introduction" said: "The automatic combination of information leads to false memories, which is false memory (pseudo memory)." The variability of eyewitness testimony is the performance of false memory.
So, what causes false memories? Or how about distorting memory? I think it is necessary to briefly describe the formation of memory. The process of memory is roughly divided into three stages: sensory memory, working memory (short-term memory), and long-term memory. Sensory memory belongs to the perceptual stage and is the process of perceiving (receiving) information. Working memory is the process of encoding information, while long-term memory is the process of placing the encoded information. If you use an analogy, the process of memory is like storing books in the library, entering new books in the library, or returning books by readers. This can be regarded as sensory memory. The administrator classifies and encodes books, which belongs to working memory. The regular arrangement of encoded books is called long-term memory. Our memory is also the process of extracting book information.
Among the three stages of memory, the one that has the greatest impact on false memory is working memory, that is, there is a problem with the encoding process of information. "Introduction" says: "The automatic combination of information leads to unreal recall." In fact, the combination of information is not "automatic", but has a basis. Depending on the difference, the encoding method is different. Different, the resulting memory results are different. But what is the basis for the encoding of information? Scientists don't seem to have much research on it. It is mentioned in the Introduction that "an individual's memory is one's own construction or reconstruction of what happened." P369 This is also just to say that the encoding of information is always but not the reason why "one's construction" is What? How does it work? Instead, referring to Bartlett's (1932) "Ghost Wars" experiment, he mentioned: "The subject changes information in the memory process with the aim of making it more meaningful to him." P360 Zimbardo Referring to "Blocking: Distraction Leads to Forgetting": "Since long-term memory is organized in terms of meaning, it is often harder to remember a combination lock than a newsletter." P262 Zimbardo Both Huang Xiting and Huang Xiting mentioned the problem of "meaning", which is also the most common description of the problem of what information is encoded on.
Obviously, the basis of information coding in working memory cannot be ignored. The coding of information is carried out according to a certain "meaning", and we still need to know more about this "meaning". What is the nature of this meaning? What drives this "meaning"?
One definition of "meaning" in the dictionary is "function, value," which may be closer to the concept here. If we take the word "meaning" apart and understand it, "meaning" refers to an abstract concept, but also to thinking or spirit, while righteousness refers to the essence of things. Therefore, meaning is the understanding and knowledge of things that are closer to the essence, and when we talk about meaning from a personal point of view, this meaning refers to the person's understanding and knowledge of the world, and the person's final formation of this view of time. It can be seen that the same thing, due to different people, will eventually form different cognitions and understandings, and form different memories.
What, then, are the inner dynamics that create the different meanings? In vague terms, it can be said to be human instincts, such as survival, seeking advantages and avoiding disadvantages, sexual impulses, etc. This is the most basic psychological motivation of human beings. And this psychological motivation varies from person to person. This is why people remember only the aspects that they think are meaningful. Some people with poor memory are just not interested in related things, or the past is unbearable. A very simple analogy, if it is a party, everyone in the party takes a photo with a camera, the results of the photo must be very different, and when everyone recalls the event, it will probably be different.
Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon explores this distortion of memory. The movie is about a robber who kills a samurai and rapes the samurai's wife. The story is simple, but what makes this simple story puzzling is that the accounts of the event vary widely: the robber confessed to killing the samurai, fought the samurai, thought the samurai was a good man, and thought the samurai was the wife of the samurai Strong; in the eyes of the warrior's wife, he is innocent, and the husband looks at him with contempt; the warrior (in the mouth of the witch) tells another scene, the robber raped his wife in front of him. Immediately, he saw his wife turn to follow the robber, and asked the robber to kill him. He was very angry. At this time, the robber pushed the woman down and expressed disdain, and asked the samurai how to deal with her. The samurai forgave the robber, but could not tolerate his wife's viciousness. With a curse and resentment against her, the samurai grieved Pulling out the knife, he cut himself open and died. In the woodcutter's account, the samurai and the robber are cowardly and duel by women. The same event has great changes in the mouths of four different people. If you analyze it carefully, it is not difficult to find that these four people represent different identities, and the same event has different meanings for people with different identities. , and this different meaning determines their different memories of the same event.
For the memory of a certain event, due to the different meanings of the event to the parties, the following three situations will probably be caused: 1. Memory correction; 2. Memory erasure; 3. Memory reconstruction. And its intrinsic motivation is the avoidance of what happens. In fact, this can be said to be a self-protection mechanism, because what happens is generally a painful experience for the person involved, or the person should be held responsible for what happened. The movie "The Man Who Was Superman" is about a man who has gone through many blows in his life - his father died in a political campaign, his wife and children died in a car accident - the protagonist does not want to face what happened, so he corrects and erases In his memory, he came from aliens and was a superman. The film "Shutter Island" tells the story of a neurotic who shot a prisoner of war while serving, and later killed his wife and was sentenced for it, but was sent to a mental hospital for mental problems. Unwilling to face what had happened or take responsibility for his crimes, he corrects and reconstructs memories that are far from the truth.
It should be noted here that memory distortion occurs in almost everyone (because there is no relevant research, I can only say this), the difference is that the degree of distortion is different. The distortion of ordinary people's memory is relatively slight, and it does not have much impact on themselves and others, so it has not attracted widespread attention. Freud, however, took note of this problem, which he called everyday negligence, or negligent forgetting, such as not remembering someone's name, remembering something that was promised to someone, or not being able to find When it comes to something, the inner psychological motivation is not wanting to face someone, unwilling to do something promised to someone, and so on. This is actually still an avoidance. Like the descriptions of several parties in "Rashomon", this should be regarded as a slight distortion, and the unreliability of witness testimony is similar to this. The situation of the protagonists in "The Man Who Was Superman" and "Shutter Island" is more serious and morbid, accompanied by distortion of memory, usually with fantasy (sleep), and fantasy (sleep) is like this strong, so that the subject would equate to the truth. We commonly refer to this condition as delusional disorder, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
From this, it seems safe to say that memory is unreliable, and that memory tends to be distorted by events that mean different things to us, but now another problem: personally, we really need a Does the memory fully correspond to objective facts? Do we need to remember things that should be forgotten? Another question is: for those with more severe disease, help them re-face the unbearable reality, or let them continue to live in their own imaginary world? And this is exactly what the two films "The Man Once Superman" and "Shutter Island" leave people thinking.
Reference:
"General Psychology of Zimbardo" Zimbardo
"Introduction to Psychology" Huang Xiting
"General Psychology" Peng Danling
"Introduction to Psychoanalysis" Freud
View more about Rashomon reviews
