{"id":124,"date":"2005-05-10T23:54:27","date_gmt":"2005-05-11T03:54:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/metasj\/2005\/05\/10\/eggshell-memory\/"},"modified":"2005-05-10T23:54:27","modified_gmt":"2005-05-11T03:54:27","slug":"eggshell-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2005\/05\/10\/eggshell-memory\/","title":{"rendered":"Eggshell memory"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a890'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Fragile and elusive, we depend on memory for so much of our understanding of ourselves, our loved ones, and the world.<\/p>\n<p>Every week I encounter some truly flabbergasting quirk in memory amonth my dearest friends, family members, and loved ones.  There is a very narrow selection of people who I deeply trust to preserve accurate memories over years and decades; off the top of my head, I can count five of them.   If you dig into people I have only known sporadically, or who I know largely *because* of their excellent memories, you can perhaps make it to ten.<\/p>\n<p>Of course memory is a double-edged sword.  When I find that someone&#8217;s memory differs significantly from mine, even if there is a third party involved who agrees with one or the other of us, I could always be the one misremembering.  Quite a frustrating dilemma.  Only if you have at least two external sources who agree with you, can you feel confident that you are remembering correctly some disputed event.<\/p>\n<p>Quite interesting to me, is the detachment of memory accuracy from mental acuity and brilliance.  The people I trust to have perfect memories span the range of traditional &#8216;smarts&#8217;, and those whose memories change so often I&#8217;m certain they are unreliable, include two of the most brilliant people I have ever met.<\/p>\n<p>In any case, I felt only deep understanding upon reading this story about Vietnam vets and their <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/news\/globe\/editorial_opinion\/oped\/articles\/2005\/04\/30\/debunking_a_spitting_image\/\">changing memories of spitting during their homecomings<\/a>.  It also reminded me a bit of a story I was editing not long ago&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href='http:\/\/www.boston.com\/news\/globe\/editorial_opinion\/oped\/articles\/2005\/04\/30\/debunking_a_spitting_image\/'>Eggshell memory &#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fragile and elusive, we depend on memory for so much of our understanding of ourselves, our loved ones, and the world. Every week I encounter some truly flabbergasting quirk in memory amonth my dearest friends, family members, and loved ones. There is a very narrow selection of people who I deeply trust to preserve accurate [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[215],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-too-weird-for-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-20","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}