Summary
In this chapter, Slater writes about Elizabeth Loftus and her work trying to demonstrate that false memories are far, far more common than repressed memories surfacing. Dr. Loftus has a particular focus on fighting charges of sexual abuse that come from such a source.
Discussion
I still feel this book is a little long on the flowery prose when it should be focusing a bit more on experiments, etc. But I digress. What Loftus believes seems like common sense to me; unless I've taken careful pains to memorize something, I wouldn't talk about my own memories as hard facts.
Here's my interesting thought for the chapter: On 9/11 (Sorry, no Challenger), when my old man called from the barber shop and told my mother to turn the TV on, I was eating cereal at the breakfast table in our dining room. I know these things for facts, since in addition to the images I memorized my own account of the morning. Doing it in words is kind of like digital instead of analog storage for me; it self repairs every time I think about it.
The interesting part is this: I couldn't tell you what kind of cereal I was eating. Given my preferences and how they've changed over time, it's 60/40 between the one thing and another. Now, I'll bet that if I believed all memory was stored and just needed to be recalled, I would think it was one or the other, with certainty. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about the ramifications of that, if any.
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