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Every(?) court accepts eyewitness testimony which is being recognized more and more as being very unreliable. Even ignoring the problem with eyewitnesses lying
by mastax 9y ago
Every(?) court accepts eyewitness testimony which is being recognized more and more as being very unreliable. Even ignoring the problem with eyewitnesses lying (or jurors falsely believing they are lying), memory is much less reliable than people feel that it is. It's very easy for false information to become associated with a memory where it resides forever after. Additionally, when remembering something the brain is happy to take the essence of something and fill in the specifics - it's as much imagination as it is recall - and it happens so fluidly it's hard to tell what you actually remember.
For an illustration of the second point, try to recall your earliest memory. For me, the first time someone asked me that question I had an answer which was then fixed in my brain as "my first memory". If I try to recall the memory, it's very apparent that there's nothing real left. It's just a memory of a memory, and any specifics are imagined extrapolations of home video and photos which I can actually remember. When this happens for more recent memories, the process is much more transparent.