absolve us of all responsibility for our failures and incompetence. The reason we are so screwed up is because our parents screwed us! How accurate and reliable is memory? We're often wrong in thinking we accurately remember things. Studies on memory have shown that we often construct our memories after the fact, that we are susceptible to suggestions from others that help us fill in the gaps in our memories of certain events. (Hyman, Jr., Husband & Billings, 1995) That is why, for example, a police officer investigating a crime should not show a picture of a single individual to a victim and ask if the victim recognizes the assailant. If the victim is then presented a line up and picks out the individual whose picture the victim had been shown, there is no way of knowing whether the victim is remembering the assailant or the picture. Another interesting fact about memory is that studies have shown that there is no significant correlation between the subjective feeling of certainty a person has about memory and that memory being accurate. Also, contrary to what many believe, hypnosis does not aid memory's accuracy because subjects are extremely suggestible while under hypnosis. (Loftus, 1980) It is possible to create false memories in people's minds by suggestion. The mind does not record every detail of an event, but only a few features; we fill in the rest on what "must have been." For an event to make it to long term storage, a person has to perceive it, encode it and rehearse it --tell about it-- or it decays. (This seems to be the major mechanism behind childhood amnesia, the fact that children do not develop long term memory until roughly age three.) Otherwise, research finds, even emotional experiences we are sure we will never forget --the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger explosion-- will fade from memory, and errors will creep into the account that remain.(Travis, 1993) Research articles and court testimony confirm the wi...
