"I do not remember": How does the memory of the experience of violence
Half the world watching the case of a candidate for the post of judge US Supreme Court Brett Cavanaugh. After his nomination for this position, three women accused the judge of debauchery and attempted rape in the 1980s, the Senate postponed the approval of the judge’s candidacy, and President Donald Trump instructed the FBI to conduct an investigation. One of the accusing Kavano, psychology professor Christine Blazey Ford, September 27, gave her testimony before the Senate Committee. There were a lot of gaps in her story - some questions, including the question of the place where everything happened more than thirty years ago, she answered: "I don't remember." After speaking at the professor criticism struck. The press drew attention to her insecurity and obvious signs of stress, politician Mike Brown considered the woman’s testimony too fragmentary compared with Kavano’s answers, and prosecutor Rachel Mitchell who questioned Ford in front of the Senate stated that it was impossible to build a case on her words.
All this is not the first time. Seventeen years ago, a similar high-profile case was going on in the United States: Supreme Court candidate Clarence Thomas was accused of sexual harassment by his former assistant Anita Hill. As in the case of Ford, Hill’s opponents also pointed to the “incompleteness” of her testimony and expressed doubts that she could reliably describe the events of a decade ago. The senators finally approved Thomas for the position.
Gaps in the memories of such an important episode of life and the truth can confuse - if you do not know how memory works. In fact, psychological trauma specialists point out, during times of severe stress, a person is sometimes simply not able to remember not only small details, but also key facts, the memorization of which from the outside seems elementary.
From the point of view of psychologists, the incomplete memories of the victim of sexual violence are not easy to explain - they should be expected. Just like the gaps in the reports of the policemen who participated in the shootout, or the soldiers who visited the firing line: it happens that they don’t even know in which month the traumatic incident occurred. Having received a psychological trauma, we, on the one hand, cannot remember something, but, on the contrary, we will never be able to forget something — both are inevitable.
Emotionally important information is called central detail, and what seemed to the brain less significant is peripheral. From the side or even for the details of the event themselves, the details may have a different weight and other elements seem important, but at the moment everything happens, we do not choose what we remember and what is not (unless we have special training). That is why, Jim Hopper, a clinical psychologist and psychological trauma expert, explains that many victims of violence cannot tell what exactly the attacker did to their body, but they do remember the expression of his gaze, the smell or the sound of the road outside the window.
At the second stage, the brain transfers the previously encoded information to the conditional “repository”, and again with the central details the same thing happens with peripheral ones: the first ones are better preserved than the second ones. The central gets a higher priority, and the peripheral is quickly erased, and if it is not remembered and coded again, it can be forgotten the very next day. Therefore, all memories are incomplete. And so, Hopper points out, the soldier will remember the fear of death and how difficult it was for him to breathe, and the victim of sexual violence his surprise at the fact that a familiar guy threw her on the bed. Such details will remain in memory forever, although most of the others will be lost. The role is played by the emotional tinge of the details: negative or positive. In the process of evolution, we learned to memorize bad experience better: it was more important for survival in a world where we were threatened by predators, spoiled food and other dangers.
Clear memories remain of the central aspects of the experience, agrees Harvard University psychologist, author of the book "Remembering Trauma" ("Remembering the injury") Richard McNally. Whether it is a victim of sexual violence, a combatant, or an earthquake survivor, after a traumatic event, people remember what struck or scared the most, he states. The seller in the store, on which the gun was turned on, will tell you what the weapon looked like, but may not remember whether the robber was wearing glasses or not, although he was standing two meters away from him.
Gradually, all of the memories from fairly detailed turn into more sketchy and abstract. We remember the essence of what happened, and some main details and on these elements we recreate the story if we are asked to tell it. Part of the brain composes it on the go. But the most traumatic experience is rarely erased, even if we don’t want to remember and restore it, Hopper emphasizes. Such memories are literally burned out in the brain. Those details that were important - for the consciousness during the incident, and not for the casual observer - are rarely distorted, confirmed by the psychiatrist from Columbia University (USA) Ted Huey.
In our understanding of how human memory works, there is still a huge amount of gaps. But today, after years of research and observation, experts agree on an important aspect concerning the victims of traumatic events: when it comes to the “central” details in their memories, there is no reason to believe that the victims are “confused”. Fortunately or unfortunately, they can be stored in memory for years and decades.
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