Reinventing yourself
Discusses the unconscious and conscious use of imagination to reinvent oneself. Background on the experiment conducted to determine the effect of imagination on autobiographical memory; Reasons for using imagination to tweak memories; Consequences of imagination-influenced memories.
By: Maryanne Garry, Devon Polaschek
Research on memory shows that who youare is limited only by your imagination.
When Bill Clinton first ran for president, he gave America sketchy and contradictory reasons for why he never served in Vietnam. But it set off a furor when records revealed that he had used "political pressure"--including calls from a U.S. senator and the governor's office--to dodge military service. The right wing had a field day branding Bill a liar.
But Clinton may have gotten the memory part right. An emerging understanding of memory reveals that it is not laid down forever like a movie, with the same events occurring in the same order every time. Rather, it is an ongoing process of distillation and revision, more like watching a live version of the TV improv show Whose Line Is It Anyway? There's a theme, but no script; every performance is at once similar and different.
Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau learned this in a very public way. When the right wing pilloried Clinton for his Vietnam story, Trudeau wondered aloud if the inconsistencies might instead be a simple case of faded memory. He sat down to write about his own draft experience for the New York Times. But his research disclosed a very different story than the one he had been telling friends for the previous 20 years.
In that version, Trudeau had drawn a low number in the draft lottery and his three-year student deferment had run out, which meant his call-up was imminent. He spent hours on the phone in emotional calls to friends and family Then he tried to obtain another deferment and interviewed at his local draft board--for which, Trudeau noted, "I received a memorable haircut." Eventually he went home where his father, a physician, diagnosed an ulcer and sent the evidence off to a doctor in New Hampshire. Then Trudeau got his deferment. Or so he thought that's how it went. (Read on to learn what really happened.)
The "autobiographical memories" that tell the story of our lives are always undergoing revision--precisely because our sense of self is too. We are continually extracting new information from old experiences and filling in gaps in ways that serve some current demand. Consciously or not, we use imagination to reinvent our past, and with it, our present and future.
What's in a Memory Anyway?
If memories aren't reliable, why do we have them at all? Memory allows us to learn from our experiences without having to repeat them endlessly Indeed, it allows us to survive. If Fred Flintstone remembers that it's bad to toss rocks at a saber-toothed tiger, he won't commit the same offense a week later.
Very few scenarios repeat exactly, so our memories work mostly by extracting the essence of those scenarios. After all, if Fred learns that it's bad to throw rocks at saber-toothed tigers, he'll live longer than if he learns only to avoid throwing those rocks at that tiger.
But memory is more than a survival tool. Psychologist Ulrich Neisser, Ph.D., contends it is a kind of social glue. According to the Cornell University researcher, it's less important to remember life events accurately than to preserve more enduring information about people, relationships and the continuing aspects of events, all of which form the core of human experience.
Think about how quickly Thanksgiving dinner descends into conversations that begin, "Hey, remember when we .... " These shared personal histories keep our relationships going. As anyone who has ever sat around swapping stories until the wee hours of the morning knows, what really happened is less critical than what everybody thinks really happened.
Enter Imagination
But what if one of your siblings interrupted your recounting of a cherished childhood memory and said, "That never happened to you. No way You're wrong."
How would you find out the truth? In research we conducted with psychologist Helene Hembrooke, Ph.D., we asked people this very question. We found that many would not necessarily look for proof, such as photos or medical records, because it seems like too much of a bother. Instead, people imagine the event, and then see if it "feels" as though it were a real experience that happened to them.
This is an easy strategy, but not a smart one. Research shows that imagining fictitious events, especially ones from childhood, tends to increase our confidence that the events really happened.
Imagination Inflation
In 1996, along with psychologists Charles Manning, Ph.D., and Elizabeth Loftus, Ph.D., of the University of Washington and James Sherman, Ph.D., of Indiana University, one of us (Maryanne Garry) looked specifically at imagination's effect on autobiographical memory. We gave people a list of common childhood events (e.g., got in trouble for calling 911, broke a window with your hand) and asked them to rate their confidence that each had or had not happened to them before age 10.
Weeks later, we asked the same people to imagine some of the events in the survey. An experimenter guided them through the exercise: "Imagine that it's after school and you are playing in the house. You hear a strange noise outside, so you run to the window. As you are running, your feet catch on something and you trip and fall. As you're falling, you reach out to catch yourself and your hand goes through the window. As the window shatters, you get cut and there's some blood." Then we asked the participants again to rate their confidence of the same childhood memories.
We found that simply imagining a childhood event for about a minute boosted people's confidence that the events had really happened. We called this effect "imagination inflation."
Memory can also be altered through what Princeton psychologist Marcia Johnson, Ph.D., calls "source monitoring." Typically, when we remember something, we also remember the source of that information. Weeks from now, for example, you may be able to tell a friend about imagination inflation, and that you read about it in PSYCHOLOGY TODAY. You might even be able to tell your friend, "It was in their December issue." But sometimes we make mistakes and remember the information but confuse the source (thinking you read about imagination inflation in Newsweek, for instance).
We also tend to remember recent experiences more accurately, getting increasingly foggy as we reach back through the years. Johnson's research bears this out. She asked people to think of actual or imagined autobiographical events from either the recent past or from childhood, and then had them rate the memories on 39 different characteristics, such as sensory detail, feeling, and what happened just before and after the events.
As expected, memories of recent events stayed pretty consistent while memories of childhood events were easily confused with imagined ones--on about 90% of the characteristics tested, in fact.
Souped-up Selves
Of course you don't confuse just anything you imagine with real life. If you imagine yourself having won the lottery last year, you probably won't come to believe you did. Plausibility is important, as is the ease with which you can imagine something.
We use our imagination to tweak our memories for a number of reasons.
We rely on memories of the past to help us imagine and make sense of the present. Cognitive psychologists Roger Schank and Robert Abelson theorized that we develop scripts of certain kinds of common experiences so we'll know how to act in future such situations. We can all imagine what will happen when we go to a restaurant, for example, even if we've never patronized that particular one. We believe someone will greet us and show us to a table, that a server will take our order, and that when we're done (or the restaurant wants us to be done), we'll get the check, add 15% to 20% for a tip, and give it to our server.
Of course, sometimes scripts keep us from imagining an alternative, which can thwart our ability to make sense of the present. In a New Zealand restaurant, for example, you'd rarely be presented with a check at the end of your meal. That would be seen as unspeakably rude, tantamount to kicking you out. Instead, when you're ready, you head toward the cash register. In New Zealand, we often see American tourists waiting idly at their tables for a waiter who never comes back.
Sometimes people use their imagination to make sense of someone else's past. In an interview last summer, Hillary Rodham Clinton explained her husband's persistent infidelity by saying it stemmed from his childhood abuse. "There was terrible conflict between his mother and grandmother," she had said. "A psychologist told me that being caught in a conflict between two women is the worst possible situation."
Of course, any psychologist could have reassured her that young Bill could have fared worse than being in the middle of two women.
There are times when imagination gives memories a positive spin. As we age, we tend to cast earlier hardships as experiences that made us stronger. But imagining a better past isn't always useful. How does it help us to be homesick?
Perhaps the biggest myth about memory is that we can forget the seriously bad stuff, a phenomenon called repression or amnesia. Of course it's possible to forget traumatic events. But scientific study does not support the concept of repression. Most survivors of Nazi concentration camps, terrible accidents or childhood sexual abuse say that they have never forgotten their ordeals, as much they might have liked to.
The Malleability of Memory
Some people take full advantage of memory's flexibility. For instance, some athletes repeatedly imagine executing the complex motor skills that lead to victory, because research shows that it does boost performance. Similarly, advertisers use imagination-based memory tricks to stimulate desire for their products.
A little imagination, however, can be dangerous, especially in psychotherapy Take the case of Lynn Gondolf. Her therapist saw her eating disorder as a red flag for repressed memories of childhood abuse. Although Gondolf said from the start that she had been sexually abused by her uncle, her therapist insisted that her parents must have been involved. Gondolf tried to imagine how. She joined a therapy group, took antipsychotics, antidepressants, sleeping pills and ulcer medication, and wound up in a county mental hospital. The funny thing is, she says, one day she decided not to return to the mental hospital--because it was too much work. Once she broke away, she started to realize that her expanded memories of abuse were false.
Some uses of imagination are merely foolish. Innumerable self-help books tout imagination-based interventions such as creative visualization to achieve younger-looking skin. Or to turn you into president of the United States.
Some people may be predisposed to imagination-based false memories. Researchers at the University of Tennessee recently showed that those who score high on measures of both hypnotic suggestion and dissociation (did you ever pull into your driveway but not remember driving home?) are more likely than others to experience imagination inflation.
As we age, hypnotic suggestibility and dissociativity decrease. Young children, therefore, are most adept at imagination inflation. When 8- to 10-year-olds imagine hypothetical events from five years earlier, they become more certain than their elders that the events really occurred.
Give the Pres a Break
But some consequences of imagination-influenced memories are not as serious as others. So when Thanksgiving rolls around and your older brother starts regaling revelers with his tale of the time he put a rubber snake in your bed, you can laugh along with everyone else, even if it's not all true. What's important is the fact that you're all together, laughing and enjoying each other's company.
And give the presidential candidates a break, too, when they try to remember what they did or didn't do 20 years ago. Garry Trudeau will. Although he had been telling the same story for 20 years, it didn't jibe with what he found later from records and interviews with relatives: His student deferment lasted one year, not three. There were no anguished phone calls; he had gone out drinking instead.
The part about the ulcer is true--but Trudeau couldn't have seen a New Hampshire doctor because he wasn't a state resident. He now thinks he asked an instate friend to lend him a local address. A significant, emotional, important autobiographical memory, riddled with the products of his imagination, right down to the memorable haircut.
How's Your Memory?
o Get a pencil and paper ready. Then read these words only once: bed, clock, dream, night, turn, mattress, snooze, nod, tired, night, artichoke, insomnia, rest, toss, night, alarm, nap, snore, pillow.
o Now put the magazine down and try to recall all the words. Give yourself two minutes.
o Did you remember snore and pillow? Probably, because we tend to recall the most recent items and those were last on the list. Did you get artichoke? You probably did because it was distinctive--it didn't go with the other words. Did you remember the word night? It was repeated three times, and that helped you learn it. Did you get the word sleep? Most likely, though it wasn't even on the list!
Such is the power of memory, that you can go from simple recall to a false memory in a few minutes.
READ MOR ABOUT IT
Momentous Events, Vivid Memories, David Pillemer (Harvard University Press, 1998)
Searching For Memory Dan L. Schacter (Basic Books, 1996)
ILLUSTRATION (COLOR)
Adapted by Ph.D. and Ph.D.
Maryanne Garry, Ph.D., and Devon Polaschek, Ph.D., are lecturers at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand--Garry in psychology, Polaschek in criminal justice psychology.
Psychology Today, Nov/Dec 99
Article ID: 375
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