Justitia, Heemskerk
I wrote a blog two years ago titled
The Catch recalling a memory of over sixty years that occurred when I was a boy
playing in my first All Star baseball game.
And this memory has popped
up in my mind’s eye off and on all of my life. It wasn’t an experience that the
hundred or so other people who witnessed it were even aware of at the time. I
alone knew that it was special. I
don’t recall the exact time or place or much else about the game, including
whether we won or lost! I just mainly
remember the catch. Leonard Mlodinow has
written a book titled Subliminal about how our unconscious mind rules our
behavior. He covers some extraordinary
new research on how our behavior and memory function. Mlodinow notes that the unconscious tier of
our mind is more fundamental than our conscious mind and it is the standard infrastructure
in all vertebrate brains that ensures our survival and ability to pass along
critical DNA genes.
The human sensory system sends the
brain about eleven million bits of information each second. The actual amount of information we can
handle has been estimated to be fifty bits per second at most. Scientists estimate that we are conscious of
only about 5 percent of our cognitive function.
The majority goes beyond our awareness and makes our lives
possible. Even if our conscious mind is
idle, our unconscious mind is always active!
That’s why it’s always a good idea to "sleep" on a vexing problem and
awake with a solution. One of the most
important functions of our unconscious is processing data delivered by our eyes
and about a third of our brain is devoted to processing vision. We receive images in two dimensions and our unconscious
creates three dimensions. Many of us
know that these images arrive upside down and our brain presents them to us right
side up. But did you know that there’s a
blind spot right in the center of every image due to the connection between our
retina and our brain? However, the brain
fills in the dead region based on the surrounding area.
There is a correlation between how the
unconscious fills in the blanks for both our vision and our memories! But that begs the question of how much of the
result is accurate? This question has
far reaching implications for memory and eyewitness testimony. Mlodinow relates that “The organization
Innocence Project analyzed hundreds of people exonerated on the basis of
postconviction DNA testing and found 75 percent had been imprisoned because of
inaccurate eyewitness identification.
About seventy-five thousand police lineups take place each year and
statistics on those show that 20 to 25 percent of the time witnesses make a
choice that the police know is incorrect because these are ‘known innocents’
used to fill out the lineup.”
Our human memory system is far from
perfect, but it’s good enough to retain the deep structure or gist of a
situation and doesn’t let the surface structure which we only retain for
seconds get in the way. Later our
unconscious fills in the estimated details based on our experience. And if we
bring a certain memory up repeatedly over time, we begin to remember the memory,
not the original event. I’ve read that
we actually never recall the original event but our last memory of the event
which may by now be somewhat corrupted, as in eyewitness accounts.
Mlodinow
questions “Are we often wrong but never in doubt? We might all benefit from being less certain,
even when a memory seems clear and vivid.”
