Stress and trauma

Duration between event and memory
Over time, of course, there is more and more chance for memories to be altered by
post-event information and modifying remembrances. We all know, too, that over
time some memories simply fade away and become confounded. Almost no one can
remember what it was like to be an infant or toddler, and many of our childhood
memories have fallen into oblivion. This can make historical investigation tricky, and
it raises real questions about witnesses testifying to events that happened decades ago.
This is not to say that long-term memory is always distorted or that it’s always less
reliable than short-term memory, but in cases where one is scrutinizing the remembrance of events long past, it’s even more important to corroborate those memories
with artifacts, physical evidence, or the memories of others.
Issues about long-term memories have troubled the prosecution of Nazi war criminals some arrested decades after the end of World War II. Frank Walus, for example,
was fifty-four years old and living on Chicago’s west side in 1977 when he was accused
of murdering women and children as a Gestapo agent in Poland more than thirty
years earlier. Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide, in fact, testified in open court
that they had actually witnessed him commit those crimes. Walus was stripped of his
US citizenship, received threatening letters and phone calls, was ruined financially by
legal fees, was called “Gestapo” and “Nazi,” and had stones thrown at him by his own
neighbors. He was facing deportation when officials acknowledged evidence that he
had been elsewhere, in Germany working on labor farms, during the time the crimes
of which he was accused were committed. Such are the travails of human memory,
and critical thinkers will consider the potential distortions that the time between the
experience and the memory may have introduced.
Transferred memories
We can even transfer information within and across memories. A dress worn at one
party might be remembered as having been worn at another. Innocent victims and
by-standers may be remembered as perpetrators. Our memory has the capacity to, as
it were, cut-and-paste content from one memory into another. In what’s sometimes
called the law of recency, a phenomenon related to the influence of post-event information, we not only remember best what we’ve experienced most recently, but we also
sometimes transfer the content of recent memories into older ones. For example, you
might remember someone you saw recently with glasses as wearing glasses in the past,
even though in the past your acquaintance wore contact lenses. Again, good critical
thinkers should look where possible for corroboration of memory by others and for
physical evidence as an important safeguard against this effect.
Stress and trauma
Stress and trauma can, unsurprisingly, affect both perception and memory. Psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson produced findings that led to
Foresman, Galen A., et al. The Critical Thinking Toolkit, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bellevue-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4538252.
Created from bellevue-ebooks on 2021-06-14 1