Tuesday 1 October 2013

eye witnesses and memory



Why does the human brain create false memories?
Human memory constantly adapts and moulds itself to fit the world. Now an art project hopes to highlight just how fallible our recollections are.All of us generate false memories and artist AR Hopwood has been "collecting" them. For the past year he has asked the public to submit anecdotes of fake recollections which he turns into artistic representations. They have ranged from the belief of eating a live mouse to a memory of being able to fly as a child.

Most people are aware of how faulty eye witness accounts can be. We fill in the gaps and will pass a lie detector test if questioned about what we think we saw. Over time that retelling of the event can also change and we will still think it is true. This is why science doesn’t accept eye witness accounts of sightings of cryptids. Which is understandable  ....but ..one of the scientific methods in experimentation is observation. So why is observing a cryptid any less credible than watching an experiment? Because a scientist says so. If we believe what the article says then all that scientific observation could be wrong and leaves it just as likely to be believed as seeing Nessie or bigfoot. Yet people do believe it because it is science but don’t believe in sightings of Bigfoot etc. Maybe if cryptozoology was accepted as a science that might change.

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