“I Know What I Saw!” Thoughts on Perception, Memory, and Faith
“Memory’s unreliable…memory’s not perfect. It’s not even that good. Ask the police; eyewitness testimony is unreliable…. Memory can change the shape of a room or the color of a car. It’s an interpretation, not a record. Memories can be changed or distorted, and they’re irrelevant if you have the facts.” —Leonard Shelby, Memento
A recent episode of the Point of Inquiry podcast mentioned a book that instantly colored me intrigued. The title, 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions About Human Behavior, practically begged my inner-skeptic to read it. All the delicious psych topics are here—memory, recall, perception, intelligence, dreams, behavior, the subconscious, human development, even ESP. But one curious theme unintentionally keeps emerging: the unreliability of memory and personal experience.
Consider: Anyone old enough to have seen Dazed and Confused in the theater has had a wild experience, even sans LSD, we deem too trippy to be coincidence. We can’t explain it, we can’t tell you the meaning, but whoa, man, it was just unreal. Then out comes the supernatural explanations. But the bummer is we almost always underestimate the chances of strange coincidences happening. I still can’t work out in my mathphobic brain how if I’m in a room with twenty-two random people, the odds that two of us share the exact same birthday is…50%. But it’s true. (If you feel up to it, check out the Birthday Problem.)
Yep, the book is full of fun little facts. But it’s also chock full of disturbing information. A woman testified that her father had brutally murdered her best friend some twenty years prior. The guilty verdict was read, the gavel was banged, and right on cue the community was outraged. Fast-forward six years and this poor soul is shuffling out of prison after an exoneration courtesy of DNA testing. How on earth did his daughter come to believe twenty years later he was guilty? Under hypnosis, a therapist helped her “recover” the memory. It was mighty kind of the therapist to do that for a hefty fee and all, the only hiccup was the memory wasn’t real.
If that were the only story. You don’t need hypnosis for someone to be certain that a person is guilty of a crime they didn’t commit. There are countless stories of eyewitnesses swearing up and down and back up again that they saw that shady-looking defendant commit the crime. Some are later released thanks to the tireless efforts of the Innocence Project—an organization well worth your support. But I shudder to think how many terrified people keep on sharing a cell with the truly guilty; violent, disturbed inmates who need and deserve to be locked up. I’m long since past the naïve thinking of my youth that the innocent have nothing to fear. The innocent have much to fear, including the flawed human mind of otherwise well-meaning witnesses and victims. What’s more, many of these eyewitnesses refuse to say they made a mistake even with the light of DNA shining in their face. Unruffle the paper, dive into that story on the just-released accused, and you’re bound to see that inevitable declaration: “I don’t care what they say, I know what I saw!”
People know what we saw; we trust our eyes and our brains. And why on earth wouldn’t we? It’s quite literally our only means of experiencing the world. But few of us really think about the process of seeing something—light enters our eye, travels to our brain, and an image is formed. And then, within a millisecond, that image is a memory. Most images come and go without much thought. But some we remember. Some we know we’ll never forget. But we don’t really remember them. We re-remember them. Our brain recreates the memory and it’s highly influenced by our current worldview and life experiences. It’s telling that most scientists who study eyesight don’t call it eyesight; they call it “visual perception.”
All of which finally brings me around to my point: Given the limitations and what we know about the mind, how are we to navigate the very thorny world of spiritual experiences, visions, impressions, and insights? If we can’t rely on the human mind to not convict an innocent man, what business do we have trusting it on these other, even slippier points?
“Ahh…” we’re told, “That’s just the beauty of spiritual experiences. They transcend the mind and the five traditional senses.” Let’s politely pretend like this isn’t extremely convenient and assume it’s true. Instantly after the experience—the vision, the impression, the “other”—don’t we then rely on our mind to remember it, interpret it, understand it, or otherwise catalogue it away for us? Doesn’t this experience, if real, instantly fall victim to all the baggage cramping our brain?
And all that assumes that a spiritual experience was real—that something outside of us did happen. That’s one big, fat, giant assumption given what we know about the mind’s ability to create false images or memories, to create illusory correlations (find patterns that aren’t really patterns), justify our choices (cognitive dissonance), and to otherwise help confirm what we already believe, whether true or not. (I don’t care what the DNA says, I know what I saw!)
I do believe in knowable reality; I preach it on a near-daily basis in the face of increasing truthiness and incuriosity from my fellow citizens, many of whom are too busy admiring the emperor’s new clothes to be bothered with facts. And I maintain that it’s quite possible that at least some of these professed spiritual experiences are real and external. But I also maintain that they hold no recognizable value beyond “there might be something else out there.” Even that requires a leap of faith that it wasn’t all “in our head.” After that, it’s less faith than guesswork and wishful thinking. Given this reality, skepticism seems to me the most reasonable, rational perspective.
I need you too clarify some things for me. Are you equating experience of the visible world with experience of the invisible world; that is, are you saying each is equally unreliable as evidenced of sufficient proof for action?
However inadequate our physical senses may be in relating to us the nature of the visible world, there is still little doubt that the visible world exists. The same cannot be said of the invisible world (and I am not referring to the EM wavelengths beyond human vision).
I would also bring up another important point of which I suspect you ate already aware. The problems of human memory are not the problems of human perception. I can make the perfectly valid claim of having had a non-ordinary experience (what The religious would call a “spiritual” experience) even though I may not remember some details or even misremember others. in this not remembering and misremembering, I create one set of problems, but the do not necessarily disprove the occurrence if a significantly non-ordinary experience. And I create another set of problems when I fail to perceive accurately what I have never before perceived. (how in my lack of relevant experience could I not help but See things incorrectly?) But these problems also fail to dissuade one from believing the reality of the experience.
The key to all this is in the interpretation of the experience. The liberal-minded thinker will always acknowledge the potential for error in any interpretation of a “spiritual” experience, but he will not deny it’s reality. Instead he will look for the simplest explanation as the most reasonable, and that will likely do away with necessity of a spiritual realm existing above or outside of the physical realm.
Nahum,
I am not equating experiences from the visible world with the invisible world. And you are correct that I’ve rather sloppily moved in between two separate issues: visual perception and the fallibility of human memory. My larger point was just that our brains process everything for us. What we see is not merely a view of images that imprint themselves on our retinas. These images go through some kind of interpretation, much of which is not fully understood. This is also true of our other senses, and we have examples of some individuals with remarkable conditions that teach us just how much we rely on our brains to interpret the world for us – from something as benign as color-blindness to those with hallucinations. And then once our brains interpret these external things for us, that same remarkable organ is used to remember what we’ve just seen, felt, heard, or smelled. And just as what we see or hear is an interpretation, so is our memory of that perception. In some ways, our memory is a perception of a perception.
I’m not trying to muddy the waters and argue for no knowable reality or so impugn the mind that we can’t trust anything. I don’t believe that. In the visual, physical world, we have repetition to give us confidence in what we see and experience. We essentially walk through an informal version of the scientific method in our lives. And we often experience the world with other people who confirm what we see and experience. While none of this is infallible, it’s light years away from one random, often inexplicable so-called “spiritual experience” that may hit only rarely in life and may have no clear explanation or meaning. I’m willing to acknowledge that something external may have happened in that moment, but I think it still need be treated with the utmost skepticism. I think your last line, which is basically Occam’s Razor, is absolutely correct.