Keeping the World Straight When Memory Is a Trickster

What a maddening thing a memory can be, dodging away from you when you’re trying desperately to snag it, descending around you like a collapsing tent when you most want to forget it.

Memory must be the most astounding handiwork of the very astounding brain: what it chooses to pack in there, where it puts it and how it retrieves it. Consider the memory that keeps you from pulling the bread pan out of the oven with your bare hands, the memory that lets a waitress keep a complex order in her head and record a new one 10 minutes later, the buried memory of an obscure moment long past that only a random scent can unearth.

What is its hit-and-miss method? Why do I remember a song I don’t even like--my parents’ hi-fi favorite, “Hernando’s Hideaway”--when I can’t remember my car’s license plate?

Do men and women remember and recall differently? If not, what were all those “I Love Lucy” forgotten-birthday episodes about?

What the brain forgets is as telling as what it remembers. I can see clear as a snapshot the poltroon features of the bully who haunted our childhoods, but I am certain that he wouldn’t know us from Shirley Temple.

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Naturally I can’t remember the name of the book, but I’ll never forget what I read. In one of her films, actress Mary Pickford was seen crawling fearfully across a large branch, a swamp full of alligators snapping and leaping at her. She remarked in later years that it was the most terrifying thing she had ever done.

Yet she hadn’t done it. The snapping alligators were shot separately from her creep across the branch, but for Pickford, as for movie viewers, the two fused.

The psychologists’ term for this trick of mind is confabulation--”inaccurate or false narratives purporting to convey information about world or self,” according to the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences.

A professor friend took his students to hear a man who had survived Auschwitz. The man related with passion how he and his fellows, as workers in the camp’s munitions factory, had sabotaged Nazi armaments. But there was no such factory at Auschwitz. “He wasn’t lying,” said my friend, “but he’s confabulating.”

Most famously, President Reagan embarrassed aides and flummoxed visitors by repeating that he had filmed the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, when the truth was that he made training films in Los Angeles for the duration of the war and got no closer to the camps than watching newsreels like everyone else.

Irving Biederman is a USC professor of neuroscience, a man untiringly absorbed by the great uncharted regions of mind and memory.

“By and large I think people do a fabulous job of keeping the world straight. We’re very rarely confused, very rarely at sea. This being said, memory clearly isn’t perfect. There’s a wonderful, almost science-fiction story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. He described a person with perfect memory who then had to insulate himself from new experiences lest they then conjure this overwhelming flood of old imagery. If you had perfect memory, you’d have to guard yourself against a flood of new images.”

It turns out, says Biederman, that in the brain’s perceptual systems, images trigger endorphins, the brain’s natural opiates. “When we’re looking around at the world, we’re trying to get the maximum endorphin hit.” This explains both our visual curiosity and why we don’t often go back to “deja vu” territory. “After you learn it, it loses the capacity to give you an endorphin hit and you go on to something else. It’s really a system designed to maximize the assimilation of new information.”

But the elastic quirks of memory can trip us up. Confusing how we came to know something--did we see it, read it, hear it?--is an “error of source memory,” says Biederman, conflating “the original experience with what we might have generated ourselves.” More sinister are the blank spaces of memory and the overlap between “what it was you were told and what it was you actually experienced.”

Most notorious of these are children’s suggestibility and the “recovered/repressed memory” syndromes that generated, and then discredited, some of the frenzy of mass child molestation prosecutions in the 1980s.

Apart from the McMartin Preschool case, perhaps the most famous of these is the murder conviction in 1990 of a San Mateo firefighter on the strength of his daughter’s recovered memory that he raped and murdered her playmate. His conviction was overturned and his daughter’s memory discredited when DNA tests did not implicate him in a second murder she “remembered” him committing. He has sued both prosecutors and his daughter.

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Space, as Captain Kirk intoned, is indeed the final frontier, but surely that applies to the inner space of our brains as well as the outer one.

I saved a story from last year about a study that found that the mind’s manifold ways of handling memory include concentrating word memories in the left brain and visual memories on the right--or was it the other way around? Now where did I put that clipping?

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Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com