A history of memory

Sunday 13 May 2012 5:00PM


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Lynne Malcolm:  On RN you’re with All in the Mind, I’m Lynne Malcolm and today we reflect on memory.

I was sitting high on my father’s shoulders, peering across the crowds at the opening of the local swimming pool, my dress had rosebuds embroidered on it and I was feeling grumpy. Perhaps I was three, the memory is crystal clear, but is it an authentic memory, or has it been helped by the family snapshot of this very moment?

Memory has always worried us; scientists have wrestled for centuries with what it is, how it works and its reliability. Associate professor of history Alison Winter from the University of Chicago has traced our concepts of memory through history. First she remembers something from her childhood.

Alison Winter:  In this memory I’m very little, probably between one and two. I am playing with one of those toys that has a series of graduated donut shaped plastic rings and the whole thing is shaped kind of like a cone and you stack them up. So in this memory I worked very, very hard to stack these things up and I’m just staring at this completed cone thinking it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life and I am the greatest genius that there ever was because I succeeded in putting all of this together.

So my psychologist friends say there’s no way that this can be a memory because it’s too early. That memories from before say, three years of age are not retained, so what you remember of that earlier period is constructed. But other psychologists say well, you know, we’re changing our sense of early childhood and memory and you know that’s possible that you could remember this. My mother with her own memory of my childhood said I was six months old when I was playing with this particular toy—which I find implausible because I don’t think any baby could manipulate this particular toy at this age—so that’s her false memory. It’s interesting because so many different claims about what you can remember and how you can remember and how you would ever confirm the validity of a particular memory come into play.

Lynne Malcolm:  These questions about her own memories inspired Alison Winter’s historical analysis of how scientists’ concept of memory has changed dramatically over the past century. Her recent book is called Memory: Fragments of a Modern History. So how did we characterise memory a century ago?

Alison Winter:  There have always been models, metaphors for memory because it’s such an elusive thing and usually there are metaphors that have to do with writing or recording some kind of information storage to think about how the mind stores information. And at the turn of the century the dominant metaphor was the filing cabinet. There are also ancient metaphors that continue to be used like the wax tablet that you scratch, you scratch an impression into a wax tablet and over time that scratch gets scratched over by other things so your memory softens or becomes eroded. But the filing cabinet was a model that was quite common in this early time, the
early 20th century.

Lynne Malcolm:  In the early 1900s science began devising techniques to retrieve the truth and the idea of the truth serum came into play.

Alison Winter:  The irony about its history is that we now I think associate it with a kind of coercive interrogations of forcing someone to tell you something they don’t want to tell. But in the 1920s it was used in the hopes of correcting corrupt police practices and this truth serum, which was actually an obstetric drug, was thought to guarantee the testimony of people whose freedom was at risk. It was almost like it was a truth serum for society in the 20s, and the claim was that you would just be able to pull the drawer of the filing cabinet and rifle through anything that was inside.

The truth serum drugs that were developed in the 20s and 30s became in the second World War these really widespread tools for retrieving past memories. So if you had some kind of traumatic amnesia and you couldn’t remember some big chunk of your past, you might be given either scopolamine, which is the early 20th century drug, or sodium amytal or sodium pentothal in an attempt to bring back these memories. And you also might be given hypnosis, just depending on what someone had handy.

Lynne Malcolm:  And just after the war thousands of people became enthusiastic about these memory retrieving practices. In a famous case one ordinary businessman from Colorado called Morrie Bernstein started doing hypnosis as a kind of party trick. The more he read about it the more he became interested in the possibility of remembering past lives through hypnosis. He went on to unleash a story which took the world by storm—the case of Bridey Murphy.

Alison Winter:  So this guy met a woman at a country club party who seemed to him extraordinarily hypnotically susceptible and he persuaded her to embark on a course of experiments in which he would regress her to earlier periods of her life.  And he told her during one of these sessions that not only would she go back to an earlier phase of this life but she would go even further back. He didn’t say how far back but he said further than this life and after a very pregnant pause she spoke in a different accent and a few seconds later introduced herself as Bridey Murphy; her name in 1950s America was Virginia Tighe. It turned out that Bridey Murphy thought of herself as having lived in the late 18th and early 19th century. She’d been born in the 1790s in Ireland and died in the 1850s.

Lynne Malcolm:  The hypnotist Morrie Bernstein published a book in 1956 on his extraordinary story of past life regression called The Search for Bridey Murphy. It so captured the imagination of society that it’s been almost continuously in print ever since.

Alison Winter:  The way it played out in the mid 50s was that he did these experiments and somebody in a Colorado newspaper picked up the story and then it hit the headlines nationally and became a national sensation very quickly. People were doing copycat experiments; there were hypnotists who were actually advertising that they would sell you a previous existence for $25, if you had more they were $25 a piece. There were investigative reporters dispatched from the national papers off to Ireland to check Bridey’s story expecting that these very concrete claims that Bridey Murphy had made that these would be disproved.

Well the interesting thing is it turned out to be really hard to conclusively disprove what she said. For instance there was a village that she mentioned and it wasn’t on the map so investigators initially thought that Virginia Tighe was either actually making this up or she’s concocting it unwittingly, but then when they actually went to the spot, there were people who lived there who said that there was such a place only it had always been tiny and so it had never made it on to any map.

So after these reporters had combed the countryside of Ireland in search of evidence for or against Bridey, and while people across America were doing these copycat experiments to find their own pasts, there were also reporters who were starting to investigate Virginia Tighe’s own past. The reporters went to Wisconsin and Chicago where Virginia Tighe had spent her childhood before moving to Colorado and what they found were all sorts of details which seemed in some ways connected to the life of Bridey Murphy. 

For instance there was a woman who was actually called Bridey Murphy who lived in Virginia Tighe’s neighbourhood, they also found in the neighbourhood where she lived they found a store with a name very similar to the name of a shop that Bridey had described for her village in Ireland and Tighe would have had to walk past this if she ever went to the cinema. She also apparently was good at having a fake Irish accent when she was in high school and had forgotten about this and even had one Irish relative. So the psychologists weighed in and said clearly what’s happened here is that Virginia Tighe has unwittingly called up little details from her own past but that became the stuff of Bridey Murphy.

So the psychologists said this is an excellent example of what became known as 'experimenter effect', how you can get a false result by either persuading yourself that you see what you want to see or by subtly and unwittingly encouraging your experimental subject to act in a way that will make your experiment a success. And they claimed that Morrie Bernstein had, because he had actually told Virginia Tighe that he wanted to discover proof of reincarnation, that she obliged him by being reincarnated. And over the course of the experiment he had unwittingly led her and she’d led him back in a kind of folie a deux to create this phenomenon  just out of wishful thinking.

News Items: In Dallas Texas three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas.

It’s just been announced that Diana, Princess of Wales has died after a car crash in Paris.

And then we saw smoke coming out, everybody sort of running out and then we saw the plane on the other side of the building and there was smoke everywhere. People were jumping out of the windows. Oh my God.

Lynne Malcolm:  Does hearing some of those pivotal moments in history trigger particular personal memories for you about where you were and what you were doing when these events occurred?  Alison Winter’s historical account of our concept of memory also tells us a lot about the history of information technology through the lens of our changing understanding of memory. One example of this is what became known as the flashbulb memory.

Alison Winter:  One of the things that most interested me in my research is the relationship between recording technologies on the one hand and how they’ve been understood; and what you might call internal memory, memory within our minds. Because researchers on memory have tended to compare memory to whatever recording device was most exciting, or cutting edge at the time. So the story about the flashbulb has to do with the way that people took pictures with cameras in the 20th century.

During my childhood there were many ads for cameras and film that talked about the Kodak moment you could take a picture of a moment in your family’s life that was on the one hand perfectly ordinary but on the other hand it would be absolutely unique and there would be this one special moment like the moment when a child takes a dive in a pool for the first time. Something both mundane and superb and then if you don’t have the camera with you you can’t capture that moment and it’s a split second.

Well the national event that was related to this idea of a frozen moment was the moment when people in America heard about the assassination of President Kennedy and for years after that people would talk about where they were and what they were doing at the moment when they heard about the assassination. This is the early days of television so it was one of the first times when something of this scale of shock was communicated so quickly to so many people. And psychologists at Harvard Roger Brown and James Kulik were intrigued by how vivid these descriptions were of the moment. It was almost they thought like a photograph and they weren’t the first people to make this comparison.

There was a neuroscience researcher called Livingston, he had this theory that he called ‘now print’ and what he claimed was that there was a moment like a flashbulb moment when if something very, very important happened to you, particularly something traumatic, you would almost print neurologically. You would save a very, very rich amount of information about what you were doing without filtering out little details. So for instance right now I’m sitting in this sound room in front of a microphone and if something cataclysmic happens I might remember the particular shape of a tissue that’s poking out of a box on the table in front of me. Some totally irrelevant details but completely preserved in all their richness because according to Livingston at these moments of extreme trauma you don’t know what might be important so you save everything.

So Brown and Kulik ten years later looked back on Livingston’s work as a way of explaining these memories that people had of the Kennedy assassination and they, using the most appropriate recording technology metaphor said this is a flashbulb memory, for just a tiny moment your world is completely lit up by a flashbulb and it’s saved. The example that I give of a flashbulb memory in my own life is I remember exactly where I was on the stairs and which foot was about to take the next step when I heard the news about planes flying into the World Trade Centre, my right foot was about to take a downward step and I remember everything, or so it feels to me.

Now there were many people who disagreed with this and there’s been 20 years of research on it but that was the claim that was made in the late 1970s.

Lynne Malcolm:  And what’s the latest thinking on that type of memory.

Alison Winter:  Ever since that claim was made people have claimed that these memories are strong, sure because they have all those emotional associations to the event. And because this is a moment when our lives intersected with these grand events we want to feel like we saved them forever, almost like a memento. But that doesn’t mean that they are actually accurate, so there have been many studies, and quite conflicting in their results, about how well we remember these particular kinds of really vividly remembered stuff. And some studies have found that they’re not that well remembered and other studies have found that they are remembered better than ordinary memories but not as well as we think. So it’s been conflicting.

The trend in the psychological sciences is to think of memory as being very reconstructive, that is we think we have a continuous access to our original experiences like I think I can remember a birthday party that I had with my dad when I was five.  But actually what I probably remember is a picture of myself with the cake and I turned that into a place holder for an original memory that is long gone and may have had nothing to do with the photograph beside the fact that that photograph exists.

So the most widely accepted understanding of memory now is that we continually remake what our memories actually are but we think of them as being reliable and authentic.

Lynne Malcolm:  You’re listening to All in the Mind, Lynne Malcolm with you on RN, Radio Australia and online. I’m speaking with Alison Winter, associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, about the ever evolving concept of memory. It’s fascinated scientists for centuries and the way we conceptualise it has changed dramatically, Take the memory wars of the 80s and 90s.

Speaker:  The issue of recovering memories as a result of therapies has reached fever pitch throughout a number of high profile court cases.

Speaker:  She said that she had been receiving this therapy and the doctors felt she must have been abused as a child and blocked it out.

Speaker:  The jury is still out on the reliability of recently recovered memories and traumatic experiences suddenly recalled during psychological therapy.

Alison Winter: Starting in the early 80s and then really picking up speed in the second half of the decade adults, women from the ages of 19 through even their 50s but most likely in their 20s and 30s began to report that they had been sexually abused when they were children and then they had been amnesic for these memories, they couldn’t remember them because they had been repressing the memories they couldn’t bear to remember. But usually during the course of psychotherapy but sometimes spontaneously these memories would come back when they were adults and they were able to confront their parents or whoever had abused them now that they were mature and strong enough to cope with the truth of it. And the numbers of these people coming forward were potentially enormous, it seemed like the beginning of a sea change in how we thought of childhood and family relations because psychotherapists were starting to claim that as many as one in three, one in four, one in two women had been abused as a child and a slightly less shocking but still a very grave fraction of men had had the same traumas.

So that was the beginning of it. Then what happened was that starting around 1990 there were some questions about whether this was really plausible that such a high proportion of adult women had been abused when they were children, and so completely blocked out the memories of this abuse. And there was this one particular family in which this came to a head. It was a family of Pamela and Peter Fried and their daughter, who was actually an academic psychologist, accused Peter of abusing her. This was when their daughter was an established academic and had her own children; this happened over Christmas that suddenly her memories returned.

She threw the parents out and the family has been estranged ever since. Now this sort of thing was happening all over the country but what was unusual in this case was that the Fried parents, instead of just protesting to their daughter that it wasn’t true, they decided that they wanted to start a national campaign to attack the very concept of recovered memory. The tried to start a non-profit research entity to document the social phenomenon of these claims of recovered memory, so the idea was that it would be studied by scientists, by psychologists and sociologists and politically and culturally it would be challenged.

And Peter Fried wanted there to be an entity that could take the place of recovered memory and so what they came up with was false memory syndrome instead of recovered memory syndrome. So they mounted this campaign and they started a False Memory Syndrome Foundation and then all over the country there sprouted up false memory syndrome societies and support groups, a really huge grass roots network of families who had been affected by these complaints. And throughout the early and middle 90s there were these really violent fights about the legitimacy of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse and cascades of law suits as children sued their parents and then parents sued the therapists of the children because they blamed the therapist for having concocted the memories.

Lynne Malcolm:  Alison Winter says that the False Memory Syndrome Foundation had an enormous amount of scientific support and therefore became far more influential in their claims than the proponents of recovered memory. However it remains a contentious debate and whilst there are some exceptions in the Catholic Church sex abuse cases, the false memory proponents largely won out as far as law suits go. But a large amount of estrangement in families continues as a result of these conflicts.

I’d like now to turn to more recent neuroscientific research that’s interesting—material that’s coming out in the process of studying traumatic memories and post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s no longer considered the best thing to bring out traumatic memories and to relive them is it?

Alison Winter:  No, and it’s really interesting, it’s one of the most interesting changes in the memory sciences in the whole century because until a very short time ago, maybe the last 15 years, it was thought that the very best thing you could do is remember better and more vividly and more completely. Because if you didn’t the thing that you weren’t remembering was perhaps affecting you unwittingly so you would be a more mindful adult and more mature if you could remember more no matter how traumatic the memory was.

But both therapists and neuroscientists of the last 15 years have said well actually first of all we don’t believe that memory is this continuous perfect thing but also the more you dwell on upsetting things from the past the more upsetting they will be. So maybe the best thing to do is to learn techniques for thinking about certain elements of the past less, or maybe you could even take drugs that soften the emotional memories that attach to certain biographical events.

Lynne Malcolm:  And so steps are being taken to develop techniques even for therapeutic forgetting, treating people with drugs to dampen their bad memories.

Alison Winter:  Yes, that’s been much in the news in the last few years. One thing I should say before I say more about it is that the use of these drugs is based partly on the idea of something called reconsolidation and this is a pretty new claim that every time you remember something it has to be stored again in the brain. So it’s not that you have this kind of dead thing sitting inside you like a book on a shelf, it’s more like every time you consult a memory you call up a file on your computer and you play with it and then you save it again. So if you turn off a computer without saving it you would damage the file. So the idea is that maybe you could intervene at that special moment when you’re remembering to alter the memory as it’s being saved.

The neuroscientists who are interested in memory dampening as it’s most commonly called think well maybe you can chemically alter memory as it’s being saved and that’s what this drug propranolol is being used to do. It affects the hormonal response to a particular memory and then the idea is that when that memory is saved the hormonal response that is associated with it will be smaller because the drug has dampened down the particular hormonal response that you had that time.

Lynne Malcolm:  So having studied a century of our attempts to grasp the nature of memory and how it works, how close does Alison Winter think we now are to an accurate understanding of it? 

Alison Winter:  My sense is that our understanding of memory is perhaps in some ways like the claims that we make about memory itself that we’re not getting asymptotically close to the one truth about the nature of memory. We are remaking how we think about the mind and the brain and behaviour as scientific research shifts in different ways and different fields come into conflict or synergy with one another. I think it’s an extraordinarily interesting time right now because so many different fields are talking to each other in ways that they never did before. The clinical psychologists and laboratory psychologists and neuroscientists and clinicians are connected and learning from one another instead of fighting with one another as they did for most of the previous century.

Lynne Malcolm:  Alison Winter is associate professor of history at the University of Chicago. Her book Memory, Fragments of Modern History is published by the University of Chicago Press. Check our website for details at abc.net.au/radionational and choose All in the Mind in the program list. From there you can also find the audio of our programs, transcripts and of course you can add your comments. It would be great to hear about your early memories and how accurate you think they are. You’ll find us on Facebook, follow @allinthemind on Twitter as well.

Thanks today to sound engineer Anne Marie Debettencort, I’m Lynne Malcolm. Join me next week for more on our memory, some interesting new ideas about how we remember together, don’t forget, same time next week.  Bye for now.





Alison Winter
Author and Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago


Memory, Fragments of a Modern History
Alison Winter
University of Chicago Press
Mesmerized, Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain
Alison Winter
University of Chicago Press

Further Information

Alison Winter


Lynne Malcolm

Comments (8)

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  • Rasili O'Connor :

    13 May 2012 7:57:09pm

    To add to the information presented by Alison Winter, regarding the term, 'False Memory Syndrome':

    • ‘False Memory Syndrome’ is not a recognised medical or psychological diagnosis and it does not appear in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III-R nor does it appear in the recently released DSM-IV.

    • Two of the main people responsible for creating the False Memory Syndrome Foundation were Ralph Underwager, a Lutheran Minister and psychologist, and his wife Hollida Wakefield. These two people were (before the invention of the term ‘False Memory’) interviewed in 1993 in the Dutch paedophile magazine, Paedika, and in that interview, they were supportive of paedophilia.

    Also: I personally have remembered a particular incident, as a (previously) repressed memory (something done to me). A sister of mine, remembers the same thing done to her, but she had not repressed the memory.

    Also: most police and emergency services workers are aware that many people repress (cannot remember) the experience leading up to, e.g. a car accident.

    Also: there is a young man I know of who has zero memory of being involved in paedophilic sessions when he was a boy and being photographed during those sessions. Many years later, as an adult, he was presented with those photographs of himself, and was shocked to see that he had completely and utterly repressed the memory of those experiences.

    Also: it is well known that people returning from, e.g. WWII blocked out (repressed) many of their experiences.

    Also: it is well documented that many (not all) survivors of Auschwitz and other concentration camps, cannot remember much of what happened when there as children.

    Best of wishes,
    Rasili (O'Connor)

      • Recovered memory doubter :

        14 May 2012 6:20:11pm

        • ‘False Memory Syndrome’ is not a recognised medical or psychological diagnosis and it does not appear in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III-R nor does it appear in the recently released DSM-IV.....This does not mean that people don't have false memories - it has been well proven that they do. It is semantics.

        • Two of the main people responsible for creating the False Memory Syndrome Foundation were Ralph Underwager, a Lutheran Minister and psychologist, and his wife Hollida Wakefield. These two people were (before the invention of the term ‘False Memory’) interviewed in 1993 in the Dutch paedophile magazine, Paedika, and in that interview, they were supportive of paedophilia....It does not follow that all those concerned with the damage done via false memories are pedophiles.

        Also: I personally have remembered a particular incident, as a (previously) repressed memory (something done to me). A sister of mine, remembers the same thing done to her, but she had not repressed the memory....How do you know that you did not develop the memory as a result of hearing your sister's story? If it happened to your sister, it is not proof it happened to you.

        Also: most police and emergency services workers are aware that many people repress (cannot remember) the experience leading up to, e.g. a car accident....Sure. There is no argument that memories can't be repressed - the controversy is more about completely forgotten memories of trauma being recovered 'intact' decades later.

        Also: there is a young man I know of who has zero memory of being involved in paedophilic sessions when he was a boy and being photographed during those sessions. Many years later, as an adult, he was presented with those photographs of himself, and was shocked to see that he had completely and utterly repressed the memory of those experiences....presumably he (mercifully) forgot the experiences, this is not unknown for those who suffer trauma.

        Also: it is well known that people returning from, e.g. WWII blocked out (repressed) many of their experiences....there is a difference between willful repression and recovering memories after complete amnesia out of the blue deccades later.

        Also: it is well documented that many (not all) survivors of Auschwitz and other concentration camps, cannot remember much of what happened when there as children....True. But have there been many cases of proven 'recovered memories' of these type after decades of complete amnesia? Most survivors of trauma are unable to forget.

          • Rasili O'Connor :

            14 Jun 2012 11:02:26am

            Hi 'Recovered memory doubter',


            Best wishes,
            Rasili (O'Connor)

  • paul griffin :

    14 May 2012 9:45:26am

    Western psychology apparently disproved the particular example of recollection of past lives quoted, however there are numerous other instances of recollection of events etc. from past lives on the internet which have been validated by informal research; this is not an area that science has an interest in.

  • Fred Dutch :

    19 May 2012 9:51:12pm

    I have a particular interest in the working of memory. A couple of years back I had my drink spiked with Diazepam. This caused a blackout. On waking the next morning I realised I could not remember things that happened the night before past a certain point in time. I had no recollection of going back to my hotel room, the last thing I remembered was taking a sip from my drink.

    I reported the incident which also involved robbery to the police. At the time I was still under influence of the substance administered. Diazepam was found in my urine sample.

    My main concern was finding out what happened during the blackout, my “lost time”. Initially I thought the last drink I could remember had been spiked. However after a couple of days I began to realise things were not as they should have been earlier on. By now I was back home, not able to revisited the location of the incident. I studied the route I had walked with the perpetrator on google maps and realised that this was different from what I remembered. I thought I had simply crossed the street at the time to use the ATM. However I now saw there was a considerable distance between the place I remembered and the ATM.

    I decided to write down everything I could remember. It took about four hours to record this in a notebook, pen on paper. By the time I finished writing my hands were cramping up. During this writing I remembered far more details. I also began to realise my conduct had not been normal. I had allowed things to happen which I should have objected to. This made me realise my drink was spiked earlier than I thought initially.

    What I believed to remember as a coherent memory of event turned out to be a fragmented sequence of small bits and pieces. It was as if a film that I previously thought to be complete had been cut in small parts, only fragments remaining. Gaps I had not noticed earlier became clear to me by comparing my memory of events with maps I found on google. Things were missing. One image of a location I had not remembering before came up. It was like a photograph, a flash bulb image. It helped me to reconstruct the route I had walked before I totally blacked out.

    Thinking of this I realise we initially remember lots of details that soon are forgotten. Only the most significant remain, those fitting in with our storyline. The rest is discarded and can only be remembered with great effort. Going trough events in chronological order a few days after the event helped me remember a lot of detail. It also made clear to me that the amnesia did not set in immediately after ingesting the Diazepam. It came on gradually with ever larger parts of events not encoded.

  • Fred Dutch :

    21 May 2012 4:44:54am




  • Mysta Squiggle :

    29 May 2012 2:16:12am

    Congratulations Lynne, so far your handling of the AITM is great and I do hope that it lasts more than the twelve weeks you vaguely mentioned in your first programme.

    A group of us in Sydney that meets regularly to discuss AITM chose this episode as our topic this month. See http://www.meetup.com/mindpod/events/64847242/ which links through to...

    * An RN podcast interview related to the Jan & Peter Freyd (not Fried) incest false-memory story

    * A 2001 Washington Uni experiment which implanted blatantly false memories into a third of the subjects

    * Just yesterday the Treyvan Martin vs George Zimmerman trial revealing wildly contradictory witness accounts

  • Ian Kath :

    28 Jun 2012 6:42:48pm

    I liked this episode so much I thought I'd post a comment as an AudioBoo –> http://audioboo.fm/boos/864855-lousy-memories-we-have.

    Back in the day All In The Mind was using AudioBoo but that seems to have passed but my comments were also reflective of the power of congruent journaling as a means of assisting memories.