When Can Memories Be Trusted?

By Anastasia Toufexis

Less than two weeks ago, Americans were spellbound before their television sets, watching Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas clash over their recollections of events a decade past. The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings are still fresh in our minds, but how many of us remember exactly what the two adversaries said, what they wore, the expressions on their faces and the tone of their voices? And 10 years from now, when we think back, how faithful will our memories be? Will we remember Hill's tears at one particularly painful disclosure of sexual harassment, and Thomas thumping the table as he decried the hearing as a high-tech lynching of an uppity black?

Those with sharp memories will have noticed two errors in the preceding paragraph: Hill's voice may have sometimes wavered, but she never cried, and Thomas may have thundered with his voice but never with his fist. Even if memory fails to retain these details, how many Americans will accurately retain the essence of the events? Will our memories reflect the truth?

Psychologists and lawyers are finding that more and more cases turn on the question of how reliable memory is. Last November in Redwood City, Calif., George Franklin was convicted of killing an eight-year-old girl in 1969; the case was based largely on the testimony of his daughter Eileen Franklin- Lipsker, who had repressed the memory of her playmate's murder for 20 . years. This month in Pittsburgh, Steven Slutzker is scheduled to go on trial for the 1975 fatal shooting of John Mudd Sr. Slutzker was charged after the victim's son, who was 5 when his father died, claimed he had a flashback memory of the murder.

Fueling the debate over the certainty of memory has been the parade of men and women -- among them Roseanne Arnold and former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur -- with newly surfaced recollections of being sexually abused as children. Many of the victims are suing their alleged molesters, including parents, relatives and therapists. Paula Pfiefle of Monroe, Wash., this spring received $1.4 million from her church-run school in settlement of her claim that a teacher repeatedly raped and sodomized her two decades ago. As is often the case with repressed memories, the events came flooding back during an emotional, evocative moment. For Pfiefle, it was while making love to her husband on their wedding night five years ago.

The validity of such memories has divided psychological and legal circles. "By and large, long-term memory is extremely credible," maintains Jill Otey, a Portland, Ore., attorney whose office receives five calls a week from women saying they have suddenly remembered childhood abuse. "I find it highly unlikely that someone who can remember what pattern was on the wallpaper and that a duck was quacking outside the bedroom window where she was molested by her father when she was four years old is making it up. Why in the hell would your mind do this?" Reflecting that faith, at least a dozen states since 1988 have amended their statute of limitations for bringing charges to allow for delayed discovery of childhood sexual abuse.

People -- not to mention juries -- place unwavering trust in the human ability to recall events, especially those that have had a strong emotional impact. But such confidence is often misplaced. "Our memory is not like a camera in which we get an accurate photograph," says psychologist Henry Ellis of the University of New Mexico.

Consider the Challenger explosion. As with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, most people claim to remember where they were when they heard the news of the shuttle disaster. Ulric Neisser, a psychologist at Emory University, tested that assumption. The day after the 1986 accident he asked 106 students to write down how, when and where they learned the news. Three years later, he tracked down nearly half the group and asked them to describe their memories of the explosion. Though many claimed to recall it clearly, "often the memories were completely wrong," says Neisser. Many students said they had received the news from television, though they had actually heard it elsewhere.

Memory is a complicated physiological phenomenon that is only slowly being deciphered. "Everything we are is based on what we are taught, experience and remember," says neurosurgeon Howard Eisenberg of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. "Yet there's no universally accepted theory of how memory works." Some activities, like remembering a number looked up in the telephone directory, are retained for only a brief time. Soon after you dial the number, the brain discards this "working memory."

But other, more momentous events make a biochemical impression in the brain, specifically in a middle portion known as the hippocampus. To file them away permanently, the hippocampus shunts the elements of the experience -- the sounds, smells and sights -- through a network of nerve cells to different areas of the brain. "It's a whole cascade of processes, physiological and chemical, that sensitizes the neurons to transmit messages," notes Mortimer Mishkin, chief of the neuropsychology laboratory of the National Institutes of Health. The proper stimulus, say, a whiff of a perfume or a glimpse of a familiar place, trips the relay, firing the neurons and bringing a past event to consciousness.

Disease, alcoholism or an injury to the brain can prevent an experience from being imprinted into the neural network. The Central Park jogger has no memory of being attacked, say neurologists, not because she repressed the event but because her injured brain never had a chance to physically create the memory.

One of the many controversies concerning memory is how far back people can remember. TV star Roseanne Arnold, for example, claims that she has a vivid memory of being sexually abused as an infant by her mother. This summer Tina Ullrich, 36, a Chicago design-firm executive, abruptly recalled images from her infancy of her grandfather sexually molesting her while he changed her diapers. "I didn't have any words to describe the experience, so I began drawing my feelings," says Ullrich, who has created 35 surreal pictures. But many researchers are skeptical of such early recall. Most people's earliest clear recollections date back to around age 4 or 5. Before that, they believe, the mind holds at best primitive pictures but no coherent memory. "Under a year, a child doesn't have the mental structure to understand how events hang together," says Neisser. "I wouldn't give you a nickel for memory in the first year of life."

Memory's workings are equally complex on the psychological level. "We see things in a context. We select what we observe, and then we may distort that for a purpose," says neuropsychiatrist David Spiegel of Stanford University. Events can be altered, even as they occur, simply through lack of attention. What is not seen, heard or smelled will not register in the brain. For example, a man might remember being introduced to a woman he finds attractive, but she might not have any memory of him if she did not consider him appealing.

Experiences can be altered as they are hauled out of memory. Remembering is an act of reconstruction, not reproduction. During the process, normal gaps and missing details often get filled in. When Senators asked law professor Joel Paul to describe how Hill sounded years ago when she first told him about being sexually harassed by Thomas, Paul hesitated and then said Hill had sounded embarrassed. "He could have been falling back on a scripted memory of how he would expect someone to act in that circumstance," explains psychologist Douglas Peters of the University of North Dakota. On the other hand, experts are not the least bit disturbed because Hill's story grew and became more detailed as the hearings proceeded. Remembering incidents is an accretion process, psychologists say, and one image evokes another.

Memory integrates the past with the present: desires, fantasies, fears, even mood can shade the recollection. People have a tendency to suppress unpleasant experiences and embellish events to make themselves feel more important or attractive. "Some of us like to see ourselves in a rosier light," observes psychologist Elizabeth Loftus of the University of Washington, "that we gave more to charity than we really did, that we voted in the last election when we really didn't, that we were nicer to our kids than we really were."

Loftus, co-author of Witness for the Defense (St. Martin's Press; $19.95) and an expert witness on memory in the cases involving the McMartin Preschool, Oliver North and the Hillside Strangler, speculates that such prestige- enhancing revisionism by Thomas could be one explanation for why his memory differs so radically from Hill's. Thomas is a "rigid person who insisted on the prerogatives of his position," observes Emory's Neisser; such people can be "good repressers" of unpleasant memories. As for Hill, Loftus suggests that it is possible she unconsciously confused some past experiences. "Could she have gotten the information elsewhere and created this story?" asks Loftus.

Suggestion is a potent disrupter of truth, as Jean Piaget once noted. The renowned child psychologist wrote that for years he recounted the memory of how his nurse foiled an attempt to kidnap him from his carriage when he was two years old. But years later, the retired nurse sent his parents a letter saying she had made up the incident to impress her employers. The young Piaget had heard the story so often that he had created his own memory of the event.

In the same vein, witnesses can be led astray -- intentionally or inadvertently -- by the questions posed by police or lawyers. "If you ask a person who has just witnessed an accident how fast the green car was going when it slammed into the parked UPS truck, you have said it was a green car," notes Peters. Chances are the witness will declare that the car was green even if it was blue. Critics charge that misleading questions as well as the publicity given childhood sexual abuse frequently plant the idea of molestation in the minds of susceptible children and adults, though no abuse has taken place.

Alas, there is no easy way to distinguish fact and fiction in many memories. The best method is to find corroborating evidence, from witnesses or written records, say, diaries or hospital charts, that can document the event. Years from now, videotapes of the Hill-Thomas hearings may verify the sights and sounds of their testimony, but the heart of their dispute is likely to remain unresolved. Whose memory told the truth?

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Graphic by Joe Lertola

CAPTION: HOW LONG-TERM MEMORIES ARE FORMED

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington, Barbara Dolan/Chicago and D. Blake Hallanan/San Francisco