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.
