Childhood Memories: The Walls Memoir

Jeannette’s story of “The Glass Castle” tells you about her adventures with her family as a child. This book is so detailed that is gives an idea that the story is mixed up false information, making her memories not very true. Rather her memories being bound with what she has heard over time. This theory of her memories being false may have been proven by Elizabeth Loftus.

Many memories for young children involve a special individual who made specific events during their childhood, vividly stand out to them as adults. In “Tender Stranger” written by Phillip Lopate, a memory is told from the perspective of a young boy. He is on his way to school when he suddenly bumps into a lawyer on the street corner. In “Novella” written by Robert Hass, the memory is from a young girl who develops a friendship with an elderly gentleman who lives in a cabin deep in the woods. The young boy meets the lawyer on the busy sidewalk and never sees him again, while the young girl forms an extensive friendship as she and the elderly man visit often. The vivid childhood memories of these two relationships play a significant role in the character’s life, whether it was a short encounter or a long lasting friendship.

Middle childhood is a marker for major psychological developments involving emotions’ effects on memory. A child’s mind more clearly encodes experiences and allows for memories

Research shows that the human mind is not like a tape recorder, we neither record events exactly as we see them, nor recall them like a tape that has been rewound. Instead, witness memory is like any other evidence at a crime scene; it must be preserved carefully, or it can be contaminated. A case I would like to mention is the Calvin Willis Case. One night in 1982, three young girls were sleeping alone in a Shreveport, Louisiana home when a man in cowboy boots came into the house and raped the oldest girl, who was Ten years old. When police started to investigate the rape, the three girls all remembered the attack differently. One police report said the Ten year old victim didn’t see her attacker’s face. Another report which wasn’t introduced at trial said she identified Calvin Willis, who lived in the neighbourhood. The girl’s mother testified at trial that neighbours had mentioned Willis’s name when discussing who might have committed the crime. The victim testified that she was shown photos and told to pick the man without a full beard. She testified that she didn’t pick anyone, police said she picked Willis. Willis was convicted by a jury and sentenced to life in prison. In 2003, DNA testing proved Willis’ innocence and he was released. He had served nearly Twenty Two years in prison for a crime he didn’t

Are all childhood memories true? Not all of them. There are many factors that contribute to false memories. One influence is siblings and even parents. If a brother or sister keeps telling their little sibling about an event, they would believe they were there, thus creating a false memory.

On very rare occasions false memories can be harmful to someone and the people around them. In some cases children can create a false memory that they were touched inappropriately because they misinterpret things. The child might remember being touched by a caretaker, but excludes the details that it was to change a diaper or to change clothes because they soiled them. These events could create legal cases and could ruin someone's life, all because of a false memory. Children are very susceptible to false memories because the can be influenced very easily by the people around them. This type of influence can affect someone because the child's testimony could very well be affected by the bias unknowingly planted in them. A false memory can affect an adult's life as well, an example of this could be rape or abuse that they believe occurred and because of it

As humans when we speak about memory; we bring up “memories” that have happened in the past as if we knew what actually happened. However, everyone creates fillers to fill in information that you do not remember in memories. In The Things They Carried, O’Brien expresses his memory and states to us that his stories are true and are also created. O’Brien fills us with information about what he knows is true and then creates the rest into a story. Loftus and Jason both discept how our brain functions when we speak about memories.

Many people have a limited memory of their early childhood. These memories fail to exist as they have faded due to brain development during this stage in life. A child’s

Based on those experiments, Loftus affirms the inaccuracy of our memory, events may be reconstructed with new information added. Applying those results into criminal investigations based on eyewitness, Loftus pointed out that witness is questioned often more than once. Also, studies have demonstrated that line-up might be a inefficient way of point a suspect since many faces are introduced to the witness. In addition to eyewitness testimony, Loftus is leading also in repressed childhood memory. Most of her experiments demonstrated that repressed childhood memories do not exist. In fact, the most traumatic memories that we experience are the ones that we tend to not forget

Memory is like a movie that gets played over and over in your head, until the movie becomes distorted. Jeanette told the Walls’ story starting when she was 3 years old and continuing through her adult life. Therefore her memoir is is somewhat inaccurate. No one remembers their childhood vividly enough to explain it years later.

The authenticity of repressed memories has been the cause of much controversy in the psychology world. Some even refer to these controversies as the “memory wars”. One side supports the idea of repressed memories, saying that there are multiple reasons for memories to be forgotten and retrieved later. The latter disagrees with how legitimate repressed memories are, since there is no way to prove the honesty of the memories presented.

The need for understanding the phenomenon of repressed memories is also very important from a legal standpoint. In recent years there has been numerous cases of people suing their parents or other authority figures for abuse that has been recalled many years after the abuse was said to have occurred. The rulings in these cases have often been controversial considering there is often not enough concrete or collaborative evidence to prove the accused to be guilty or innocent. The judge and jury are often forced to make a ruling that relies heavily on the testimonial of the accuser. This is very contentious considering there is not an accurate and reliable test to determine the validity of the accuser.

Over the last thirty years, the idea of children as witnesses and the accuracy of their testimony has been widely debated. People are asking themselves if the memories of young children, specifically between the ages of five and ten, can be accurate and in return trusted. So, can children’s memory and testimony be accurate? Prolific amounts of research have been conducted in an attempt to answer this question. Most of the research suggests that unfortunately we can not rely on their accurate recall in testimony. I would have to say I agree with the findings.

Memory does not work like a video camera, smoothly recording every detail. Instead, memory is more of a constructive process. We remember the details that we find most important and relevant. Due to the reconstructive nature of memory, the assimilation of old and new information has the ability to cause vulnerable memories to become distorted. This is also known as the misinformation effect (Loftus, 1997). It is not uncommon for individuals to fill in memory gaps with what they assume they must have experienced. We not only distort memories for events that we have observed, but, we may also have false memories for events that never occurred at all. False memories are “often created by combing actual memories with suggestions received from

The mode of implantation from the researchers included telling the participants multiple accurate childhood memories and would include one false memory (Loftus, 1997). The researchers validated the memories told to the participants by informing each participant that their parent(s) had been spoken to and those memories had been offered up (Loftus, 1997). Some of the false memories included being lost in a shopping mall when younger or spilling a drink onto the dress of a bride at a wedding (Loftus, 1997). 37% of those with the implanted memories found themselves able to recall the false memory provided in great detail and were often found to contain much emotion on the part of the participant (Loftus,