Research finds reason why the forensics data departs from Human Memory

[Jim Phelps]

One of the more interesting issues on the study of the JFK assassination is the differences in the memory of persons around the Dealy Plaza area and around the Parkland Hospital Emergency room. There is some new research from Cambridge University that may help explain the differences between the forensics evidence, like the Zapruder Film, or say the Hospital attendants and the X-ray photos in the National Archives.

The new research details appear in this URL:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44793315/ns/health-behavior/t/what-really-happened-sharp-memories-tied-brain-crease/

Citation:

"There are two types of people in the world: those who remember everything exactly as it happened and those who have a tendency to muddle what’s happened with what’s imagined.

The difference between the two may be explained by a subtle variation in the brain's structure, according to a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

About 50 percent of people are born with a prominent fold in the brain matter that lies just behind the forehead, explained study co-author author Jon Simons, a researcher at the University of Cambridge in the UK. Simons and his colleagues found that these are the people who seem record very accurate versions of what has happened to and around them

It might also have an impact on how judges and juries perceive eye-witness testimony, Simons said. You could imagine that people without the fold “might witness a crime and then talk to someone else,” he explained. “Or they might read a newspaper report about the crime and then misremember what they actually saw.”

The tricky thing about this kind of memory issue is that people generally don’t recognize they have it, Simon said. They think their memories are every bit as accurate as everyone else’s.

Perhaps one day some enterprising defense lawyer will ask for brain scans of prosecution witnesses to see if they have accurate memories."

End Citation

This also appears on the Cambridge web site here:

http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/keeping-track-of-reality/

Citation:

"A new study of the brain explains why some of us are better than others at remembering what really happened.

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This brain variation, which is present in roughly half of the normal population, is one of the last structural folds to develop before birth and for this reason varies greatly in size between individuals in the healthy population. The researchers discovered that adults whose MRI scans indicated an absence of the PCS were significantly less accurate on memory tasks than people with a prominent PCS on at least one side of the brain. Interestingly, all participants believed that they had a good memory despite one group’s memories being clearly less reliable."

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Thus, when half the population can experience this inabilty to accurately recount the events of memory from that day, which were part what other said, part what they saw, and then what they recall----this study tells that a large cross section of the population can fail to recount what truely occured.

So, we can begin to see why where there appears to be solid visual evidence like the Zapruder Film, that many accounts from persons memories may well depart from the forensic evidence. The same would follow for all the accounts at Parkland, where perhaps words modified the memory of what was really going on in the Emergy Room that day.

Something highly worth tossing into the considerations for the validity for witness memory over that for forensics type evidence of X-rays and Films for the day.