The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us. Christopher Chabris

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СКАЧАТЬ have clipped and pasted it into my file of “stories to tell that have a message I want to share.” I have told the story verbally so many times over the years that I had it memorized…and then, somewhere along the way, internalized it as my own experience.

      This case bears all the hallmarks of a failure of source memory. Walsch remembered the story, having read and retold it many times. The fact that the child in the story had the same name as his son made it easier for him to come to believe that the memory was his. (Our friend Ken Norman probably picked up Chris’s story more readily because he had dined at the same Legal Sea Food restaurant.) Walsch kept a record of the story in his file and came to believe that he had written it. In his interview with the New York Times, Walsch said, “I am chagrined and astonished that my mind could play such a trick on me.” Chand, however, thinks the theft was intentional: “If he knew this was wrong, he should have known it was wrong before he got caught…quite frankly, I’m not buying it.” Both Chand’s indignation and Walsch’s astonishment are entirely consistent with the illusion of memory. Walsch doesn’t understand how he could have mistakenly appropriated another person’s memory, and Chand doesn’t believe that he could have done so innocently. They both think that memory must be more faithful to experience than it really is.

      Just as we cannot be certain that Kenny Conley suffered from inattentional blindness when he reported not seeing Michael Cox being beaten, we cannot say for certain whether Walsch’s plagiarism was intentional or accidental. What we can say, though, is that it is possible that Walsch internalized someone else’s memory and lost track of the source of the story. Such source memory failures are common, and they even can be created in the laboratory. In a clever study, psychologists Kimberly Wade, Maryanne Garry, Don Read, and Stephen Lindsay asked subjects to view a doctored photograph showing the subject enjoying a hot air balloon ride as a child.³⁰ The subjects were each interviewed several times, and were asked each time to recall the event, or if they could not recall it, to imagine that it had happened to themselves. Although none of the subjects had ever taken a hot air balloon ride, the photograph and attempts to recall it led some of them to incorporate information about the image into their personal narrative memories. Half the subjects created a false memory about the balloon ride, some embellishing their memories substantially beyond what was shown in the photograph.

      The ability to change memories using doctored photographs has Orwellian ramifications. If we can induce false memories simply by editing images, it might be possible to literally revise history, changing the past by doctoring it. Using a similar approach, Dario Sacchi, Franca Agnoli, and Elizabeth Loftus showed subjects an edited version of the famous photograph of a single person standing in front of a column of tanks during the 1989 protests at Tiananmen Square in Beijing.³¹ In the original version of the photograph, only the lone protester was visible on the wide road. The doctored version shows crowds of people lining a narrower road on both sides of the tanks. When they were quizzed about the historical facts of Tiananmen Square only moments later, those who viewed the doctored photograph believed that far more people had been at the protest.

      Forgetting a Life-and-Death Matter

      Memory distortions are not limited to irrelevant details like whether or not books were in an office or particular words were part of a list. In fact, they can apply to life-and-death decisions, even those that you yourself have made. Australian psychologist Stefanie Sharman and her colleagues conducted an experiment that calls to mind the classic Seinfeld episode in which Kramer asks Elaine to help him and his lawyer work through a long list to decide the medical circumstances under which he would be willing to carry on living. (Lawyer: “OK. One lung, blind and you’re eating through a tube.” Kramer: “Naw, that’s not my style.” Elaine: “Borrrr-ing.”) The researchers interviewed adults and asked them to make (more realistic) decisions about which life-sustaining treatments they’d want if they were seriously ill.³² For example, would they want only CPR performed, or would they also want to be fed artificially if necessary? They interviewed the same people twelve months later using the same questions.

      Overall, 23 percent of all their decisions changed between the initial interview and the follow-up, meaning that people who said during the first interview that they would want a life-extending treatment said during the second interview that they wouldn’t want it (or vice versa). That people would change their preferences is not terribly surprising. Perhaps they had discussed the possibilities with friends, relatives, or doctors in the interim; maybe they encountered news stories about end-of-life issues. What is striking is that 75 percent of the people who changed their minds were unaware that they had done so! They thought that the decision they reported in the second interview was the same as their decision in the first interview. Their memory for what they had said earlier was rewritten to match their current beliefs.

      The illusion of memory leads us to assume—unless we receive direct evidence to the contrary—that our memories, beliefs, and actions are mutually consistent and stable over time. Amid the national grief after President Kennedy was assassinated, a poll showed that two-thirds of people claimed they had voted for him in the 50/50 squeaker election of 1960.³³ At least some of them must have revised their memories of how they voted three years earlier, probably to make them consistent with the positive feelings they had about their fallen leader. More broadly, we tend to assume that everything in our world is stable and unchanging unless something draws our attention to a discrepancy. When our beliefs change, though, our memories can change along with them. A living will you produced a few years ago may not reflect your current preferences—but you are likely to misremember its contents and assume that it expresses what you want today. If you become seriously ill and are unable to communicate, doctors will rely on this document and may inadvertently take actions that contradict your wishes.

      Where Were You on 9/11?

      Try to recall exactly where you were when you first heard about the attacks of September 11, 2001. If you’re like us, you have a vivid memory of how you learned about the attacks, where you were, who else was with you, what you were doing immediately beforehand, and what you did immediately afterward. Chris recalls waking up late that morning, after the first plane had hit the World Trade Center. He listened to the Howard Stern Show on the radio until it ended around noon, at which point he turned on the TV. He got in touch with an Israeli colleague, who told him it was already obvious who the perpetrators must be, and he received an e-mail update from a friend who was living in Brooklyn, watching the events safely from her rooftop. He received another e-mail from the manager of his office building at Harvard, William James Hall, recommending evacuation.

      Dan recalls working in his office that morning when his graduate student Stephen Mitroff came in to tell him that a plane hit the first tower. He spent the next few minutes seeking information online, and when the second plane hit, he turned on the television in his lab and he and his three graduate students watched the towers collapse. He then spent a few frantic minutes on the phone trying to reach his brother David’s girlfriend because David was traveling back from New York to Boston that morning (he was sitting on a plane waiting to take off from LaGuardia Airport when the attacks happened). Dan remembers becoming concerned that the fifteen-story building he was in might also be a target. He left before noon to pick up his wife in downtown Boston and they went home together and watched the television coverage for the rest of the day.

      Neither of us has any idea what we were doing or whom we talked to the day before 9/11. We suspect that the same is true for you. Your memories of 9/11 are more vivid, detailed, and emotional than your memories of more ordinary events from that time period. Memories of dramatic events of personal or national importance often are recalled in greater detail. Some significant events appear to be imprinted in our minds in a way that lets us play them back in video-like СКАЧАТЬ