The forgetting brain, the Loftus-refuting mind

Elizabeth Loftus, blithely forgetting she said what she did.

Having an infinite, or practically so, memory capacity seems fantastic, no?

No, in reality.

For the few people who have something like that, it's as much curse as blessing.

How does your brain prioritize anything, first of all, if it doesn't have the capacity to forget — and to judge what is forgettable?

Second, how does your brain easily recall anything if it remembers everything?

That's part of why new neuroscience research on the power of forgetting is so interesting.

One main point is that forgetting comes in a variety of forms, some more active than others. Hold on to that thought.

Main subpoint 1 below that is that some of this forgetting, one variety of it, is "intrinsic." In other words, a base-level "Forgetting 101."

And a subpoint within that is the importance of dopamine in forgetting, at least in the old laboratory staple, the fruit fly. This is another refutation of simplistic takes on dopamine as "the pleasure molecule" or "the addiction neurotransmitter."

Nope, no such thing, going beyond that brain cells have multiple dopamine receptors, all shaped a bit differently.

A second subpoint within that is that scientists are learning by experimentation (with non-human animals only, no "Clockwork Orange," but hold on to that thought, too) to manipulate forgetting. In fact, I wrote about related research with rats back in 2013. Hold on to that, too. We're going to come to the second half of the header in a bit.

The second big point? Many forgotten memories are NOT "100 percent forgotten." At the least, the brain changes caused by an initially created memory aren't totally lost, not even a week or more later, not even with such a short-lived critter as a 1-year-lifespan sea slug.

I'm sure that, in years and decades ahead, we'll learn more about what is behind the unchanged.

Main subpoint?? This refutes some of Elizabeth Loftus' simplistic ideas on how the mind works. If we don't totally forget, but do often semi-totally forget, and emotions are involved with that, that shows her quasi-Freudian strawman of "repression," which she demolishes as quasi-Freudian after setting it up as a strawman, is all wrong. (In fact, a keyword search shows I previously blogged about his issue at the time another story was written about it. But, that's OK. This piece above is longer, and the second half of this header? The issues, and the person behind them, always need addressing.)

Speaking of "Clockwork Orange" and of blogging in 2013, I wondered back then if Loftus had actually mainlined on the movie.

One thing I noted there was the use of the word "repressed." Whether she consciously uses it in a quasi-Freudian sense or not, and whether she consciously does this as an attempt at strawmanning, she often comes off that way.

(Update, April 12, 2021: The LA Times says of this time, it's more than 300 cases, that it's $600 per billable hour. Update, June 7, 2022: Per this Hustle story on the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp dual defamation suit and the price of expert witnesses, this may be WAY low. In a murder case in 2017 in Couer d'Alene, Idaho, not exactly Los Angeles, and criminal not civil, one psychologist got $210K in expert witness fees. Hustle reminds us that expert witness billable hours include prep hours and depositions, not just trial time. The piece says that psychiatrists bill $575 per hour on trial time on average and psychologists [we'll put Loftus there] $531 per hour,  So, on the really high side, Loftus may be an expert witness millionaire. )

 

No wonder she loses many cases as an expert witness.

No matter how much she's paid.

And, since Freud has been dead for almost 80 years now, not the 70 I noted then, and Freudianism, except among certain elites outside psychiatry as much as inside it, has been dead for almost 60 years now, not 50, again, it's time for Loftus to move on, whether she's been doing this consciously or not.

Your memory is better than you think

Or rather, your and my short-term memory is better than we’ve previously been told.

Our ability to remember shocking images in memory has lead researchers to revise ideas about just how much we can hold in short-term memory. That’s somewhat true, still, but not in the way believed before.

Neuroscientists used to think there was a numeric limit, such as being able to hold no more than three or four items in short-term memory at a time, at least without “clumping.”

Now, it appears we should more closely use a computer analogy and say that our short-term memory limits are based on bytes of space, not number of items.

“Before people have had this idea that visual memory has a very simple limit: three or four items and that’s it,” said researcher Paul Bays, a neuroscientist at University College London. “What my research shows is that there isn’t that upper limit, but instead there’s a single resource that’s shared out between items. What happens is that the items that stand out get more of this resource, and so are remembered with greater precision.”

Obviously, further research needs to be done about things such as, what happens when two “standout” items that stand out for totally different reasons, are presented to awareness at about the same time.