Moonwalking With Einstein Read Online Free PDF Page B

correctly.
    I found those numbers astonishing, but I realized they were merely quantifying something that I instinctively knew: that our memories do a pretty darn good job. For all of our griping over the everyday failings of our memories—the misplaced keys, the forgotten name, the factoid stuck on the tip of the tongue—their biggest failing may be that we forget how rarely we forget.
    “Here’s the most incredible thing about the test I just gave you,” Ed declared. “We could play this game several years from now and ask you which of these photos you’ve seen before, and you’d actually be able to point to the right one more often than not. Somewhere in your mind there’s a trace from everything you’ve ever seen.”
    That sounded like a bold and possibly dubious claim, one that I was curious to look into. Exactly how good are our memories? I wondered. Is it possible we have the capacity to remember everything ?
    This notion that our brains don’t ever really forget is certainly embedded in the way we talk about our memories. The metaphors we most often use to describe memory—the photograph, the tape recorder, the mirror, the computer—all suggest mechanical accuracy, as if the mind were some sort of meticulous transcriber of our experiences. Indeed, I learned that until fairly recently, most psychologists suspected that our brains really do function as perfect recorders—that a lifetime of memories are socked away somewhere in the cerebral attic, and if they can’t be found it isn’t because they’ve vanished, but only because we’ve misplaced them. In an oft-cited paper published in 1980, the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus polled her colleagues and found that fully 84 percent of them agreed with this statement: “Everything we learn is permanently stored in the mind, although sometimes particular details are not accessible. With hypnosis, or other special techniques, these inaccessible details could eventually be recovered.”
    Loftus goes on to say that this conviction has its modern origins in a set of experiments carried out from 1934 to 1954 by a Canadian neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield. Penfield used electrical probes to stimulate the brains of epileptic patients while they were lying conscious on the operating table with their skulls exposed. He was trying to pinpoint the source of their epilepsy, and hopefully cure it, but he found that when his probe touched certain parts of his patients’ temporal lobes, something very unexpected happened. The patients started describing vivid, long-forgotten memories. When he touched the same spot again, he often elicited the same memory. Based on those experiments, Penfield came to believe that the brain records everything to which it pays any degree of conscious attention, and that this recording is permanent.
    The Dutch psychologist Willem Wagenaar came to believe the same thing. For six years, between 1978 and 1984, he kept a diary of the one or two most notable events that happened to him each day. For each event, he wrote down what occurred, who was involved, where it occurred, and when—each on a separate card. In 1984, he began testing himself to see just how much of those six years he’d be able to recall. He would pull out a random card and see if he had any memories of the events described that day. He found that he could recall almost everything that happened—especially the more recent events—with just a few retrieval clues. But nearly 20 percent of the oldest memories seemed to have totally disappeared. These events, described in his own diary, felt totally foreign, as if they had happened to a stranger.
    But were those memories really gone? Wagenaar wasn’t convinced they were. He decided to take another look at ten events that he believed he’d completely forgotten, in which his diary suggested that another person had been present. He went back to those people and asked them for details that might help him recall his lost memories.