The
phrase “I remember it like it was yesterday” becomes somewhat
meaningless when you realise that yesterday, like every other day
since the beginning of time, is gone forever – and therefore can't
be easily referred to for a quick fact-check.
One
of the first things they teach you when you become a copper (or so I
am told) is to take eyewitness accounts with a generous helping of
salt. This goes double for witnesses to an event that was both
entirely unexpected and began and ended within an extremely short
space of time. This can be largely explained through the concept of
schematic thinking – an idea that fascinated me in sixth form
psychology, and which I shall now explain to you in what is probably
a mangled and misinterpreted manner so heaving with irony, it just
might melt my laptop.
A
schema is sort of like one of those crossword solvers used by people
who miss the point of a crossword. For those of you who don't know
about crossword solvers,
they're programs and/or websites you can use to solve crossword
puzzles for you and, oh dear, I've probably encouraged a few of you
to use them. Anyway, the point is this. A crossword solver works by
taking what limited information you have – three letters from a six
letter word, say – and then using this to almost instantly present
you with one or more solutions to save you thinking. A schema will
similarly take limited information – perhaps scrappy memories, or
an unfamiliar sight or sound – and instantly fill in the gaps to
proffer some kind of understanding/solution. It does this,
essentially, by making it fit in with existing beliefs or experience.
This isn't a conscious process, which is where the trouble comes in.
To
go back to the idea of eyewitness reports, let's take the
hypothetical crime of a purse snatching in a busy shop. A dastardly
fiend snatches a bag from a woman's shoulder and makes good his
escape, grabbing his ill-gotten gains and leaving the shop all within
the space of less than five seconds. There are ten witnesses. Thanks
to schematic thinking, no two eyewitness accounts match exactly.
Eight witnesses say the bag was over the woman's right shoulder,
because they are right-handed; two witnesses say it was the left
shoulder, because they are left-handed. The bag itself was red, but
will be reported by some as blue, because the theft took place in a
section of the shop selling mostly blue bags. The criminal was clean
shaven, but is reported by four witnesses as having noticeable
stubble or the beginnings of a beard, because that's how dirty
purse-snatchers look, isn't it? The criminal was wearing smart shoes,
but six witnesses swear he was wearing black (or dark blue) trainers,
because he was running. And so on. I'm obviously just pulling these
numbers out of the air, but the principle rings true.
Tempting
as it is to explore how and why schemas are at the rotten core of
various prejudices (it's currently fashionable amongst racists, for
example, to consider certain terrorists representative of all
Muslims, while ignoring acts of heroism carried out by Muslims such
as those in the recent horrors of France and Tunisia), I don't want
to go off on too much of a tangent here. The point is that at a
fundamental level, we all have some of our memories and perceptions
subtly altered without our permission by a sort of internal editor.
An overzealous editor who wants to ensure that everything is
understood with no loose ends, in a way that doesn't challenge the
audience's expectations. On top of this, our memories can be
altered by other people – both intentionally and unintentionally.
If
life events act like cookie cutters, leaving clearly defined shapes
in our minds, then those shapes are cut from an extremely malleable
clay that never hardens. I'll leave the explanation of this to an
expert. There's a brilliant Ted Talk by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus
that I strongly recommend you watch. It will take less than eighteen
minutes of your time, and will open your eyes to just how fragile the
accuracy of human memory is.
Wandering
back to the idea of memory and the legal system; results from
polygraph (so called 'lie detector') tests are not- despite
what you may have heard – admissible as evidence in a UK court of
law. There are several reasons for this, one of the chief ones being
the fact that their margin of error remains fiercely contested to
this day. Even ignoring that, and the techniques that can be employed
to fool such a test (yes, it can be done), all a polygraph test can
be said to prove – at best – is what a person believes to
be true. And those pesky schemas can then come into play to
interfere.
Let's
say that, on a day of remarkable coincidence, three people in three
different cities have a virtually identical experience in the middle
of the night; one a devout and enthusiastic Christian, one a strong
believer in UFOs and alien life, and one an atheist. Each person
wakes up in the early hours of the morning, and sees mysterious
figures surrounding their bed making strange noises for a minute or
more. The mysterious figures then suddenly disappear. The devout
Christian will swear they were visited by angels, as this slots in
perfectly with the world view that their religious schemas provide.
The UFO fanatic will swear that they were visited by aliens, as this
slots in perfectly with the world view that their very different, but
equally strong, belief provides. The atheist, with no existing
schemas that smoothly wrap around the experience, won't immediately
know what to make of it; but after research, may well conclude that
it was a hypnopompic hallucination.
To
put it in a way that even somebody like me can understand,
'hypnopompic' basically refers to a state where asleep and awake melt
into one another. You're seeing the real world, but your dream brain
is allowing your imagination to drop things into your vision,
sometimes with accompanying sound. In essence, a waking dream. I had
a hypnopompic hallucination once, and it was bloody terrifying.
I
didn't know it was a hypnopompic hallucination at the time. I
certainly wouldn't have used those words, as I was probably about
seven or eight years old. Poor little me; I woke up (more or less) in
the morning, and immediately saw a small creature sitting on the end
of my bed staring at me. It was as big as a fair sized TV. It was a
cardboard box with eyes and a downturned mouth cut out, with arms
ending in gloves and legs ending in shoes. The arms and legs
suggested that whatever was inside the box (if anything was indeed in
it) was wearing a tight-fitting stripy onesie.
Look,
I was seven or eight.
It
looked straight at me and said, in an unnaturally slow and deep voice
that chilled me to my young bones:
“Wide
awake club”.
It
was scary at the time, okay? I leapt out of bed, straight past the
demon, and hurtled into my parents' room. When I returned to my
bedroom the thing was gone of course, and I tell you what, I really
bloody hope it was a hallucination. I think that may have
scarred me for life. I'm never going to forget that, and I remember
it in horrifying detail even today.
I
remember it like it was yesterday.
Luke
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