Review Of Elizabeth Loftus How Reliable Is Your Memory

After watching How reliable is your memory? by Elizabeth Loftus, I believe that to a great extent, memory is not a reliable source of knowledge because it can be distorted, contaminated, and even falsely imagined. Memory decay, distorted memory, hindsight bias, consistency bias, the availability heuristic bias and suggestibility- are all problems that beset our reliance on memory.“I was there. I saw it.” The phrase that many witnesses confidently use in courts of law- to generally support or undermine the position of the perpetrators involved- that is entirely based on their memory of the past. Yet recently, experts have agreed upon the conclusion that the testimony of eyewitnesses in court is unreliable. Why would these so-called experts come to such an abrupt conclusion? …show more content…
For example, I have encountered numerous moments where various members of my family could each remember the same event differently from how I did. At first it was disturbing, but then I had to let go of the notion of objective truth in relation to memory. The understanding of memory is mutable. Perhaps more troubling for the reliance on memory is not just that it is susceptible to error and forgetting, but that it can be entirely created by suggestion. Personally, there have been many moments where I was convinced that I remember an event from the past, only to realize that I constructed it based on a photograph or stories within the family. My memories are my own to explore, to learn from, to play with and shape. The subjectivity of memory by all means supports the claim that our memory is an unreliable way of knowing. As part of her research into the reliability of memory that she mentions in the TED talk, Loftus discovered how easily memories can be created and investigated the ways in which memories could be modified by techniques of