People are not good authorities on what they know or remember, even when that information seems unforgettable. Their minds are too full of information to keep track of it all. Retrieving information without distorting it in the process can be nearly impossible.
A client needed help solving an expensive, critical problem. After several conversations, he told me the problem had developed on its own and that it was out of his control. He was absolutely certain of it and was ready to move on to the next item of business.
I had two pieces of information that came out of his mouth several months earlier. So I said he didn’t really believe what he was telling me, and that he had already stated the solution. After I reminded him of the earlier conversation, we were able to solve the problem with ease.
How could such a competent leader forget something so unforgettable? A perfectly normal mind begins forgetting things right away. It’s a law of memory. A normal person will also experience trauma and swear up and down, “I can never forget what happened. It changed me forever. I will never be the same. It has profoundly affected my life and all my relationships. It’s as if it happened yesterday.”
In fact, it is as though it happened as long ago as it did. No matter how honest we insist we are, many things contaminate our memories. We are left with fact and fabrication. Try putting 50 different coins in an empty box of chocolates and shaking them neatly into the different dividers. Information in our heads gets jumbled, re-sorted, rearranged, re-attached, replaced and lost. This is inevitable without very careful, proper maintenance, which is highly unlikely to happen when strong emotion is involved.
Emotion fuels an influential bias to find and construct a conclusion. We are so sure that something has been stamped indelibly on our memory, while we accumulate various sorts of mismatched associations with other mental data.
Human memory is partly chaotic, precisely because it is so powerful. It gathers vast quantities of information haphazardly and intentionally. No one is immune to the chaos since we can’t keep track of our entire consciousness and all the facts and fables that influence our thinking.
A highly educated, minority woman participating in one of my projects told me she had grown up without any awareness of her ethnicity. She had also survived unspeakable trauma, married a good man and restarted her life. She was in her 30s, and she insisted she never, ever knew of a single time in her life when she was aware of her ethnicity. We had to solve this claim.
Such puzzles can be easy. They are not counseling or psychiatric matters. This one took about three questions that were intended to catch her off guard at just the right moment in just the right way. We laughed when it happened. The truth was suddenly so obvious to her.
A local man wanted to determine the time, location and manner of his mother’s death. He told me during our first meeting exactly how she was murdered and how a neighbor disposed of her body in the most shocking way I could imagine. It was indelibly etched in his memory. Except it wasn’t. We solved related issues during the following months, and then one day I decided it was time to ask him how his mother had been murdered. This time he gave a different explanation, because information — and its influences — had shaken out into a different configuration inside his head. He saw the past differently, but he didn’t know it.
Just last night, we met again and had a long talk with his sister who had a totally different spin on the horrible, traumatic, unforgettable event. Her version and his were irreconcilable. However, a tiny question clarified everything by catching the sister off guard and allowing access to a puzzle piece that made everything fall into place.
When we’re looking for truth during a confirmation hearing for a judge or during any inquiry, we shouldn’t confuse honesty with accurate memory. The good people I work with are always tweaking their perceptions of their unforgettable past. Sometimes they change their perceptions radically. When you are evaluating someone’s memory and you want to believe that person, you are off on the wrong foot. Honesty and memory don’t have much to do with each other.
Max T. Russell of New Palestine writes for the international business intelligence and nonprofit communities. Send comments to [email protected].
