Memories

Returning to a common theme I’ve touched on a few times before.
I was listening to a podcast today. This is a relatively new one but I’ve come to trust the host by some of his previous work. At one point in the show the hosts go on a tangent and start talking about nicknames. The begin to talk about derogatory nicknames that they had for people and then wonder about what similar nicknames they were called behind their backs. I found the bit rather insightful. It invited introspection. What kind of a person do others think I am? It’s always good to reevaluate if you really are the type of person you want to be.
Something about the bit troubled me. It wasn’t until the program was over that I made the connection. The host told about how he used to call one of his junior high school teachers “Jabba the Hutt” and how bad he felt about it now that he looks back on it. Now here’s the problem. The host also revealed in the same episode that he is 56 years-old. So lets do a little math here. If he’s 56 in 2012 then he would have been 21 when the first Star Wars movie came out. But we never saw the character, Jabba the Hutt until Return of the Jedi which came out in 1983, when the host was 27 years-old.
Now I don’t doubt that the host called his teacher a derogatory name. And I don’t doubt his sincerity when he talks about how bad he feels decades later. This story just proves how plastic our memories really are. This event could not have played out the way he remembers it. At the very least the nickname in his memory morphed to accommodate the image he had of that teacher once he saw the movie in 1983.
I’ve talked before about how I’ve been guilty of this same type of memory error. It’s disconcerting to realize that our memories aren’t quite the “dash camera” that we like to think they are.

Picking Cotton

In 1984 Jennifer Thompson was raped. She spent one hour with her rapist’s face just inches from her own. She made a concerted effort to study her rapist’s face and learn every detail about him. If she lived through the night she wanted to be able to lock this guy up forever. And that is exactly what she did. However after being in jail for eleven years DNA proved that the man she had locked up without any physical evidence, just based on her description, did not commit the rape. Picking Cotton is this story

I’ve always been suspect of human memory, particular when it comes to our justice system. I’ve had personal experiences where my own memory did not line up with other facts. I know that how I remember the incident could not have been the case but somehow my recollection of the events has been altered. My experiences are completely trivial when compared to the eleven years that one man, Ronald Cotton, spent in prison for something that he did not do.

Since his release Cotton and Thompson have become very active in educating police systems at how to avoid the mistakes that happened in their case.

Reading this book was not easy. Sections will and should make you very uncomfortable. The serious miscarriage of justice that happened is not to be taken lightly. Cotton and Thompson’s story will have you squirming in your seats the next time you watch a cop show and they lock somebody up just based on witness identification. Or worse, the next time you hear of a death row inmate being denied a stay of execution and his conviction is based on even less than Ronald Cotton’s conviction.

Far from being bitter about the loss of so much of his adult life Cotton recognized that he and Thompson were victims of the same man, the real rapist Bobby Poole. Their story is one of the most heart warming tales of forgiveness that I have ever read. It will have you questioning a lot of your preconceptions about, justice, memory and what it truly means to forgive.

Funny Christmas Memory

My mother recently asked me to write a memory about my favorite Christmas. This is not neccesarily my favorite Christmas but it's just a funny story that I wanted to share.
December of 1996 Victoria and I were at a mall in Salt Lake and after buying stuff for Aaron and a few other family members together we went our separate ways for a few minutes to pick up gifts for each other. When we met back together in front of ZCMI Victoria could barely carry the gift she'd bought for me. She refused to let me help her since she didn't want me to figure it out. A few minutes later she resorted to just dragging the bag through the mall. For about fifteen minutes she dragged soemthing along that appeared to wiegh around 40 pounds. Yet she still refused to let me help her. So a few weeks later I was not the least bit surprised to find a large 12" deep dish cast iron Dutch oven under the tree. I still use it quite frequently. And I get this image of her dragging it through the mall every time I use it.

Memory

One Sunday, several years ago I attended my sister's Ward so I could be there for the blessing of my niece. It was a nice day and most of my family and extended family were there. After the service one of my in-laws stopped me and told me that she knew of a company that was hiring technicians. On her suggestion I applied and was accepted at the company that I now work for. I remember this event very clearly. It was very important to me both because it was my sister's first child and it was the because it is the moment that changed my career path from barely scraping by at REI to becoming and engineer for AT&T.
But there is one big problem. In spite of how my brain remembers it it simply couldn't have happened. You see my niece is only 8 years old now and I've been working at this job for 9 1/2 years. How could I have more seniority at this company than my niece has on this Earth if her birth proceeded my employment there?
In the past couple years I've been studying quite a bit about false memories and how fluid our memories actually are. Our brain is not the running video of our lives that we'd sure like it to be. Instead it grabs emotions and concepts and sometimes it links event by the emotions and feeling felt and combines them into the same event. This little trick of our brain has caused people to even confess to crimes that they didn't commit. When I first read about this phenomenon I didn't quite believe it. Perhaps just like everybody thinks they are better drives than the rest of the world, I thought that I was a better "rememberer" than everybody else. This memory of my niece's blessing has forced me to reconsider how fallible my memory actually is.
Logically I have come to the conclusion that I had gone to my sister's Ward a second time, a few years before my niece was born and that was when I got the tip about the new job. I can't for the life of me figure out why I would have been there, but I'd be willing to bet that since I forgot why my brain filled in the blanks by combining the two trips and now I remember then as just one event. Even though I know they could not have happened as one event I still can't separate the two.
Just something to consider the next time you take a stand and are absolutely positive that something happened exactly the way you remember it.