I read the second in the Frost series first. Had I read it in order after this one, I would have noticed the psychological connection. In Voice Inside, Freeman’s killer was obsessed with a memory and acted on it. Memory is also a prime mover in Night Bird.
Memory is a very tricky thing as we have learned in the past few decades. It’s malleable, easily fooled, and extremely fallible. Ask an eyewitness to an accident how fast a car was going as he went through the stop sign, the witness will implant the image of a stop sign in his memory even though there may not have been one there.
Here a memory expert (Francesca Stein — get it? Frankenstein) uses images to change a client’s remembrance of a traumatic experience in order to eliminate a phobia. She maintains that every time you haul up a memory from the repository in your brain you alter it in some way.
If you are interested in how memory works and its experience in the judicial process I recommend The fallibility of memory in judicial processes: Lessons from the past and their modern consequences Mark Howe and Laure Knott. *
A salient paragraph:
When memory serves as evidence, as it does in many civil and criminal legal proceedings, there are a number of important limitations to the veracity of that evidence. This is because memory does not provide a veridical representation of events as experienced. Rather, what gets encoded into memory is determined by what a person attends to, what they already have stored in memory, their expectations, needs and emotional state. This information is subsequently integrated (consolidated) with other information that has already been stored in a person's long-term, autobiographical memory. What gets retrieved later from that memory is determined by that same multitude of factors that contributed to encoding as well as what drives the recollection of the event. Specifically, what gets retold about an experience depends on whom one is talking to and what the purpose is of remembering that particular event (e.g., telling a friend, relaying an experience to a therapist, telling the police about an event). Moreover, what gets remembered is reconstructed from the remnants of what was originally stored; that is, what we remember is constructed from whatever remains in memory following any forgetting or interference from new experiences that may have occurred across the interval between storing and retrieving a particular experience. Because the contents of our memories for experiences involve the active manipulation (during encoding), integration with pre-existing information (during consolidation), and reconstruction (during retrieval) of that information, memory is, by definition, fallible at best and unreliable at worst.
Lots of plot summaries. No point in me adding another. I suggest reading them in order and I will certainly now move on to the 3rd.
*Memory. 2015 Jul 4; 23(5): 633–656. Published online 2015 Feb 23. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2015.1010709 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4409058/
Elizabeth Loftus gained considerable fame (and fortune) for her research into the fallibility and manipulatability (if that’s a word) of memory.
https://www.amazon.com/Eyewitness-Testimony-With-preface-author/dp/0674287770/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0520271440&linkCode=as2&tag=teco06-20
https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_how_reliable_is_your_memory?language=en
An interesting article on Loftus’ research and the Weinstein trial. Physical evidence should always be required in any case involving memory. When you have prosecutors and victim’s rights advocates, all of whom have their own agendas, juries need to be very careful in evaluating eyewitness and memory testimony.
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