The Woman Who Can't Forget (6 page)

I found this a particularly intriguing distortion to read about, because I make note of the people in my life misattributing all the time and find it amazing, especially that they clearly really believe they're remembering correctly. I've learned that I have to stop myself from correcting people in most cases, which I used to do a fair amount of as a child. In fact, one of the facts about memory that Schacter reports is that people tend to privilege their own memories for events over the recollections of others. Most of the people close to me in my life pretty much gave up on doing that with me a long time ago.

It's hard to fathom how people's minds play this trick of misattributing, but an interesting theory about how autobiographical memories are recalled may go a long way toward explaining it. The theory is that our autobiographical memories are not stored all in one place in our brains; rather, we re-create them in an elaborate and delicate reconstruction process whereby different parts of an experience that have been filed away in different sections of our brains are pulled together again. This process is said to take up to 10 seconds, and it is vulnerable to errors. When we misattribute, we may be pulling together pieces of different experiences and fusing them into what seems to us to be a totally clear, accurate memory.

One of the sins that is most appalling to me is related but different; Schacter calls it suggestibility. This is the creation in our minds of outright false memories, such as through others' suggestions. The key is that the false recall comes from outside information, not from information stored away in our brains. Children are especially vulnerable to forming such false memories, as seen in a number of child abuse trials in which prosecutors unearth memories from children about sexual crimes that never happened. Not only is this false remembering damaging in such cases, it also raises serious issues in regard to eyewitness testimony in legal trials. Many studies have revealed that witness recall can be substantially flawed, in part due to the way in which the witnesses were questioned or shown information, such as in a lineup of suspects. As far as I know, my memory is not susceptible to suggestibility.

What seems to me one of the most problematic of the sins, because it is so subtle and so pervasive, is the one Schacter calls bias. This is the way that people's memory of the past can be significantly distorted by what they know or feel in the present. These distortions operate in many tricky ways, and Schacter identifies five key types. One, called consistency bias, causes us to make our thoughts and feelings more consistent over time, so that we remember feeling the same way about something in the past as we do now, even though we actually felt quite differently then. For example, someone who initially supported the Iraq War but now opposes it might misremember having ever supported the war. An example that Schacter describes is from one study that showed that if you asked a married couple how they had felt about each other five years earlier, they would tend to describe those feelings according to the way they were currently feeling, which, depending on the state of their marriage, might be a good thing or a bad thing.

Another category is change bias, which occurs when people think that they should have changed something in their lives or about themselves over time, and their minds exaggerate the actual amount of change that has happened. For example, if you attended an anger management class and think that you should have learned to become calmer, then you might exaggerate just how much improvement you've seen in your control over your temper due to the class. It's interesting that this bias can involve not only exaggerating how much better the situation is in the present, but also how bad the situation was in the past. To use the same example, a person might also exaggerate just how bad a temper she had before the class. The mind is endlessly creative!

One type of bias that is fairly easy to spot in friends and family is the distortion called hindsight bias, which is when people believe that they always knew something that they've in fact just found out about. With those who are close to us in life, this sort of rewriting of history is bound to come up fairly glaringly now and then. Say, for example, a friend who is a big fan of the Dallas Cowboys claims that he always knew they were going to lose a big game they'd been the strong favorite to win, even though you clearly remember him saying they were going to cream the other team. Schacter uses the case of the O. J. Simpson trial and how many people who had thought Simpson would be convicted said after the trial that they had known he'd be let off. Interestingly, this bias is much stronger when it seems to people, after the fact, that there was good reason for them to have had the correct view initially. If the difference in outcome seems due to a quirk of chance, then the distortion isn't nearly as strong. So if the quarterback for the Cowboys was injured, for example, then that friend who is a fan probably wouldn't be distorting about his prior expectation that the team would achieve a crushing victory, or at least not as much.

A type of distortion that has plagued human life in many ways that are all too obvious is that called stereotypical bias, which has been a contributing factor in racial and gender stereotyping. What happens in this process is that preordained, general views about a category of people are projected onto individuals. As Schacter writes, “Because it may require considerable cognitive effort to size up every new person we meet as an individual, we often find it easier to fall back on stereotypical generalizations that accumulate from various sources.” Over time, this is one type of bias that I hope we can make serious headway in correcting.

The most personally damaging memory mechanism, in which people's memories turn against them, is known as persistence: people cannot forget disappointments or moments of shame in life, like failing a major test in school, or getting fired from a job, or being rejected by a lover. The rehearsal of these memories can cause great emotional harm, as when terrible memories like rape or abuse haunt people all their lives. The excessive replaying can even cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Dr. Schacter refers to one case of persistence that led to shocking consequences—that of baseball player Donnie Moore, who was a relief pitcher for the California Angels. He was, as Schacter writes, “literally haunted to death by the persisting memory of a single disastrous pitch.” Moore was brought in to finish off a game against the Boston Red Sox but ended up throwing a pitch that was hit out of the park for a game-winning home run. He ruminated about that pitch so persistently that he was driven into a terrible depression and ended up shooting his wife and then committing suicide by turning the gun on himself.

Research in the field of positive psychology, often called the science of happiness, has also produced powerful results about the negative psychological effects of ruminating, particularly in the onset of depression. Those who are depressive are more likely to ruminate, and those who ruminate are often dragged into depression. A horrible irony about this finding is that ruminators often think that their intense attention to whatever bad experience they're dwelling on will help them gain some valuable insights, when in fact, rumination tends to undermine critical thinking of that sort.

Although persistence would seem to be similar to my own memory, I don't think it is really the same as the kind of replaying that my mind does. My memory is not selective in that way, fixated on any particular event. For me, the least consequential moments persist alongside the most traumatic and influential. That's not to say, though, that my most upsetting memories haven't weighed especially heavily on me; they have, and they've thrown me into bouts of depression. It's just that the mechanism seems quite different to me, as I also have all kinds of inconsequential memories popping into my head in the same way all the time.

The ever-present nature of my memories about the slings and arrows of life makes me envy the way in which the last of the biases, which is called egocentric bias, distorts most people's memories in ways that are self-flattering. People tend to credit themselves more for successes than for failures, for example, and to privilege their successes in their memories of their lives. Psychologist Shelley Taylor, who has done important work on this subject, refers to this as creative self-deception. At the heart of egocentric bias is the tendency to put oneself at the center of the action in life, thinking that so many things have to do with us when they may not really be about us much at all. For example, we tend to interpret people's moods as having to do with our influence on them, when they may really be feeling that way because of something else entirely; or we tend to privilege our role in some joint task over the contribution of others. What is especially fascinating to me about the way that egocentric bias tends to distort our memories is that for most people, it ends up distorting things in their favor, so that they tend to “remember past experiences in a self-enhancing light,” as Schacter writes.

Schacter argues that the “seven sins” have evolved over time because they are advantageous in many ways, or are the by-products of memory functions that have served us well. Through the long sweep of human history, they have been, in the words of evolutionary theory, adaptive. Egocentric bias, for example, can significantly improve well-being by making the past look a whole lot more successful or happy than it really was. I can't honestly say that I'd really want to have these “abilities,” because I do like that my memory is so complete, though some egocentric bias would probably have done me a world of good. I also find myself wondering about the trade-offs in terms of knowing the truth about our lives. To me, accuracy about what has happened to me, about who said what when, and about the truth of a situation is vital. Interestingly, research in positive psychology shows that those who are natural optimists tend to remember their failures less accurately, seeing them in a relatively positive light. Research also shows, though, that their optimism, which has so many benefits, comes with a trade-off about realism, which in some circumstances, such as when it's important to be able to size up accurately a challenge being faced, can be problematic.

One of the most interesting questions about memory and forgetting is how much of each is optimal in our lives. The strength of the natural process of forgetting is remarkable to me. One study showed that over a period of 300 days, approximately 3 percent of life events were “highly memorable,” which works out to about one event every three weeks. That sort of gap in the record of my life would truly disturb me. But then consider the case, fictional though it is, of the subject in Jorge Luis Borges's famous short story “Funes, the Memorious,” which many people have said I would enjoy.

In the story, a teenage Argentinian boy named Ireneo Funes takes a bad fall while horseback riding and begins to have perfect memory. He remembers absolutely everything he sees and hears and reads in the finest detail. He remembers in such fine detail, in fact, that he has trouble sleeping at night, which has often been true for me, because he is rehearsing those limitless details in his mind. He can learn whole volumes of arcane information in mere days and develops an extraordinary facility for picking up foreign languages. He reads about historical cases of superior memory and marvels about what was so special in those cases because his memory is so much stronger than those people's were. So acute and complete did his memory become that, Borges writes, “he remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882,” and he “not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it.” Tragically, Funes ultimately becomes lost in all of that detail, or, more accurately, imprisoned by it. He cannot free his mind from the minutiae he has become fixated by, and the narrator of the story conjectures that he has even lost the ability to truly think, because thinking requires being able to get perspective and to generalize, which Funes could no longer do. It is a strange and harrowing vision, and not insignificantly, Borges adds into the plot of the story that at the same time Funes was invested with his perfect memory in the fall from the horse, he became crippled.

I'm thankful that, complete as it is, my memory is not at all as fixated on details as was that of Funes, but the story is certainly thought provoking in terms of the ways in which my memory has ruled my life. In telling the story of my life in the rest of this book, it is in very large part the story of my memory that I will be relating, and I hope that in doing so, I shed some interesting light on that intricate, tricky dance of remembering and forgetting in all of our lives.

O
ne of the longest-standing notions in psychology is that even though we forget almost all of our earliest experiences, they shape us in profound ways, and one of the original goals of psychotherapy was to unearth those shaping experiences so that they could be intellectually and emotionally conquered. Although much of what Freud conjectured has been rejected by most psychologists, his central insight about early experiences playing a large role in personality development, and in continuing to influence us later in life, rings true to me, given my own life experience. Not only did the memories of my earliest years influence my life profoundly as I grew up, but they continue to do so. Given how vividly I recall a number of memories from between two and three years old, I certainly appreciate what the value of repressing might be.

I can still feel the irrational fears and unduly intense emotions about what—to adults—are in no way traumatic events, but kids are often horribly upset by. Remembering as many of my earliest memories as I do and as vividly as I do, I think that a great deal of the experience that becomes subconscious for most people has remained conscious for me. I've lived with a good deal of the roiling, irrational influence of what is normally driven into the subconscious right on the surface of my mind for my whole life.

What is your earliest memory? Perhaps you've known what that memory is for some time and can answer this question right away. It's true that at a certain point in our lives, our recall of our first memories becomes relatively fixed, though interesting research has shown that as late as in their twenties, most people's answers about what their first memories are still vary quite a bit from one time they're asked to the next. So, ask yourself again what that earliest memory is.

Stretch your mind back as far as you can go, and consider what your memory for the earliest years of your life is like. Maybe it's of a younger sibling showing up as a baby in the house or a bad fall. Those are common ones. Maybe it's something that scared you, like a dog barking at you, or something that confused you, like not being able to open a door in your house. Is it hazy? Is it a full event or just a fleeting moment? Maybe it's only a static vision of something, like a room in your home or a toy you loved. Can you hear anything that was being said to you or to someone else in the memory? Do you have any sense of smell associated with it? And do you feel any emotion when you recall it?

One of the most widely accepted findings in the science of memory is that about what's called childhood amnesia: the almost complete loss of autobiographical memory for the first two to three years of life. Yet scientists still don't know for sure why we forget these years.

Arguments about when the first long-term memories are formed in the brain differ. Some research has indicated that the brain may become capable of storing them as early as eighteen months. One study seemed to show that we may have some memory capacity even before we are born. In that study, mothers read aloud the same story passage repeatedly in the last months of their pregnancy, and when that passage was read to their babies in the first thirty-three hours after birth, they showed signs of recognizing it. But there doesn't seem to be any doubt that memories we may form from as early as that are ultimately lost. An interesting finding that seems to back up the assertion that it is at about eighteen months that infants begin to be able to remember is that this is also when they first demonstrate an awareness of a self. They recognize that they are looking at themselves in a mirror. But it doesn't seem to be until about twenty-two months that they develop a sense of self-consciousness, as we tend to think of our sense of self—to know that they are an individual in the world.

The range of age when the brain seems to develop in the ways that allow us to retain memories in the long term is generally between three and seven years, and a widely accepted argument is that long-term memory really begins at age four. Some people may have a few memories from before three years of age and some may not have any until even older than seven, but for many people, their first few memories are from between ages two and three.

The study of childhood amnesia is one of the truly fascinating areas of research in the science of memory, and I find the different theories about what causes it deeply thought provoking. Freud argued that it was due to the need to forget—or, to be more precise, to repress—traumatic early experiences. Some researchers have argued that it's due to the timing of the physical development of the brain, and that before certain structures are in place, memories can't be stored, at least not for the long term. But other work has suggested that the forgetting process is actually more significant—that it's not so much that we can't form memories at that age, but that our forgetting is in overdrive for this period. Still another theory is that we don't remember those years because we don't yet have language ability, and without language, autobiographical memories can't be encoded in our minds.

A theory that is especially intriguing to me, given the nature of my own earliest memories, argues that the reason we forget the first years is that the mind of an infant is different from that of an older child and an adult. An infant's understanding of the world is so undeveloped that the mind is not yet able to make sense of events in ways that allow episodic memories to be filed away. I can attest from my own recall that the infant mind is a wildly irrational one.

I do have childhood amnesia, but I also have a good number more memories from those earliest years than is normal. Some of them are intensely dear to me, and others can still send a shock of child fear and anger coursing through me.

My abiding overarching feeling for those early days is that I felt utterly loved in the warm cocoon of a close and caring family. There's no question that my memory of that time has played a powerful role in my life, both as a refuge that I retreat to and, I'm afraid, as an anchor that has in some ways weighed me down, keeping me tied firmly to a phase of life that most of us remember only quite vaguely and move on from without incessantly looking back.

I was born in 1965 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City to a close, loving, and protective Jewish family. Actually, “protective” doesn't even begin to describe it. When I was four years old, I had my tonsils out at Roosevelt Hospital, and my maternal grandmother insisted we take a taxi home, which seemed odd to me since we lived in the apartment building across the street. I remember wondering while I was being put into the cab why we weren't just walking. Family was a big part of my childhood in New York, and our apartment was always filled with relatives on both my mother's and father's side. For my first few years, I didn't actually realize they were from two different families.

We lived at the Coliseum Apartments—a complex of two apartment buildings on Fifty-eighth to Sixtieth Streets at Ninth Avenue, with a private garden in between the buildings. The garden was a magical place to me. It had thick green grass and was lined with walkways and benches and planted with rosebushes and big potted trees. All the preschool children played there during the day while the mothers talked and rocked their babies in their carriages. Our apartment had a wonderful view of St. Paul's Church across the street, and I loved the way its stone walls glistened in the sunshine. One of my favorite things to do was to climb up on the couch in our living room and look out the window at the view down Ninth Avenue to the Lincoln Tunnel; I was fascinated by how the roads and bridges crisscrossed. That view still means so much to me that eighteen years after we had moved away from New York, when I was in the city for Thanksgiving 1989, I took a friend to see our building and ended up standing in the middle of the street taking photo after photo down Ninth Avenue. To this day I still go to see the building we lived in every time I am in New York.

One reason that those earliest days have remained special to me is that they were also special to my parents. My mother says those days of the 1960s in the city were the best decade of her life because that's when she met my dad and had her family. They were deeply in love and were finding a new place for themselves in the world as my father's career as an entertainment agent started to take off. I loved hearing my dad talk about his work, and in the evenings, I couldn't wait for him to come home. Every night, I'd sit with him and my mother as he ate dinner and told her about his day.

Psychologists say that the stories our parents tell us about their own lives may have a significant shaping influence on us as we struggle to make sense of who we are, developing a concept of our own personalities. Our parents may also play an important role in what we end up remembering about our lives—what gets stored away in our long-term memories or what we tend to recall about our own lives. I know that for me, the stories that I heard about my parents' lives have meant a great deal to my sense of self, and I loved being taken into the story of their lives.

My father's family came from Newark, New Jersey, and he grew up there in the 1940s and 1950s, when lots of people who would go on to national acclaim, like author Philip Roth, were growing up close by, though he didn't know them. My grandfather owned a gas station in the Italian section of the city, which was strictly divided into enclaves by ethnic groups: Jews in one area, Italians in another, Poles in another. My father made quite a transformation in his life by getting into the entertainment business. He never made a conscious decision to go into the business; the notion was planted in his head by a friend one day, and my dad laughs when he remembers responding that maybe he could be an agent, because he didn't even know what an agent did. All he knew about agenting was what he had seen in the movies: the agent was the guy with the tattersall hat who went into a phone booth and made deals and got 10 percent.

At the time there were three big agencies—MCA, William Morris, and GAC. My dad managed to get interviews at all three and started off in the mailroom of William Morris, as all those aspiring to become agents for William Morris did. Within three months, he caught a lucky break that set his career into fast-forward. He was told to fill in for the sick secretary to one of the agents, Bernie Brillstein, who for decades was one of the biggest managers in the entire business and still commands a great deal of respect. Brillstein discovered Jim Henson and his Muppets, and later he handled Lorne Michaels and the
Saturday Night Live
comedians and writers. My dad had expected that he'd just be working for Bernie for a week or so until his secretary was better, but it turned out that the secretary didn't come back to work for four months, and those four months were an amazing time for my dad. Every Friday night, Bernie hosted a crap game at his apartment, around the corner from William Morris, and powerful people in the entertainment business would come by. My father started developing connections, and before long, Bernie had put him and two other agents in charge of a new commercials department at the agency. Though working with commercials wasn't as sexy as movies or TV, they managed a lot of young talent, like the Second City Players and actors like George Segal, who was just starting out.

I loved hearing about my father's clients as a young child, and spending time with him at work, and those early days with him are among my most cherished memories. At that age, when I was two through five, I didn't recognize any of the people he was talking about, including Ray Charles, one of my dad's clients who came to dinner once at our apartment. To me, Ray was just a very tall man with a wonderful smile standing in my living room, and—testimony to the fact that children's minds are not yet capable of making coherent sense of the world—I even suspected that he might possibly be my grandfather on my father's side. My grandfather had died before I was born, and all I really knew about him was that his name was Charles, so I asked Ray, “Are you my grandpa?”

The most fun for me about my dad's work was getting to go with him to the Ed Sullivan show. In those days, a younger agent was always assigned to escort the William Morris clients who were appearing on the show. This was a once-a-month duty, and the agent would stay with them while they rehearsed all day Saturday and Sunday until the show went live, at 8:00
P.M.
on Sunday night. Often my dad would take me with him. First we would have breakfast at the Carnegie Delicatessen with a wonderful comedian known in the business as Fat Jack Leonard, who would always say to me, “Come here, little girl, you married? You're not married, little girl?” One of my favorite times watching the rehearsal at the Ed Sullivan show was when I was mesmerized by a magician practicing his magic act, but I was really more enamored by the assistant in her beautiful sequined dress than by his magic tricks. I thought the dress was so gorgeous that I told my dad, “Mommy should have a dress just like that.” Every time Ed saw me sitting with my dad, he would come over and make a fuss over me. His son-in-law, the executive producer of the show, was really nice to me too, and he would bring a stool over to the side of the stage for me to sit on. Often I'd be sitting right next to Ed as the acts rehearsed.

My father's job as an agent not only made for an interesting childhood for me; it actually led to my birth. My mother and father met one day when my dad was working for an agent who represented the band leader Mitch Miller. He took some papers out to where Miller's show was shot in Brooklyn, at the Avenue M Studio, where silent movies had been made in the early days of film.
The

Perry Como Show
was shot there too. The studio had two big stages, and Perry used one and Mitch the other. My dad went there to deliver some papers to a client, which he had volunteered to do because there were always pretty girls out there—all the shows' dancers.