As eyewitnesses of the event, they see everything differently. Lies like an eyewitness

Memory is a document of the past

Old men and women drive in in wheelchairs.
1st old woman. As I remember now...
1st old man. No – I remember that as now!
2nd old woman. You remember how it is now, but I remember how it was before.
2nd old man. And I remember it now, just like before.
3rd old woman. And I remember how even earlier, very, very early.
3rd old man. And I remember both now and before.

V. Mayakovsky “Bedbug”

The same heated and equally fruitful debates flare up in our country after the release of the next prime-time film or television product on a historical topic - if there are still people who lived in the era depicted on the screen.

These disputes boil down mainly to the assessment of the props: did they wear such dresses and hairstyles, drove such cars, lived in such apartments, ate such foods... After all, formally speaking, everyone who lived then or supposedly remembers the story perfectly well grandmothers, grandfathers, etc., can and often does claim to be a witness. But the trouble is that without the historical context, which is absolutely necessary for the analysis and assessment of the proposed biographical experience or the figure of the witness himself, these memories at best give us nothing, at worst they completely distort the real picture. It is the importance of context that is illustrated by an episode from George Orwell’s novel “1984”, where the main character, trying to find out at least something about the past of his country, traces of which he himself systematically destroys in the Ministry of Truth, asks an old beggar: what was life like before? But he does not understand the question and cannot give any intelligible answer, except that beer then cost four pence.

Both the question and the answer are important in this episode. Orwell's hero, turning to the past, is actually trying to comprehend the present: was it really so bad before that the current regime in Oceania is salutary and necessary? And the old man cannot give him an intelligible answer, because the system (of which the main character himself is a part), together with historical memory, has taken away from him all the tools for understanding both the past and the present. Therefore, his memories are just fragments of a raw, undivided awareness of the past, and for the hero they are completely useless.

We can safely say that for decades we have existed in the space of precisely such – undifferentiated, undigested – experience. For many years, only very small segments were visible on our “memory map”; it was difficult to compare it with individual memory. An absurd situation has arisen, the consequences of which have not yet been overcome by Russian society, when millions of people were bearers of a difficult historical legacy, including terror, famine, war, but could not articulate it in any way. The “mute” memory under conditions of prohibition, fear, censorship, and constant self-censorship underwent very significant deformations, which had the most detrimental effect on the mission of the witness.

"Thaw"

Birth of a witness

Today they write a lot about the post-Stalin decade, they see some parallels with modern reality in this era, they look for answers to pressing questions in it, but they do not mention one very important phenomenon of this time - the birth of a witness.

By the beginning of the 1960s, and not only here, but especially in countries that experienced dictatorship, mass terror, war, and the Holocaust, a need arose to evaluate and study the past. However, many intellectuals very quickly come to the realization that it is hardly possible to describe humanitarian disasters (symbolized by Auschwitz and Kolyma) using traditional methods and sources. A mediator is needed between the present and the past, which is so difficult to describe. This is how a witness appears, who is called upon to become this mediator.

The particular importance of the role of the witness in these historical circumstances became apparent even during the Nuremberg trials. It is not for nothing that Stanley Kramer returned to this topic in 1961 in the famous film “The Nuremberg Trials.” Two years later, Germany begins its own trials of Nazi criminals (in particular, the executioners of Auschwitz), where more than two hundred prosecution witnesses speak publicly for the first time. In 1964, the Eichmann trial, which attracted worldwide attention, also opened in Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt rushes there to come into contact with and experience the testimony of the executioner and his victims. It is thanks to what she heard and saw that she comes to the conclusion about the “banality of evil.” It is extremely important that all these court procedures and speeches are filmed for the first time, shown on television, and these media circumstances stimulate the memory of other potential witnesses not involved in the processes.

As the importance of the figure of the witness is realized in public discourse, the term Zeitzeuge arises in Germany, which can be translated as “witness of time.” This difference between the “witness” and the Zeitzeuge was seen by Viktor Shklovsky back in the 20s, when in his book “The Hamburg Account” he wrote about “contemporaries and synchronized swimmers.” The meaning of this division in relation to the role of a witness is that not everyone who lived at the same time can convey its main nerve, its deep meaning, its “noise,” if we resort to Mandelstam’s metaphor. By the way, it was precisely this “noise of time” that Marlen Khutsiev did not discover in the television series “Thaw”: “It seems to me that everyone is confused by the name “Thaw”. What I see has nothing to do with the phenomenon called the “thaw.” This is just a story about how a movie is made... In our thaw there were problems - moral, social, public... and I still don’t understand what problems the authors solve in the film. So it had to be called differently.”

The image of time can also be woven from Akhmatova’s perfect “dirty” if we place the evidence in a historical context. Here, for example, are quotes from family correspondence from 1961. The husband and wife are young scientists from the provinces, candidates of science, and often go on business trips:

“The other day I went to Essentuki to buy butter, bought 1 kg, there was plenty of it. I’m thinking of buying a three-liter can of melted butter here (I saw such butter in Essentuki). In Kislovodsk, they say, there is flour, but you have to go in the morning, and I only have Sunday, I’ll look, I think that with fats we have worse than with flour.”

“I went to Nalchik one Sunday, and there at the market there was pork, lamb and beef for 17-18 rubles, very fatty. The stores in Pyatigorsk have everything, but there is no sugar yet.”

“In Almaty, I bought a Cheviot suit from a Leningrad factory, quite by accident, in a store, size 48, height 3, dark blue, just right for me, and for only 399 rubles. If you don’t like it, they’ll tear it away for 500 rubles. I also bought myself for 50 rubles. nylon white hat. You see what a spender I am.”

What does this typical example of Soviet correspondence from exactly the same year as the Thaw series say? About everyday mundaneness, about the lack of spirituality of authors? Not at all, with the same zeal they chased after books that were impossible to get; the husband managed to serve several years in a Stalinist camp, just as a boy. Here a very important background is created for the then still extremely difficult, gray and full of everyday humiliation life, completely different from the one that is portrayed to us today on the screen, even with the best intentions.

In the Thaw decade, voices began to be heard for the first time testifying to what was the essence of the Stalin era: about mass repressions, about the Gulag. However, very soon this topic again becomes taboo, settling for many years in “samizdat” or “tamizdat”, inaccessible to the general public. This entailed great informational, psychological, and analytical losses, because many witnesses fell silent forever. Memory remained largely segmental, socially homogeneous and poorly reflected. As for another huge layer - the memory of the war, it, although in a truncated form, is still present in the censored space, in particular on the television screen. One of the best examples is Konstantin Simonov’s documentary “A Soldier Walked” (1975).

The difficult truth about the war constantly sought to be supplanted by the official spoiler - the mythologized memory of “professional” veterans, which cut off everything that did not fit into the canon of the heroic feat of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War. At the same time, the form of “meetings with veterans” was unusually actively exploited by Soviet propaganda and contributed to the devaluation of the very idea - the transmission of genuine living memory by a witness. But the fact that in those years when millions of its bearers were alive was perceived by many as an official fake, a propaganda screen, a dummy, today is presented as the true memory of front-line soldiers, which the unvarnished truth about the war and, most importantly, about the incredible cost of victory supposedly mortally insults .

It was literature in the censored space that replaced history, which could not reliably describe events without access to sources that were behind seven seals. Realizing that a virtual Orwellian disappearance of the memory of the Gulag is taking place, many survivors sit down to reminisce. Evgenia Ginzburg, the author of one of the best memoirs about the camps, writes about this directly: she lived to bear witness. This is most evident in Shalamov’s prose, where the author essentially speaks for those who will never be able to talk about their experiences. At the same time, Shalamov is one of the first to realize the limited capabilities of a witness broadcasting the memory of Kolyma.

"Thaw"

Birth of the Spectator

Since the mid-60s, interest in the history of dictatorships has become so widespread that such a powerful new mediator as television cannot help but respond.

It is interesting to turn to the experience of Germany, which most clearly reflects the process of the appearance of a witness on the screen and, most importantly, the connection that has arisen between him and the viewer. The school format of educational films about history is gradually becoming a thing of the past; it is being replaced by non-fiction films made according to the canons of historical documentaries on the BBC. They are created according to a more or less universal recipe: a cut of chronicle film footage illustrates the comments of historians and is accompanied by a voice-over from an objective narrator. Very quickly, it becomes clear to the management of television channels and television producers that films devoted to various aspects of the history of National Socialism have enormous audience potential. The seizure of power, betrayal, conspiracies, bloody crimes, on the one hand, could not in themselves - as an action - not entertain the audience, and on the other hand, this whole terrible story until quite recently was the reality in which they lived.

As educational and educational tasks fade into the background on domestic TV, the so-called histortainment (entertainment on historical topics) wins, talking heads of experts become less and less attractive to the viewer, and also create inconvenience for the filmmakers. There is a gradual abandonment of comments by academic historians who insist on facts and interpretations, which complicate these stories and reduce their rating effectiveness. Hence their replacement with the voices of witnesses of the era. It is their appearance on the screen that brings this format of documentaries into prime time. The witness is called upon to fill the space between the viewer and the event, to bring drama and emotionality to the television story about historical events.

This also coincides with the emerging boom in oral history, when new technical capabilities make it possible to very quickly and mobilely capture the memories of eyewitnesses on film. In the 1980s, megaprojects emerged, with hundreds and even thousands of testimonies recorded. It seemed to many at that time that thanks to these “voices from the choir” an important key to understanding, and most importantly, to the reliable transmission of historical memory, had been found. The greatest achievement in this film work with witnesses was Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah (1985).

But by the end of the 1980s, many historians, while not at all rejecting the role of witnesses, realized that in fact, appealing to memory is a very difficult task. The attempt, especially evident in the format of documentary historical television, to replace history with memory raises serious questions. The point is not in the primitive logic of the saying “He lies like an eyewitness,” but in the problems of interpretation, working with myths and repressions, and finally, with experienced traumas.

When a product is put on the television conveyor, all these doubts and difficulties are taken out of the equation. The expansion and devaluation of the witness on the screen began to lead to the disappearance of the historical context and the suppression of cause-and-effect relationships. The question arose: what can dangling quotes interspersed with film footage, the origin of which is also very doubtful, provide for understanding the era or analyzing historical events? Can, for example, footage from Leni Riefenstahl's films be considered documentary? Or footage from Nazi news film programs Die Deutsche Wochenschau?

What do evidence taken out of context give us as a result - when we, for example, learn from the lips of a loving grandson that his grandfather, who signed the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, loved his grandchildren very much. That, deprived of a company car, he traveled by public transport to visit his grandmother in the hospital, and his chief boss was essentially an unhappy man, with difficult children whom he had to raise alone because his wife died.

The format, in which witnesses replaced historians, turned out to be very convenient for television. In many cases, with their help, facts are replaced by feelings and emotions, and reliability is ensured by their witness status. A certain ideal type of television witness has emerged, whose statements only confirm stereotypes and clichés. This type of witness constantly appears in domestic documentary television productions, creating a false image of the benign atmosphere of Brezhnev’s stagnation, or mythological “documentary” portraits of Soviet leaders of the Stalin era. Perhaps most often, with the help of the testimonies of nurses, cooks, and personal drivers, a frankly tabloid product is created: “history” seen through a keyhole.

It is quite obvious to anyone who studies problems of historical memory that the most accurate example showing the limitations of the means available to the witness is still Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon. It is no coincidence that Sergei Loznitsa builds his documentaries and, most importantly, the film “Blockade” (2005), entirely on newsreel footage, refusing not only talking heads, but also voice-over commentary.

"Thaw"

TV film as a historical source

Since the early 1980s, after the incredible success of the television series “The Holocaust” (1979), fictional television films and television series in which private history is depicted against the backdrop of seemingly real historical events have gained increasing popularity from documentary production. Speaking about domestic experience, we should mention the huge success of two television series of the 1970s - “Seventeen Moments of Spring” (1973) and “The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed” (1979).
At the same time, both films - and here the talent of their creators was revealed - did not in any way insist on their historical veracity.

As television and cinema become the main mediators of historical events, they begin to claim a major role in the formation of historical memory. Of course, this is not articulated so directly by their authors and producers, but we see how historical films and television series strive to turn the viewer into a witness of the events taking place on the screen. This effect occurs when a film presents itself as authentic.

Perjury is, as you know, a criminal offense, an offense that is condemned by any established ethical system, morality, morality, and even one of the most serious sins in Judaism (sin against the 9th commandment), Christianity, and Islam.

However, perjury is not always intentional. A misleading false witness does not always know for sure that he is lying. A person can distort and make mistakes with inspiration, and at the same time be confident in his rightness and crystal honesty!

I'm not even talking about the so-called "broken phone", when information is passed from mouth to mouth, gradually turning into misinformation. When retelling, at each stage of the verbal “chain” the facts are distorted and transformed. Such are the properties of our brain - to speculate, mixing reality with fantasy and unconditionally believing in “apocrypha” created with our own hands.

But here's the information "first-hand"... It is also not always reliable. You yourself, most likely, have seen many, many times how people who were present at the same event are able to describe it so differently that they give incompatible versions of what happened, refuting each other. There is a well-established saying: “Lies like an eyewitness.” Criminologists love her very much. It accurately characterizes the features of working with witnesses to incidents and crimes.

Here's what the blogger writes:

« There was an incident about two years ago. Saturday, I sleep, but I DO NOT sleep much anymore, because I have training in a few hours (but for me it’s a thrill, of course, I love training). But, of course, I also like to take a nap. Suddenly a squeal, like, help, save. The squeal is, of course, feminine, I would even say girlish.

I fly out onto the balcony, half asleep, and ask (and my voice has been conditioned by many years of yelling in the hall, yes, I even sing pretty well, I guess)... so I ask, like, what the hell???
And there some woodpecker was wringing the girl, raised his dick, wanted to tell me something, but then he looked at it better, bit his tongue, let the girl go and moved on, pretending as if nothing had happened.

Well, the girl followed him, started howling, in general, I realized there, this is the family idyll of degenerates.

So, the next day, rumors spread around the house that the maniac wanted to rape the girl, and some man jumped out of the balcony (jumped out of the balcony!!!), naked, and gave this maniac a hard time.
I laughed a lot.
And there are a lot of such examples.”

Proof that eyewitnesses do not lie out of malicious intent is a curious experiment once conducted at the International Congress of Psychologists. The event took place in a hall next to the restaurant, where a costumed masquerade ball was held. The scientists' speeches were disturbed by loud shouts and music, but the organizers of the congress made excuses that they could not do anything about it - rent was expensive, and they only managed to rent half of the building.

And then something shocking happened. During the next report, a ball participant in a Pierrot costume burst into the hall. Harlequin was chasing him with a pistol in his hands. Shots were fired, Pierrot fell... When order in the hall was finally restored, the chairman asked all eyewitnesses to give testimony in order to demand a penalty from the owners of the building, who promised peace and order during the congress.

More than a hundred psychologists gave written testimony. Some wrote that Harlequin shot Pierrot in the back, after which he fell, others claimed that Pierrot fell himself, and his pursuer just jumped on him and shot into the air. Still others clarified: the victim fell immediately after the shot, and only then Harlequin put his foot on her and kicked into the air. It seemed to the fourth that Harlequin was shooting point-blank at Pierrot both before and after his fall... The testimony also varied regarding the number of shots - some heard only one bang, others two, others three or even four.

It is clear that the psychologists interviewed were not at all interested in deliberate distortion of facts, and were only trying, after experiencing a slight shock, to subjectively describe what they saw. Everyone could swear that his version was the truly correct one.

The next day, the “second act” of the performance took place in the same hall. According to the scientist, whose report was interrupted yesterday, the entire scene with the ball in the restaurant, as well as the “showdown” between Harlequin and Pierrot, were prepared in advance for the sole purpose of refuting or confirming the main provisions of his scientific report. Psychologists laughed a lot when they listened to their own contradictory testimony, which confirmed the truth of the statement that unconscious lies arising from the subjectivity of impressions are characteristic of almost any person.

The other day, washprofile posted a note about perjury. Psychologists from the University of Iowa\Iowa State University and John Jay College\John Jay College conducted an experiment that once again proved that witnesses to a crime should not be completely trusted.

The experiment was conducted with a group of students who were not told the real purpose of the experiment. They were asked to go into the university laboratory and wait a little. After that, a stranger appeared in the room, took the laptop from the table and quickly retreated. A few minutes later, her “employee” entered the laboratory, who discovered the loss of the computer and informed those present about the theft that had just occurred.

The arriving “policeman” asked the students to help identify the thief.
After this, the students were shown several people, one of whom was suspected of committing this theft (there was no real “thief” among them). Students were asked to point to the offender and rate their level of confidence that the choice was made correctly.

The results of the experiment were shocking: during the identification process, most witnesses indicated that among the individuals presented to them there was a real thief, and the students reported this with a high degree of confidence. After this, the identified person told the witnesses that in fact he was not a thief, but was simply invited to participate in the identification procedure. Having realized the mistake, 60% of witnesses immediately pointed to another person from among those initially presented to them. They explained that they had previously been mistaken, but were now absolutely sure that they were naming the real criminal. A detailed description of the study will be published by the journal Psychological Science.

The phenomenon of perjury has long been studied in the United States. It is generally accepted that this problem is widespread - by some estimates, up to a quarter of the testimony given in the country's courts is subsequently refuted (by the results of various examinations or otherwise). There is no exact data on the true scale of this phenomenon: firstly, because no organization maintains relevant statistics; secondly, because most statements made by witnesses during interviews with investigators and judges are not recorded. In addition, quite often false evidence is given by people who simply want to become famous and have no real information about the crime.

But it's not even about the lawsuits. That's writing history. There is also a problem here. Here is an excerpt from Belinkov’s book about Yuri Tynyanov:

« The famous English politician, conqueror, adventurer, poet and historian Sir Walter Raleigh saw the fight from the window of his cell in the Tower.

The fight broke out precisely in those moments when Sir Raleigh was finishing the last lines of the second volume of World History.

He saw how first two fought, then four more joined them, then another, and another, and twelve more.

A ring of interested parties has formed around the landfill. It boiled and swelled like soup in a tin bowl.
The landfill rolled around the prison yard, then gradually began to fall apart, and fallen human figures appeared at its edges.

After knocking, an elderly pirate entered the venerable historian's cell from the next cell.

Sir,” said the venerable historian, “what a wonderful fight.” Isn't that right, sir?

“I don’t find it, sir,” the pirate answered with a hint of barely noticeable disdain. - Wonderful fights only happen in Merthyrtydfil prison, Glomorgen County. I'm sorry.

But, sir,” objected a somewhat wounded Sir Raleigh, “twenty people took part in the fight, about which you speak, as it seemed to me, with a tinge of barely noticeable disdain.

But, sir, you are prone to inappropriate exaggerations,” interrupted the venerable pirate. - You are trying to sell six people for twenty.

But, sir,” objected the former favorite of Her Majesty, who once owned forty thousand acres in Ireland, with liveliness, “I thank the creator, I still know how to add two with four, with one, and with another, and with twelve more.”

“Two and three, and one, and that’s the whole count,” the venerable pirate interrupted the venerable adventurer. - But where else are there fourteen? Thanks to my creator, I can count to six as well as any Eton boy.

But, sir, I fought under the banner of Coligny! I know well that if you add two to four and add one to the resulting sum and also add one and twelve, you get just...

The elderly pirate, who had once been cut off the upper half of his head by the brave sailors of Her Majesty’s fleet in a bloody battle that lasted many days, began to laugh.

Sir! - cried Walter Raleigh, conqueror, adventurer, poet and historian. - If people who observed the same event at the same moments can differ so decisively in the story about it, then what is the historian’s story about the events that happened a thousand years before worth?!

With these words, the venerable historian grabbed the manuscript of the second volume of World History, in which only an unfinished line remained, and with a groan threw it into the fireplace.

People tend to be deceived and fall into self-deception, become victims of misunderstandings and create self-justifying accumulations of interconnected texts so that the final conclusions are not drawn from a neutral point of view, but from a huge number of small episodic stories, stories with a small letter, the big History they need grows, outlining everything that happened, everything that happened between “them” and “us,” the entire sequence of events, all the differences and absurdities of this world from the correct, that is, our point of view.

« The most questionable events are those that were observed by the largest number of people. To say that a fact is simultaneously confirmed by thousands of witnesses is to say, in most cases, that the actual fact is completely different from the stories that exist about it.
From all of the above, it clearly follows that historical works must be treated as works of pure fantasy, fantastic stories about facts that were poorly observed and accompanied by explanations made later"- wrote psychologist Gustave Le Bon.

A recent example is the emergence of one LiveJournal community. It happened live, in front of hundreds of people. But this does not stop the liars (who were not standing nearby at all) from shouting that the community was stolen from them.

Or here's another example: Bibi. His deceit became the talk of the town.

Creatives from Kadima place a particularly disproportionate emphasis on Bibi’s deceit (naively believing that someone else’s shortcoming is their advantage, and it is enough to convince the voter of Netanyahu’s deceit for him to run to vote for Tsypa).

Why do you think that he is deliberately lying when he says that he never voted for unilateral disengagement? Or about the position of finance minister in the Italian government? Or about Gandhi's presence in his government? Or about the fact that he saw British soldiers walking around Jerusalem as a child?

But Bibi is not a fool at all. He is smarter and more talented than most Israeli politicians. Why does he set himself up anew every time and allow himself to be caught in a lie? Moreover, small. This is at a loss. The only explanation that comes to my mind is the guess that maybe Bibi is not lying, maybe HE REMEMBERS SO.

When, together with a group of bloggers, I came to a meeting with Bibi, he touched upon the story of the Hasmonean tunnel. Those who understand Hebrew can watch and listen.

Bibi told how he ended the intifada in thirty minutes by threatening Arafat. But I didn’t remember the recoil of Hebron that followed. He didn’t need it at all in the format of this meeting. This only spoiled the impression... Then why did he?!

THIS IS HOW HE REMEMBERS.

It is clear that his former party members, who now, by the will of fate, find themselves in the Kadima political movement, remember this story somewhat differently.

But why should we actually believe them and not him? Following this does not mean at all as a result of this. And it’s not for the party that arose on the basis of itnatkut and for itkansut to reproach Bibi for giving away territories.

I also remember these events somewhat differently. But when I listened with Bibi and carefully watched his body movements (which did not betray a lie at all), I involuntarily remembered a joke:

« The husband comes home. He sees the wife lying under her lover.
Freezes in a dumbfounded pose.

The wife, without stopping the process, tells him:

Well, who are you going to trust?! Your shameless eyes or my word of honor?! "

After all, a lie detector, at most, can indicate what the subject himself considers to be true. Is this really true?!

Because of this, conflicts very often occur in situations of “word against word” (“confrontation”). For example, a woman accuses her boss of sexual harassment. Passes a polygraph test. And the bark detector confirms it.

Then, the boss, backed up against the wall, will use the same technical means, which, based on instrumental psychophysiological studies, gives him the statement that he did not sexually harass her, and if he touched her ass, it was purely by accident.

In 1991, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus conducted a survey on memory. It turned out that most people (including psychologists) believe that memory contains a literal record of events: access to it may become difficult, the vividness of impressions may fade, some parts may be missing, but overall the brain works like a video camera.

How, then, do we explain the existence of false memories that feel so emotionally powerful, precise, and detailed? We are absolutely confident in their authenticity, but in vain.

Through the stencil of attention

Problems arise already at the perception stage. We notice what our brain considers important at the moment (a deep neckline, a gun pointed between your eyes, the dramatic twists and turns of a new book by your favorite author), and signals that are assessed as unimportant are suppressed. Magicians often use this to create their illusions.

Internal narrative: the main thing is that the suit fits

All our memories are part of a coherent story that we constantly create from the chaos of data. If the brain notices a contradiction, it tries to eliminate or smooth it out. The incomprehensible and unexpected must receive at least some explanation or be discarded. The model of the world must be stable, and that’s all, otherwise it will be impossible to make decisions and act normally.

This concerns not only your interpretation of what happened (Vasya shot with a pistol because he is a terrorist), but also the details of what happened (I don’t remember any police uniform on Vasya, because this contradicts my opinion that Vasya is a terrorist).

By prior agreement

Witnesses who discuss an event among themselves will unconsciously bring their memories of it to a common denominator. Not only your personal, but also your collective suit should fit well. This is called "conformity".

Ideally, of course, we need other witnesses to be sympathetic to us. If we don't like them, we will resist this process.

The main thing is the essence, and we’ll come up with the details

The general theme and emotional background of the memories are preserved quite accurately, and the details are thought out (well, you can’t store them all, in fact - the physical memory medium is not rubber). Moreover, they are selected in such a way as not only not to contradict, but also to reinforce and strengthen the central theme and emotion. So “I caught a crucian carp” turns into “I caught ten crucian carp and a pike,” subordinated to the central “the fishing was excellent.”

What is important, where from is unimportant

The source of information is erased from memory much faster than the information itself.

This could have been an important saving of resources initially (what difference does it make who exactly said that a tiger is chasing us), but in modern society it can become a problem (if news agency N said that a tiger is chasing us, then I’ll probably run, and if the television channel is M, I’ll think ten times).

Also, our brains don’t place too much importance on whether the information received is true or not: if you say something and then explain that it is not true, after only 3 days 27% of young people and 40% of middle-aged people will remember the statement as true and will act yourself accordingly.

However, if you first announce that the statement will now be untrue and then give the information, more people will remember that the statement is not true. Keep this in mind if you ever get involved in fighting myths.

True story that happened to me

We tend to place ourselves at the center of stories (I knocked Vasya’s gun away, not Petya) and appropriate the experiences we’ve heard, read, or watched. Of course, we won’t take credit for actions that are completely incredible (from our point of view today), but over little things we can lie to ourselves and others quite a lot. It’s easy to remember that we were in a zoo that we only saw on TV.

Now that you asked I'm starting to remember

There have been quite a lot of studies in which subjects remember something that did not happen (for example, a non-existent scene from a film that has just been shown). This can be done by showing a photo of yourself processed in Photoshop and/or asking leading questions.

In this light, some psychotherapeutic methods seem rather dubious. Resurfacing memories of childhood abuse can easily turn out to be false. Especially when your therapist is armed with a presumption of parental guilt. Ellen Bass and Laura Davis had a significant hand in its formation.

I will quote here an excerpt from their book “The Courage to Heal”: “Assume that your feelings are absolutely correct. If you feel like you were a victim as a child and it affected the rest of your life, then that's exactly what you were. You don't need precise and coherent recollections like you do to testify in court."

When a psychotherapist makes his patients sincerely believe that they were abducted by aliens (which is what John Mack became famous for), the delusion of what is happening is obvious to most. But fabricated memories of incest have destroyed many lives and family relationships. Children are especially highly suggestible. Of course, domestic violence exists, but this is not a reason to imprison and persecute innocent people.

So, memories can be erased, not formed at all (if, for example, you are in a state of chronic lack of sleep), adapt to our expectations and the expectations of other people, merge with each other, and so on. We don't notice this because we usually have no reason to doubt it. There is nothing to compare the stories in our heads with, because no one records on video our entire life from birth to death. It’s a pity: the shock of viewing the footage would have been enormous. “I remember everything differently, I don’t believe you,” say many participants in the experiments, reading reports about significant events written by them in the past.

Welcome to the Matrix, Neo!

Although no, memory still has some relation to reality.

Sources

1. Leonard Mlodinow, “Unconscious”, 2012
2. Steven Novella, course of video lectures “Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills”, 2012. Lecture 4 – “Flaws and fabrications of memory”.
3. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/224766.php
4. http://wolf-kitses.livejournal.com/72264.html
5. http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A8%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%84,_%D0%9C%D1%83%D0%B7%D0 %B0%D1%84%D0%B5%D1%80
6. http://www.stopbadtherapy.com/courage/index.shtml
7. http://www.chayka.org/node/3957
8. http://skepdic.com/repressedmemory.html

About the section

This section contains articles devoted to phenomena or versions that in one way or another may be interesting or useful to researchers of the unexplained.
Articles are divided into categories:
Informational. They contain information useful for researchers from various fields of knowledge.
Analytical. They include analytics of accumulated information about versions or phenomena, as well as descriptions of the results of experiments performed.
Technical. They accumulate information about technical solutions that can be used in the field of studying unexplained facts.
Techniques. Contain descriptions of methods used by group members when investigating facts and studying phenomena.
Media. Contains information about the reflection of phenomena in the entertainment industry: films, cartoons, games, etc.
Known misconceptions. Revelations of known unexplained facts, collected including from third-party sources.

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Information

Lies like a witness

In the article “Lie detection in the study of non-fiction,” we have already discussed what options for distorting events by eyewitnesses may occur in the study of non-fiction. Here we will look at the various psychological effects that affect the witness and his testimony.

One of the most famous effects is "inattentional blindness". Its essence is as follows: often a person may completely fail to notice even a very bright and significant detail that is literally “under his nose” if he is distracted by some other task (for example, trying to consider something, count, remember , study). And the more important the object of distraction seems to a person, the more “blind” he is to other details. As an example, we can recall a children's riddle based on distraction: “At the final stop, fourteen men and two women boarded the bus. At the first stop, two men got off and two women got on. At the next stop almost all the men got off (only three remained), and at the next stop five women got on. After driving for half a kilometer, the bus stopped and another man got on. How many stops were there along the bus route?” If you don’t know in advance that you need to count stops (and there are only three of them), then attention is focused on frequent variables - the number of men and women. It is often impossible to answer the final question.

The next effect is "attention overload", somewhat similar to the previous one. It is based on the peculiarity of human memory, which is capable of concentrating and analyzing only a small number of elements at a time. An example is a simple problem: “Two workers unload two wagons in two days. How many wagons will 6 workers unload in 6 days? When solved on paper, it seems simple, but when solved in mind, it causes problems because the amount of data that needs to be held in memory to solve it exceeds the capacity of working memory, making logical conclusions impossible. Thus, small amounts of seemingly simple information cause confusion and difficulty in its perception and analysis.

Effect "delayed attention" is based on the fact that the human mind is able to maintain attention on some event for only about 10 minutes, then it begins to be distracted by other events and details around. Thus, over time, maintaining attention and remembering information becomes more and more difficult. Anyone who has listened to long lectures is probably familiar with this effect.

One of the effects that is important for NOF researchers is "replacement of memories", which lies in the fact that when mentally or verbally reproducing events, the memory of it changes, since the neural pathways are activated differently each time. As a result, a person, under the influence of his own opinion and fantasies, as well as new knowledge acquired after the incident, remembers not what he actually saw and felt, but a completely new event construct. So, for example, with leading questions you can “force” an eyewitness to “remember” details that were not there at the time of observation.

The previous effect can also include the substitution of memories caused by strong emotions or tense anticipation of current events.

A variant of the memory substitution effect is "false memory". When it manifests itself, a person, independently or by imposing information from the outside, can over time “remember” an event that did not actually take place at all, and believe in this memory. University of Washington psychologist Elizabeth Loftus described a false memory experiment in 1997 in an article for Scientific American: “When one of the participants was asked about this unfortunate incident at a wedding during the first interview, he replied: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” . I’ve never heard of this before.” However, in the second conversation, he already answered differently: “The wedding was outdoors. We were fussing all the time, so perhaps I could have accidentally touched someone and spilled a glass of punch or something. Yes, I made a big mistake. And then they yelled at me.”

Conclusion

All people are susceptible to the above effects. The likelihood that they will appear depends on the emotional and physical state of the witness, both during the event itself and after it, and during the interview. Thus, due to differences in the perception of reality, people's testimony about the same incident can vary significantly. And since many factors influence the perception, memorization and reproduction of the details of an event, you should not unconditionally trust the testimony of witnesses; they can only be used as additional information to material evidence (photographs, videos, etc.), which should form the basis of evidentiary evidence. basis for any investigation.

Going into eternity Lebedev Yuri Mikhailovich

“Lies like an eyewitness”

“Lies like an eyewitness”

Until now, a debate has not subsided in Russian military historiography: whether or not there was a three-day mourning in Germany for the German liner Wilhelm Gustloff. It was sunk on a January night in 1945 by the Soviet submarine S-13 under the command of Alexander Marinesko.

In Daniil Granin’s book “Evenings with Peter the Great” there is the following phrase: “He lies like an eyewitness.” And then the writer continues: “There is nothing surprising in this. Everyone lives in their own time. Eyewitnesses misinterpret - they care about the impression, they need to surprise, horrify, delight.”

We all have to deal with this all the time. Therefore, I treat such stories selectively. I believe them more when their statements are supported by documents. Over the years that have passed since the sinking of the German ship Wilhelm Gustloff by submarine C-13 on January 30, 1945, dozens of books, hundreds of articles have been written, films have been made, both documentaries and feature films, not only in our country, but throughout to the world. An uninitiated person's head should be spinning, because he no longer knows what to believe. Was there or was there not three days of mourning in Germany for the ship Wilhelm Gustloff? Did Hitler declare Alexander Marinesko his personal enemy for this or not? Who was the ship transporting: refugees or the elite of the German submarine fleet? Was the commander of the German convoy shot for his omissions? I'm not even talking about such a myth as the three-day celebration of the sinking of the Gustlof by the crew of the C-13. Marinesko and his sailors allegedly celebrated the victory for three days in a row by sinking in their submarine to the bottom right next to the pier.

“Eyewitnesses” tell all this, spilling out information, usually in an excited state and giving free rein to their imagination. It's another matter when you work with documents. They also have varying degrees of reliability, but they are much more beneficial to process. They can be compared, finding similarities and inconsistencies and thus building a real picture.

Supporters of the theory of three-day mourning refer to the statement of one of the “eyewitnesses” Viktor Anisimov, who “personally held in his hands the newspapers of Nazi Germany “Völkischer Beobachter” and “Schwarzes Kor” in early February 1945. There, he said, “it was written in black and white about three days of mourning.” It so happened that in the 1990s I spoke with Viktor Anisimov for several days in Berlin at an international seminar on the problems of perpetuating the memory of the dead. He represented the delegation of the Kaliningrad region, where he lived. I remember that at that time I was delighted by his beautiful, polished German language, which distinguished wartime specialists. The conversation confirmed that he indeed belonged to the old guard of experts in German language and literature. It turned out that we both served in the same department, representing the interests of the country in the field of military diplomacy. He - during the war, I - much later. Captain 1st Rank Anisimov was already in deep reserve, but vividly recalled how during the war he served in the Soviet embassy in Sweden as an assistant military attache. At that time I had not yet heard anything about “Wilhelm Gustloff”, so we did not touch on this topic. A few years later, in Viktor Gemanov’s book “Feat S-13,” I suddenly came across the above-mentioned statement by Anisimov. And I regretted that we didn’t talk about the German airliner then. I think that as a colleague I could ask him purely professional questions. For example: “Where are these newspapers themselves? How come you, Comrade Captain 1st Rank, did not send them to the center as confirmation of this information? This is the elementary duty of every military diplomat. Isn’t it for this reason that your chief, People’s Commissar of the Navy N.G. Kuznetsov, in his book “The Course of Victories,” dropped the phrase through clenched teeth: “I learned about mourning a month after this event.” It turns out that he, having his representatives at the rank of naval diplomats in each coastal country, overlooked important information. Moreover, it was simply easy to obtain it, since it was available in open sources. Or maybe the wise Nikolai Gerasimovich still wanted to say in this way: “They set me up, forced me to write such a heresy in my book. I know perfectly well that there was no mourning, but in the context of the intensification of the theme of the feat, I was forced to submit to the circumstances.”

For half a century, no one has been able to find the text of the message about the imaginary mourning. Because he didn't exist. This was confirmed by the largest expert on naval issues of the Second World War, German professor Jurgen Rover. This is how he answered my question: “I asked the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich regarding the newspapers Völkischer Beobachter and Schwarzes Kor.” There is a complete selection of newspaper data for February 1945, but in none of the issues was it possible to find information about the death of Wilhelm Gustloff. The disaster was first reported in Swedish newspapers such as Dagens Nyheter, which was told to me by the former director of the Swedish State Archives.”

Thus, the question of imaginary mourning was closed for me. But after I had a chance to read the book by Nobel laureate Gunter Grass “The Trajectory of the Crab”, dedicated to the death of “Wilhelm Gustloff”, another amazing page opened in this whole story. It turned out that there was still mourning, but not for a ship with that name, but for a person who, by the will of tragic circumstances, was immortalized after his death in the guise of this liner. In 1937, one of the Nazi functionaries, whose name was Wilhelm Gustloff, was killed. It was for him that Hitler organized a luxurious commemoration, marking it with three days of mourning in Schwerin with the participation of 35 thousand Nazis.

In Soviet times, people who had access to this classified information reinterpreted it and presented it in an interpretation that was supposed to further glorify the “attack of the century.” A myth was also added here about the personal enemy of the Fuhrer, who became Alexander Marinesko, although in reality Hitler called the murderer of the real Gustloff, the Jewish student David Frankfurter, as such.

Well, then the last loud myth about the allegedly destroyed 3,700 German submariners who were on the liner that served as their mother ship fell apart. In fact, a battalion of 819 submarine cadets went on the last voyage on this ship. 405 sailors died, all their names are engraved today in alphabetical order on two boards at the monument to fallen German submariners in the town of Meltenort near the city of Kiel. I had a chance to visit there and photograph these boards.

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