Brains On Purpose™

That's not how it happened! Let me tell you the true story

How can two or more people sincerely, earnestly, and confidently have such widely divergent versions of events? As mediators, we often have heard stories from parties in which the facts are conflicting and yet no one seems to be deliberately deceiving.

Research continues to show us our memories are malleable and pliant so we are not surprised at the inconsistency. For a good reminder of our memories' flexibility, take a look at "Remembering a Crime That You Didn’t Commit" (The New Yorker). Excerpt:

Shaw and Porter’s study also provides further evidence of the inaccuracy and malleability of human memory, evidence that is already compelling enough to have persuaded the state supreme courts of New Jersey and Massachusetts to mandate that judges instruct juries that eyewitness testimony is inherently unreliable. “Evolutionary theorists say memory is good enough—just good enough for us to survive and to reproduce,” Shaw told me. “But, at the very least, this research calls into question whether we should be putting so much weight on any memory in court”—especially in the absence of corroborating proof. ...

Are you or your clients remembering that story accurately? Some ways to check

I recommend to you this excellent article written by the authors of The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. They offer 10 ways to check the accuracy of our very malleable and faulty memory.

Journalists know that when they hear something from one source, they should corroborate it with independent sources before reporting it. The science of memory has taught us that our own memories are also unreliable sources, just as needy of corroboration.

Click to read the rest of "How Not to Be the Next Brian Williams: Ten ways to avoid false memories" (Slate).

Are you sure that's what happened? Most conflicts are part fiction, part distortion, part dead

When we recall something that occurred in the past, our recollection is not accurate like a video camera. Some if not much of our memory is fabricated. Our fuzzy, faulty memory has been covered before both at this blog and in many books and articles: the memory's shiftiness is by now notorious. So why I am writing about it again?

Even though I know about memory's tricks, I need a reminder frequently because it's so, so easy to forget that we forget; the fact that we re-produce, re-shape, re-construct our memories is simply forgotten. A very good reminder is this article from The Conversation titled "Serial: your memory can play tricks on you – here’s how" which I recommend to you. Excerpt:

It is also important to understand that memories are not constructed from precise records of what actually happened – but rather from records of what we experienced. Our perception is shaped by all sorts of things: our knowledge, our mood, the social context, our physical perspective, even our vocabulary (the language we have available seems to affect the way we encode and retrieve memories). But critically, the reconstruction process itself is also shaped by all of these factors.

Context and knowledge therefore provide a framework not only for encoding memories but also for retrieving them. And because both context and knowledge change over time, so can the memories.

Click to read the rest.

Wish to learn more about learning? Two new books on changing the brain through learning

T-shirt from this year's APS conference

Does resolving conflict require learning? Typically, yes, of course. If no one in the dispute learns anything new, the conflict will probably remain unresolved. That's one of the reasons learning is often mentioned here at BonP.

In May, I attended the 26th annual convention of the Association of Psychological Science; some of the presentations I chose among the multitude offered included learning as a focus. One of my favorite programs, and certainly the most entertaining, was one copresented by APS past-president Henry Roediger who is the author of a new book on learning titled Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. This week I have been reading the book for the first time. I say "first time" because I know I will be reading it again: it contains so much of value about teaching and learning. The book is one I will continue to recommend often.

If you want to both learn and be amazed, watch Dr. Roediger's APS program (about which I have already blogged at idealawg.)

While we are on the topic of books (a topic which many of my friends and colleagues think I talk about very, very, very frequently) I have just learned of a title, another one on learning, that will be out in less than a week. This book is called Multiple Pathways to the Student Brain: Energizing and Enhancing Instruction by Janet Zadina (Brainfacts.org). I believe you can get a preview of Professor Zadina's Multiple Pathways Model here.

Now what about you? What books do you recommend on learning and the brain?

"How Your Memory Rewrites the Past"

Since the past is usually an important factor in a dispute, understanding the process of memory can be helpful to anyone involved in the dispute and its resolution. Although the malleability of memory is not a new topic here at this blog, a reminder can be of value. So here's a news release from Northwestern University.

Your memory is no video camera; it edits the past with present experiences

February 4, 2014 | by Marla Paul

CHICAGO --- Your memory is a wily time traveler, plucking fragments of the present and inserting them into the past, reports a new Northwestern Medicine® study. In terms of accuracy, it’s no video camera.

Rather, the memory rewrites the past with current information, updating your recollections with new experiences.

Love at first sight, for example, is more likely a trick of your memory than a Hollywood-worthy moment.

“When you think back to when you met your current partner, you may recall this feeling of love and euphoria,” said lead author Donna Jo Bridge, a postdoctoral fellow in medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “But you may be projecting your current feelings back to the original encounter with this person.”

The study is published Feb. 5 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

This the first study to show specifically how memory is faulty, and how it can insert things from the present into memories of the past when those memories are retrieved. The study shows the exact point in time when that incorrectly recalled information gets implanted into an existing memory.

To help us survive, Bridge said, our memories adapt to an ever-changing environment and help us deal with what’s important now.

“Our memory is not like a video camera,” Bridge said. “Your memory reframes and edits events to create a story to fit your current world. It’s built to be current.”

Click to read the rest.

Note (added February 7, 2014): More recent research on memory (this study was looking at working memory) in the news release titled "When It Comes to Memory, Quality Matters More Than Quantity" (New York University).

. . .“Our results certainly don’t mean that you always remember everything that matters. However, ‘remembering everything a little bit’ seems much closer to the truth than ‘remembering a few things perfectly and others not at all’.”

Videos from APS: Memory formation, brain diversity, and our brains as conductor-less orchestras

Last time I went to the annual conference of Association for Psychological Science, I was grateful for all that I learned. I attended again this year and the experience was no less valuable. Even if you did not attend, several of the talks are available online for you to view. Below I will link to some of them.

Michael Gazzaniga gave a keynote address titled "Unity in a Modular World." From the writeup:

In his keynote address, Michael S. Gazzaniga suggests the brain may work through local gossip rather than central planning.

A composer standing with hands at his side while the orchestra plays a perfect symphony — that’s how the brain works.

At least that was the metaphor offered by Gazzaniga of the University of California, Santa Barbara, during the keynote address of the 25th APS Annual Convention. ...

Click to read the rest and watch the video of his talk.

The Presidential Symposium this year focused on memory formation. The speakers were Joseph Steinmetz, Ted Abel, Elizabeth Loftus (photo above), Michael Fanselow, and Elizabeth Phelps. From the writeup:

This year’s speakers...took the audience on a tour of memory formation that began with cells encoding the memories, continued through various brain regions retrieving them, and concluded with the social experiences that sparked them in the first place.

Click to read more and watch the video.

Another keynote was titled "Diverse Brains."

[L]anguage-processing researcher Morton Ann Gernsbacher explained why it makes more sense to accept disabilities like autism as examples of brain diversity rather than viewing them as defects.

Click to read more and watch her talk.

To read and watch still more from the conference, click here and here. Very soon, I will write a couple of posts about other presentations I attended. Watch for them here at BonP and at idealawg. I only returned a couple of days ago so am a bit behind on my blogging.

Image credit: Association for Psychological Science.

Quick and entertaining reminder of the fallibility and malleability of our memories

I bet if you take the 18 or so minutes to watch this TED video, you will not think your time was wasted. Forensic psychologist Scott Fraser is a good storyteller and his short talk "Why eyewitnesses get it wrong" is a good reminder for us to be very careful when trusting our own memories, or the memories of our clients.

5 unsolved brain mysteries: Despite many clues in neuroscience, we still don't know much about whodunnit, howdunnit, or whatdunnit

In even just a few years, we will look back at our assertions about the brain and be amused at our degree of certitude. There are many reasons people forget that we are still in neuroscience infancy: need for closure about how the world works, desire to make people behave as we want, impulse to make our client's problems easier to solve and conflicts quicker to resolve, plus many other motives. Unfortunately, we still don't know enough to accomplish more than minimally, if at all, any of those goals by using brain science.

Every so often, it is helpful to pull back on the reins of the racing, sometimes runaway, neuroscience horse. One effective rein-pulling technique is to remind ourselves of what we don't know. This morning, to remind myself of vital information we are missing, I read "Top 5 Unsolved Brain Mysteries" at howstuffworks. Excerpt:

When you compare the brain's detectives, neuroscientists, to other detectives, the neuroscientists seem to fall short in solving mysteries. After all, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple needed only about 250 pages each to get to the bottom of their cases. Ditto for Nancy Drew. ...

...

T­he workings of the brain, however, determine such fundamental questions about personhood that we may never know everything about what's going on. That doesn't mean we can't speculate, though. While we may not be able to solve these capers with clues that point to Colonel Mustard in the library with a revolver, we can dive into the current thinking on some of the brain's famous unsolved mysteries. ...

Click on over to the site to read about five mysteries: Nature versus nurture, why the brain stops functioning, sleep and dreams, memory, and consciousness.

For people who insist that we do know a lot about the brain that can be used in conflict resolution, I recommend reading Psychology's Ghosts. Don't have time to read the whole book? Then just read the chapter titled "Missing Contexts" to understand why much that is learned in the laboratory is not necessarily applicable in, or even relevant to, our world beyond the research lab.

Memory is a creative activity, like poets and painters in your brain

Memory is not like a video camera; it's malleable, shifting and changing with time, place, and mood. That's why, in mediation, the story of a conflict is not as important as the role and place of the current versions of the story in the path towards resolution.

When reading Beauty and the Soul, I came upon a fanciful and charming paragraph that helps to illustrate memory's shiftiness.

What happens to our memory as time moves on? We think of it as an archive, and for this reason we call the recording of computer data "memory." I am afraid it is a misleading metaphor. Imagine that the data stored in your computer have their own life. A spell changes the numbers. The texts you have written mix with each other, conjure up stories, or turn into songs. The photos become animated, then a film, the characters take trips all over the computer, start writing e-mails themselves, and the people in your address book suddenly have a will of their own and decide to play videogames. That is how a computer would work if it had human memory. That is how our unconscious works. Any experience we record does not stay the same, but interacts with other experiences, creates in us certain moods, evokes reminiscenses, rouses fantasies, makes up stories. Memory is neither neutral nor mechanical, and hardly accurate—it is not like a filing cabinet of archives. Memory is a creative activity.