Over and over memory researchers (e.g., Elizabeth Loftus) and proponents of reforms of the legal treatment of eyewitness evidence assert that the mind or the brain is not like a tape recorder or a camera -- and newspapers and TV reporters are fond of repeating such pronouncements. These memory researchers and legal reformers mean to debunk, they say (over and over) the popular misconception that the brain is like a tape recorder. I have been puzzled about such anti-memory-as-tape-recorder pronouncements. How many members of the public actually believe that human memory is nearly perfect because the human organism and its brain and its sensory organs etc. work like a perfectly well-oiled and well-calibrated machine? How many serious scholars said anything like that? I have done a bit of Google research. My conclusion: IT IS AN URBAN MYTH THAT MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC OR SCHOLARS SUCH AS PSYCHOLOGISTS GENERALLY BELIEVE OR EVER GENERALLY BELIEVED THAT THE HUMAN ANIMAL AND ITS PERCEPTIONS AND ITS MEMORY WORK LIKE AN ALMOST PERFECT TAPE RECORDER OR CAMERA. (I may eventually marshal and present some of my evidence here, but, frankly, I'm not sure I need to.) Did Proust subscribe to this memory-as-camera memory-as-perfect-machine myth? Shakespeare? Immanuel Kant? Jung? Hegel? Helmholtz? John Dewey? Are members of the public unaware that they sometimes or often forget where they put their keys or their children, or that they often cannot remember the names of some or many of their high school classmates? Is it really the case that jurors need to be told that the human mind, sense organs, etc. do not operate like (well-maintained and perfectly-calibrated) tape recorders or cameras?
- I suppose that an occasional person believes or believed that the human animal's perceptions are machine-like, always accurate, and permanent even for practical purposes. So what? Some people probably believe that the moon is made of green cheese and that they died yesterday. It doesn't follow that many or most people believe such things.
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Postscript: Some scholars -- esp. some neuroscientists and AI theorists -- think that the brain is like a machine. But that does not mean that such people think or thought that the human animal has perfect and permanent recall.
I think you have constructed and attacked a straw man, only partly clarified by your postscript. The idea that a memory is somehow a recording in the brain has been prevalent among psychologists and was generally accepted with the main disagreements during the last several decades being over how and where the recording is made, stored, and retrieved. Is a "memory recording" a macromolecule (RNA? polypeptide?), an altered neuron, a neuronal circuit, or field effect (hologramic)?
Some Google searches:
"James V. McConnell" memory
"Wilder Penfield" memory
"J. Z. Young" memory
I expect the "man on the street" understanding of memory is not as well articulated and tested as in the scientific searches for understanding, but it nevertheless seems to me that the common notion is that memory functions as some kind of audio/video recorder in the brain. The recording may not be perfect because what is recorded is influence by our "attention," which may be distracted or not fully engaged. "I can't remember" is generally explained as a failure to retrieve the desired recording and not necessarily a failure to record. It is also understood that some memories fade with time (like a cassette tape wearing out or an ancient photograph). BUT I think most people generally believe that a memory IS a faithful recording to the extent that it is retrievable and not "faded."
The memory/recorder myth may have some similarities to the eye/camera myth (google "eye is like a camera"). There is an analogy between the eye (of a chordate) and a camera as far as the lens and iris for focusing and controlling the amount of light entering the eye. Beyond that, there is no similarity, and attempting to establish an analogy between film in a camera and the retina is misleading.
I will defer researching the extent to which psychologists and other scholars once generally believed that the human animal, its perceptions, and memory work like an almost-mistake-free tape recorder or camera. (Good scholars and scientists have long recognized that traces left on physical matter by space-time events can "deceive," can amount to false positives. Cf., e.g., the problem of "noise" in signal detection theory.) But I will point out now that the jury instructions approved by New Jersey and the trial testimony of experts on memory and perception are directed at jurors and not at some past cohort of academics and scholars such as psychologists. I repeat: I very much doubt that ordinary people believe that their memories and perceptions are almost invariably accurate. I just don't believe that "ordinary" people generally have that much confidence in human perceptions and human memory. This is why I think it's patronizing to have experts or trial judges effectively tell jurors that they should abandon their common belief that human memory works like a very accurate tape recorder or camera. If I am correct, such an instruction or testimony addresses a problem that does not exist. (But I suppose most jurors understand that they are being patronized and thus will usually ignore -- or perhaps resent -- such an instruction or expert testimony.)
Examples of mistaken identity in popular culture:
film "The Wrong Man," Alfred Hitchcock, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wrong_Man
The Adolf Beck Case, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Beck
film "Aparan," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aparan_(film)
"8. 'The Great Dictator' (1940)
© Warner Home Video
In The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin assumes two roles: Adenoid Hynkel, a terrifying dictator who rules over fictional country Tomainia with an iron fist, and an unnamed Jewish barber that happens to look exactly like Hynkel. The majority of The Great Dictator follows the two characters as they go about their day-to-day lives – in the film’s most famous scene, for example, Hynkel plays with an oversized balloon that looks like a globe – but in the film’s final stretch, the barber finds himself mistaken for his infamous doppelganger. Wackiness, unfortunately, does not ensue – the barber instead decries his look-alike’s agenda during a speech delivered to the world – yet it’s not to diminish what is otherwise a landmark comedy." http://movies.about.com/od/toppicks/tp/mistaken-identity-top-10.htm
The Google search phrase --
"mistaken identity" film fiction --
generates many misses but among the literally millions of hits it generates are hundreds and probably thousands of examples of films, novels, plays, etc., whose plot involves a mistaken identification of the sort under discussion here. So: it is unlikely the ordinary person believes that eyewitnesses almost never err/
Psychology & Law: Using Psychological Science to Reduce Mistaken Identifications in Criminal Cases
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZdNiNeHCDo
About 44 min recording of a webinar: about a half-hour lecture by Gary Wells followed by Michael Leippe's responses to questions.
More on the myth that ordinary people generally believe that perceptions and memory are very much like mistake-free tape recorders or cameras: popular culture: another of almost innumerable examples of films etc. with mistaken identification as part of the plot: "Call Northside 777" (1948 film), http://classicmoviesnippets.blogspot.com/2012/03/call-northside-777-1948.html
N.B. It is a mistake to think that my challenge to the supposed common belief in the infallibility of eyewitness identification means that I think that jurors do not repose too much trust in some types of eyewitness identification or that eyewitness identification procedures (e.g., in lineups) cannot be improved. My claim that there is a "myth of a myth" about jurors' beliefs about human perception and memory says nothing about these more discrete questions. Furthermore, like "ordinary" people, I am quite prepared to believe that eyewitness identifications are frequently inaccurate.
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