The Persistence of Memory

The Persistence of Memory,  Salvador Dali

Every now and again something will happen to remind me of just how unreliable our memories are, well mine anyway.  Every marriage has its little inside jokes.  I was relating one of these to an internet friend when I was once again reminded of just how lousy my memory is.  

My parents used a sexist term that I attributed to the World War II generation, tomato, but always pronounced ta-mAy-ta.  A tomato was a sexually attractive and probable flirtatious woman, something of a rough equivalent to “broad” or “babe”.  Tomatoes were not sluts or whores, but then again not exactly the wholesome girl next door either.  I checked the dictionary bundled with my computer and there is no reference to a tomato being anything other than a tasty salad ingredient.  I checked the Urban Dictionary and it had a variety of usages for tomatoes, some quite nasty.  The one that would align with my usage here, was quite graphic, and exceeded the intensity that I would associate to the word.  No need for the F-word here, that is understood.  Also there was no mention of it being of WWII vintage. 

Anyhow, my wife and I have always been a little amused with the term, and we have this little private joke.  Upon seeing a large and nice looking tomato (the vegetable / or fruit if you must) I will stare at the tomato with an astonished look and say “What a magnificent tomato!”  and my wife will reply in a squeaky falsetto  “Oh thannnk youuuuu.”  The joke is based on the “knockers” scene from the Mel Brooks movie Young Frankenstein.

  Wikipedia, Young Frankenstein

Here is where the persistence of my memory goes awry.  I have a very detailed memory of the scene that is visual in nature.  Gene Wilder and Madeline Kahn approach a pair of large doors on a castle.  Kahn is wearing a very low cut peasant’s blouse and has an abundance of cleavage showing.  Wilder does not have a hat on an his hair is very wild and Einstein like.  On each door is a huge knocker.  Wilder notices the knockers and stops and stares for a moment in pure astonishment and says “What a magnificent set of knockers.”  Madeline Kahn puckers her lips up shyly looks down and sort of quivering her head says in a very high pitched squeaky falsetto “Ohhhhh thaannnk yooouuuuu” employing a Betty Boop eyelash flutter. 

Here is the actual scene:

YouTube, Young Frankenstein, What Knockers! Clip

Well as you can see my memory of this incident is rather inaccurate.  Notably it was not Madeline Kahn, but Teri Garr and there is not near the drama that I remember.  Garr does not speak in falsetto and Wilder has a hat. This is totally not the scene that I remember, and what makes it worse is that I even have my own internal video of it which follows the written script above.  

So what is going on here?  Why is my memory of this scene so terribly wrong?  

According to an episode of Radiolab, 

Radiolab, Memory and Forgetting, June 7, 2007 (Note, entire episode is 60 minutes.)

our metaphors for memory are for the most part wrong.  We often think of memory as being a biological filling cabinet in which memories are stored in a very accurate and detailed manner. We may have problems recalling the memory but it is often regarded as a location problem.  Find the right mental cabinet and correct drawer, and you will fairly accurately remember what you had placed there years ago.  WRONG!   Well perhaps it is the equivalent to a large hard drive or memory card, where sensual stimuli and perhaps a story are some how recorded into the neurons and are available for an exacting playback.  WRONG. 

It seems the actual mechanism is that protein bridges are in some manner constructed between neurons.  These bridges do not allow us to play back a memory per se, but  rather to re-create the situation in our minds.  Research has found that a certain drug can not only block the laying down of the proteins during memory formation, the drug can also block the action of the proteins during recollection, thus reducing or eliminating the memory.  This blocking action during recollection is felt to be evidence that recollection is not simply the access and reading of a data file, but rather the re-creation of the event mentally.  We actually experience a mini-theatrical performance of the event which then lays down some new protein bridges. 

So the problem with the persistence of memory is that these new Broadway performances are subject to our experience since the original event and our emotions at the time of the recollection.  So they get modified in the remembering. The more one remembers an incident, the more likely the memory is going to be colored if not corrupted by the very act of remembering.  How we would like to think of our various recollections is that of making a xerox copy of the original.  So after 50 recollections you basically have the same recollection as the original.  But the reality of it is more like the one of those experiments you did in school where the teacher hands a written paragraph to the first student at the left front desk.  The student reads the paragraph then whispers the story to the student behind him.  That student whispers the story to the next...all the way to the last student in the right rear of the class.  The last student then relays the story he heard verbally to the entire class.  Invariably the last student’s story is radically different from the written story handed to the first student.  Each student colors or emphasizes the story in a different manner in his re-creation of the story.  

What is even more frightening is that not only are our memories malleable by our own experience and and emotions they can be subject to modification by others.  In the second segment of the memory episode at Radiolab, they speak of research where people’s memories were intentionally modified with events that did not happen.  How you ask, imagining torture, or some scary contraption with a rats nest of electrodes affixed to the subject’s skull?  No! Quite simply through persuasive discussion.  It turns out to be rather easy to get someone to recall an event  if they believe you are being truthful.  

The danger in this lies in court testimony of eye witnesses.  It is very easy for investigators to suggest to an eye witness a modification to their memory.  As was mentioned in the podcast, an eyewitness see a crime committed.  The perpetrators leave in a car.  The car is rather unformed in the witnesses' memory.  An investigator asks, “Was it a red Camaro?”  There is some element of chance that the unformed car (which could be a green Toyota) will harden into a red Camaro in the person’s mind, just from the question. If it does, then that red Camaro is now going to be what the witness saw, not some shadowy generic vehicle but a very specific red Camaro and each recollection will give strength to the red Camaro.  There is probably a very critical period of time in which the witness needs to be very honest himself and the investigator and state “I don’t know. I can not remember the details of the car.”  If the witness is trying to please the investigator, the suggested red Camaro may very well become a “fact” in the witnesses' memory without his realization. 

I experienced this many times at work.  Something turns to shit during a test.  When this happens it always happens fast.  Slam bam thank you ma’m, and what the hell just happened?   You experience some loud noise, a whole bunch of alarms, and then the power trips. It usually occurs in about 10 to 30 seconds.  Generally you have nothing more than a ruined test.  But there may be a lot of man hours involved in that test, and you have to find out what happened.  So you sift back through the data and you start to construct a story.  You are not telling a line of BS, you are trying to figure out what happened (although in a way to cover your ass to some degree in the process).  What I found was that in the recollection of the incident I would remember more and more was the fabricated story made of words that the data presented and less and less of what I actually experienced with my senses which went something like this BOOM, WHOOSH, BANG, BZZZZZZZZZ, WHAM, THE ROAR OF VARIOUS PUMPS, ONE ALARM...TWO ALARMS...THREE ALARMS...POWER TRIP. LOTS OF ALARMS FLASHING LIGHTS AND KLAXONS SOUNDING AND THE CONTINUING ROAR OF PUMPS, RELIEF VALVES HOWLING, AND A SECONDARY TRIP OF ALL THE POWER TO THE FACILITY...BLACK AND SILENCE EXCEPT FOR THE RELIEF VALVES WHICH ARE DEAFENING.  

Teri Garr is in the scene, not Madeline Kahn. 

I can’t say I miss those incident reports.  Explaining a f--- up was never fun, even when no human error was at fault such as lightening strikes and power failures.

Finding the “What Knockers” YouTube clip was a lot of fun by comparison.  I was amazed at how wrong my memory of the scene has become.  To tell you the truth I don’t think that I remembered that Teri Garr was even in the movie.  I remembered Madeline Khan and her iconic voice and somehow substituted her into the knockers scene.  

It was my wife that actually started the joke. Years ago, I innocently made some comment about one of our garden tomatoes, and she replied “Oh thank you” in a squeaky falsetto.  I looked at her dimwittedly and she had to explain.  Well that started it.  The joke has been going on for better than three decades.  It is nothing but a silly joke, but one that glues us together through the commonality of experience.  It is really old and trite, yet it never fails to get a small chuckle.  It is not the humor that is important, it is the bonding, the shared experience.  It has been used with melons, Pop Tarts, plastic jugs, walnuts (in reverse), gourds,  even felines.  Felines?  Well every now and again the cat will sit in her lap.  “What a magnificent .... “ 

Image Credits:

Persistence of Memory, Salvadore Dali: Wikipedia, The Persistence of Memory

Video, "What Knockers":  YouTube, Young Frankenstein, What Knockers! Clip

Still, "What Knockers": NeoGaf Forum, Young Frankenstein Is Awesome