"Tacit poetry" appears in this signing ezine:
THE TACTILE MIND WEEKLY #4
13 May 2003

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CONTENTS

~The Main Thing: John Lee Clark
~On Hand with Trudy Suggs
~Belfast Graffiti: Shane Ó hEorpa
~Man on the Street: Christopher Jon Heuer
~Coffee Shop Notes: Sara Stallard
~The Significance of Reality: Adrean Clark
~Tacit Poetry: Tom Bell
~Missed Connections: Tanya Ruys
~Palm Lines: Raymond Luczak

and I couldn't resist this research which suggests all kinds of things about
resding in language.

tom bell

BRAIN HAS A WAY OF DISTORTING MEMORIES

By Carey Goldberg, Globe Staff, 5/13/2003

Bad news for diary enthusiasts and raconteurs: Accumulating evidence
suggests that when it comes to preserving memories, certain things are
better left unsaid. For example, researchers found that when subjects
watched a videotape of a mock bank robbery, those who were asked to describe
the robber in detail just afterward had a harder time identifying him later
than those who had never tried to put their memories into words.

Another experiment found a similar effect with wine-tasting: Sometimes,
describing a wine's flavor made it harder for certain people to pick out the
wine from among others when they were taste-tested later.

Psychologists call this phenomenon ''verbal overshadowing,'' and they have
been studying it for the last dozen years, intrigued by yet another
indication that, though memories may seem as static as snapshots, they are
in fact fluid and vulnerable to distortion.

Psychology professor Jonathan Schooler of the University of Pittsburgh, who
discovered the effect, defines verbal overshadowing as ''situations in which
one tries to describe difficult-to-describe perceptions, thoughts or
feelings, and as a result of that, loses access to the very information
they're trying to describe.''

Ironic, isn't it? You take the trouble to try to record your most ineffable
moments, and just by trying to put them into words, you distort the very
memory you're trying to preserve.

As another prominent researcher, Christian A. Meissner, a psychology
professor at Florida International University, puts it: Verbal overshadowing
''shows that the way you articulate your experience can alter the way you
remember it in the future.''

In fact, work on verbal overshadowing calls into question what for many is
the greatest joy of writing a diary -- the opportunity to chew over various
life events, more exhaustively than even the dearest of friends could
stomach.

Several overshadowing experiments, Schooler said, found that when people
ruminate over feelings, it can interfere with accurately assessing them.
Subjects did much better when they just went with their gut, he said.

But for diehard intellectualizers, there are some heartening aspects to
verbal overshadowing.

For one thing, the wine-tasting experiment found that people who were expert
not only at tasting wine but at describing it lost nothing by putting the
taste into words.

So keeping a diary or retelling experiences could cause no harm for people
who have plenty of practice at it.

Also, verbal overshadowing does not tend to affect memories of things that
lend themselves easily to words anyway, like simple descriptions of actions
or chains of events.

And, in general, Schooler said, ''There's tons of research in memory that
suggests that recording experiences and rehearsal will help you to remember
certain aspects of that experience.''

But just keep in mind that it's a double-edged sword, he said: ''Certain
kinds of distortion may also occur, and they may be particularly pronounced
when you try to explain why you're having the experiences you are and when
you try to describe really ineffable experiences.''

Diaries aside, work on verbal overshadowing has clear implications for law
enforcement and the handling of witnesses. In particular, Meissner said,
''Our research says that if you're going to ask a witness to make a
subsequent identification, maybe it's best not to push them when it comes to
their description of the perpetrator.''

Schooler and Meissner disagree over the underlying mechanism at work in
verbal overshadowing. Meissner sees it as a ''recording problem,'' that
people distort memories as they lay them down or when they retrieve them.
Schooler sees verbal overshadowing more as a sign of conflict between the
parts of the brain used in verbalizing and the parts used for nonverbal
perception of things like faces or maps.

But both seem to agree on the overall lesson. As Meissner put it: ''We need
to be careful about the way we express our memories, because the manner in
which we express something may distort it in the longer term.''

Carey Goldberg can be reached at [log in to unmask]

This story ran on page C3 of the Boston Globe on 5/13/2003. (c) Copyright
2003 Globe Newspaper Company.