Humans rely on our memories. Memories tell us what happened in the past, so that we may recount it and learn from it.
The problem is, memories don’t tell us what happened in the past. Our memories are incredibly unreliable. We remember what we want to remember – not what actually happened.
In fact, we don’t have memories at all, not as we believe we do. Memories aren’t stored like the brain’s equivalent of a videotape or a library. Instead memories are assembled on the fly whenever we try to recall a specific event.
This is known as the misinformation effect, and its repercussions are severe.
For one, we’ve built our entire justice system around the concept of eyewitnesses. The problem is, there is no such this as a reliable eyewitness. Our memories are too fragile and way too easy to manipulate to trust anything being said by a person taking the stand.
There are countless examples of innocent people convicted for crimes they didn’t commit based on nothing but unreliable eyewitness testimonies. Some of these innocent people have even been convicted to the death penalty – and have subsequently been executed by the state.
But now that we know that eyewitnesses are so horrendously unreliable, that we truly cannot trust that which we remember, surely there must be urgent steps being taken to change our justice system?
The answer is, of course, no. Nothing has changed. Justice is still dealt out based in large part on eyewitness testimonies. It seems humanity prefers to live in a comfortable lie that accept a difficult truth.