Memory

My brother-in-law, a distinguished theoretical physicist, does not confine himself to abstruse mathematical formulations.  He takes time from his theorizing to paint in watercolor, work as a cabinet maker (mainly for the benefit of his daughters), and to delve into whatever matters catch his attention.  One of these matters was the ancient painting of geese that my wife and I saw at the Egyptian Museum and that I had described in an earlier post.  He asked me if I had a copy of the painting, which forced me to confess that I had tried to find one without success.  He promptly found a copy and sent me the link to it (http://egyptsites.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/meidum-necropolis/).

I was astonished when I opened the link and looked again at the painting, because in an earlier post I had described the painting incorrectly, placing a pair of geese on each side, with a single goose standing behind each pair, as if waiting its turn.  As you can see, a single goose is at each side, with a pair behind it.  To that lapse can be added another: I had failed to notice that the pair on the left are geese, whereas the pair on the right are ganders.

If I had seen this painting several years or even months before writing about it in my blog, I would not have been surprised.  But I wrote about it not more than two weeks after seeing it.  If my memory of such a recent event cannot be trusted, what is the likelihood that my accounts of earlier events, especially those of childhood, can be trusted?  Is the fallibility of memory the reason that my brother and I remember some  childhood events in drastically differing ways, as if we had grown up in different families? 

The other day, my wife and I were discussing the soap operas we listened to as children when we stayed home from school because we were sick.  I mentioned “Our Gal Sunday,” and recited the question that opened every episode, “can a girl from a little mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of one Britain’s handsomest and richest lords?”  And then I gave the lord’s name, Henry Brinthrup.  I was pretty proud of having remembered all that.  A check on Google, however,  proved my memory faulty.  This is the actual opening,  "Once again, we present Our Gal Sunday, the story of an orphan girl named Sunday from the little mining town of Silver Creek, Colorado, who in young womanhood married England's richest, most handsome lord, Lord Henry Brinthrope. The story that asks the question: Can this girl from the little mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman?"   So my memory for a serial that I must have heard 100 times during my childhood was correct in its outline but not in its detail.

Eyewitness testimony, which has falsely convicted many prisoners whose innocence was later proved by DNA analysis, is notoriously unreliable, but you would suppose that a leisured examination of a painting two weeks before and an epigraph heard one hundred times, even if heard 70 years ago, would yield correct memories.  That they do not is shocking.  Is this a function of my advanced age or has my memory always been so full of holes?  In any case, I find myself in good company.  When he was old, Mark Twain said that his memory used to be excellent: he could remember anything, whether it had happened or not, but now he could only remember the latter.


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