From the nature
of these memory errors, and those documented in many other incidents he
studied, Münsterberg fashioned a theory of memory. He believed that none of us
can retain in memory the vast quantity of details we are confronted with at any
moment in our lives and that our memory mistakes have a common origin: they are
all artifacts of the techniques our minds employ to fill in the inevitable
gaps. Those techniques include relying on our expectations and, more generally,
on our belief systems and our prior knowledge. As a result, when our
expectations, beliefs, and prior knowledge are at odds with the actual events,
our brains can be fooled.
**
Münsterberg
published his ideas about memory in a book that became a best seller, On the
Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime. In it, he elaborated on a number
of key concepts that many researchers now believe correspond to the way memory
really does work: first, people have a good memory for the general gist of
events but a bad one for the details; second, when pressed for the unremembered
details, even well-intentioned people making a sincere effort to be accurate
will inadvertently fill in the gaps by making things up; and third, people will
believe the memories they make up.
**
Between them,
Freud and Münsterberg had come up with theories of mind and memory that were of
great importance, but unfortunately the men had little impact on each other:
Freud understood much better than Münsterberg did the immense power of the
unconscious, but he thought that repression, rather than a dynamic act of
creation on the part of the unconscious, was the reason for the gaps and
inaccuracies in our memory; while Münsterberg understood much better than Freud
did the mechanics and the reasons for memory distortion and loss—but had no
sense at all of the unconscious processes that created them.
