The Brain And Memory: The Influence Of Memory

If we were to hold our brains in the palm of our hands we’d be holding a mass of pink responsible of many aspects of who we are. The brain and it’s ability to retain memory has been a very useful tool not only in the court, but in everyday life. A world without memory would make living much more difficult especially in the case of trying to solve a crime. Witness testimonies are a heavily relied on piece of evidence in court, but can be an affected when memory is altered by external factors, and distortions.

Biologically, many parts of the brain work to store memory. According to “The Human Memory” the cerebral cortex “plays a key role in memory”. The prefrontal cortex processes short-term memories and long-term memories which is an important

The brain has different ways memory fails one being distortion. Distortion, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is defined as “the alteration of repressed or unconscious elements before they appear in the conscious mind”. A form of distortion is misattribution which is the confusion of the source of information a memory came from. This confusion alters aspects of a witness’s memory which affects the response a witness gives when questioned. An example a Psychology textbook presents is one of a sexual assault victim who was watching a television show during the crime. Later, when asked to identify the suspect she gave the appearance of a man she saw on the television show rather than the actual perpetrator. The television works as a form of suggestibility, but the actual confusion between the two men is a distortion that stems from wiring in the brain, specifically the frontal lobe found in the article “Misattribution, False recognition and the sins of memory” by Schacter and Dodson. The distortion of misattribution resulted in the delay in custody of the actual perpetrator. Furthermore, memory blindness is another form of distortion that can affect the way memory is received by those in criminal justice. The academic article, “Memory Blindness” by Cochan, Greenspan and others describes how memory or “choice blindness suggests that people’s introspective abilities can be quite limited” in which they performed research to test how accurate are witnesses able to detect misinformation in their own testimonies. The authors stated that “ people can often be misled in the short term about their own preferences” and tested it by giving participants of their experiment false versions of their own memory. The participants recounted their memories from a presentation, were given a fifteen minute retention period, then were given what they depicted as their