Your eyes do lie but it’s not their fault.
Or why you shouldn’t always trust either what you see or how you remember what you see.
Chico Marx in the movie Duck Soup says a line many people love to use. It may shock you to know it is wrong in all sorts of ways. Impersonating Rufus T. Firefly (aka Groucho Marx), he asks, "Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?"
The truth is there are two pieces at play for you to understand what you 'see.' First and most obvious is your eyes, but less obvious maybe your brain and, more specifically, your memory. The chances are your eyes are not that involved in the process at all. The most significant influence on what you think you understand about what you see is your memory. Your memory, as we will discuss, is suspect, most of the time.
Let's explore why your eyes are not the whole story, why your memory is suspect, and what, in practical terms, you should do about all of this.
The Eyes Don't Have it
According to multiple uncited sources, according to the internet, it's a fun fact that 80% of our memories are determined by what we see. The problem is that the eye is just like a camera and does not understand what you see. Your eyes are not what is making your memories - it's your brain.
So how does this work?
As we mostly remember from high school sciences, light passes through the cornea at the front of your eye until it hits a lens. The lens then focuses that light on a point at the very back of your eye at a place we call the retina. At this point, cells at the back of your eye turn the light into electrical signals, and the optic nerve carries the signal to your brain. It's your brain that converts those signals into what you think of as images, and this is where it gets interesting. It's your brain, not your eyes, that interpret the images you see into understanding, and to do so, it uses language.
In the blog "How do I change the way something occurs to someone?" we talked about the power of language. Just saying a word like "Disneyworld" creates a whole series of images in your mind. That's the power of language. The flip side of this is that it is tough to explain something if you don't have a word. As an example, look at the following image:
You probably saw the image and said, "I wonder what a fork is doing on this webpage?" The power of 'fork' is that you already know what people could be doing with this item when your brain connects it to 'fork.' Given the picture, you know people were meant to eat with it.
Now, for a moment, imagine you come from a culture that doesn't have 'forks' and only eats with spoons. What would they think the image is? Well, they may think it's a comb, a torture implement, or who knows what. It will occur to them in a language they understand.
This demonstrates the power of language and how much of the work is done in your brain and not your eyes. Like the image sensor on your camera, your eyes just capture the image and pass it along.
That’s not what you think it is
So, you see with your brain, and your brain uses your memory to understand what you are 'seeing.' The question is how much should you trust your memory? Ever been an eyewitness?
Every 'great' courtroom drama needs an eyewitness to point at the defendant and say, "it was them." If Innocence Project is any guide, this is poor proof of guilt. They studied 358 people who had been convicted and sentenced to death since 1989 and were exonerated through DNA evidence. Of these, 7 out of 10 had been convicted through eyewitness misidentification. They had served an average of 14 years in prison before exoneration.
There can be many reasons for misremembering, but well-known memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus has proposed four critical explanations for why forgetting occurs. In summary, here they are:
Decay - According to this theory, a memory trace is created every time a new memory is formed. Decay theory suggests that over time, these memory traces begin to fade and disappear. If the information is not retrieved and rehearsed, it will eventually be lost.
Interference - Proactive interference is when an old memory makes it more difficult or impossible to remember a new memory. Retroactive interference occurs when further information interferes with your ability to recall previously learned information.
Failure to store - Encoding failures sometimes prevent information from entering long-term memory.
Motivated Forgetting - Forgetting painful memories and traumas may help people cope better. Forgetting the vivid details can help blunt the complex emotions attached to those memories and make them easier to live with.
There are many other reasons and failures, but the overriding thought here is that memory is not fixed. Even if you had the language skills to do it, what goes in does not come out the way it was received. Or, as Daniela Schiller of Mt. Sinai School of Medicine describes it, memories are malleable constructs that are reconstructed with each recall. We all recognize that our memories are like Swiss cheese; we now know that they are more like processed cheese.
Yes, I remember it well.
"We met at nine; we met at eight, I was on time, no, you were late
Ah, yes, I remember it well
We dined with friends; we dined alone, a tenor sang, a baritone
Ah, yes, I remember it well."
Lerner and Loewe from Gigi
Like the two old friends in Gigi, we can have a very clear memory that we may swear on a bible (or your equivalent) that is accurate, and they may be entirely false. If you have siblings, ask them how they remember an event from when you were kids, and you will probably find each of you remembers the scenario differently. Some of this will be because of how the situation occurred to them, but some of it is because memory is not a fixed constant.
So next time someone tells you something because of how they remember it, you can comfortably answer, that may be so, or it may just be a story you are telling yourself.