Friday, March 17, 2017

Thanks for the Memory



Thanks for the memory, with a nod to Bob Hope. It turns out that Daniel Kahneman has a great deal to say about memory and experience. Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel for economics, with a great deal of help from his deceased friend Amos Tversky, has written a very large book, Thinking Fast and Slow, that is currently having an impact on the world of business, politics and, of course, academia. I do not intend to review that work here but I need to make the caveat right at the outset that much of what follows comes from that book. Please allow me to escape the charge of plagiarism by making this assertion at the beginning and excusing myself from inserting an unending series of quotes. 

As any lawyer, policeman, or judge can tell you eyewitness and memory evidence is fallible. In fact, it falls to the bottom of the list as far as evidential quality is concerned. Even lie detector tests are not or should not be trusted. That said we can turn to Kahneman to see why. His idea that we have two ways of thinking; one, instinctual and very fast – instantaneous and effortless, and the other slow, analytical and laborious. He and his colleague after a lifetime of extensive study have shown with unimpeachable research results that two things tend to happen: When a problem arises we all tend to respond with our instinctive or fast thought. It is easy, even if not very accurate. To say that it is not very accurate is in many cases a gross understatement. And if we discover that we need to analyze the problem and take some time it is relatively hard work. We often unconsciously avoid a lot of this work by answering a simpler related question instead, essentially missing the point.

The half million or so words that he uses to support these ideas I have no intention of summarizing or reviewing. Instead I want to address a small subset of his ideas related to memory. We make our life story essentially by two related but different means: memory and experience.

As we age we begin to form a life story using our memories as data. We want the story to be coherent, purposeful, and basically good and honorable. I have some fond memories of my dear departed wife Barbara recalling and relating some wonderful experiences we may have had on a vacation or cruise. She had a tendency to conflate two or more occasions and bundle them into the same narrative as if they all occurred at the same time. It made a better story. I found this charming and never demurred. It was her story after all. I would guess that we all are guilty, if I may use that term, of doing the same. How many remembered stories are precisely true as they actually happened? Precious few I would guess.

The other way in which life occurs is through experience. This is a very difficult word. We really never have a repeat of an experience. We may have a memory of that experience but we cannot duplicate the feeling we had at the time. In these modern times we use photography to try and preserve the experience by later replay. This had been going on for well over a hundred years. Most of us have boxes and boxes of pictures, most are of forgotten times and people, none of which actually recreate the experience that photographer had at the moment he took the picture. It still doesn’t really work. Today we can take dozens (I have a friend who takes thousands) of pictures on our holidays. It is a proven fact that we seldom look at many of them or at the most for very long. We have a frantic obsession with attempting to preserve the experience.

Our memories tend to be episodic and as I said earlier are in support of our ‘story.’ I recount here a rather extreme example of what can and surely does occur from my own background. 

During WWII I was a young sailor, an electronics technician aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer, the USS Nicholson DD442. During the time I served in the Nick we cruised back and forth in the Pacific between Hawaii, Eniwetok, Ulithi, Guam, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and eventually Okinawa for the big battle and then to Tokyo. I have recently been involved with an historian who is writing an account of the Nicholson’s exploits. I have recalled a great deal of material for him and I believe I have made a major contribution. For his part he has gone into the system and been able to retrieve quarterly ship’s muster rolls and monthly battle diary reports, all recently declassified. Much of the material in these reports I recall but a lot came as a real shocker.

My duty station was in the Combat Information Center which is located in the space just below the bridge on a destroyer. There is a rear facing open deck just behind CIC that I often spent time on to watch whatever might be happening or just for loafing if I was off duty. From that vantage point I could see the depth charges being deployed off the rear of the ship during the prosecution of a sonar contact and I had a good view of most of the armament aft of that point, two of the big 5 inch guns, the 40 mm twin mounts and the 20 mm twin mounts. The ammo for the 5 inch guns consisted of a 28 lb. powder cartridge and a 50 lb. projectile for each shot. One night in the anchorage at Okinawa I was rousted out of bed for a general quarters alert and came on deck headed for CIC just as the number three 5 inch gun right over my head was fired. It was very very loud and was a real shock to me. I’ll never forget it. So I know what the five inch guns sound like. The father of my daughter-in-law was also on a destroyer. He had duty in the radio shack and claims his hearing was impaired by the noise of the five inch guns during target practice. The radio shack is just below CIC. The kicker to this story is to be found in the monthly war diaries signed by the captain of our ship. I have read these diaries carefully. They report the expenditure of dozens if not hundreds of rounds of five inch projectiles in routine target practice in the Pacific during the period I was aboard. I heard none of them, only that one. Or so I remember.