The Night Bird (Frost Easton #1)(20)

“Okay.”

“In other words, reality happens once, but memory happens over and over,” Stein told him. “Every time I ask you to think about the blue car that zipped through the stop sign and had an accident, your brain goes back and retrieves the memory, like a file from a cabinet. However, memories—unlike reality—aren’t fixed. With every recollection, we reshape what we saw. Our memories of an event are influenced by how we want a situation to be, how we perceive our role in it, what people tell us, and even by what we hear or read about what took place. After a while, our brains can’t distinguish between reality and our reconstruction of reality.”

“Eyewitnesses are unreliable,” Frost said. “I get it.”

“Exactly. Not only are they unreliable, they can be stubborn about it, too. Witnesses are often one-hundred-percent convinced of the facts, even when they’re wrong. And trauma can actually make it worse. You wouldn’t think a rape victim could ever misidentify her assailant, right? And yet it happens. Innocent men have gone to prison because of it.”

“Like I said, people get it wrong. How does that relate to what you do?”

Stein responded with a slight dip of her chin. She had a calmness and precision in everything she did. “My point is that people can change their own memories without even being aware that they’re doing so. The danger—and the opportunity—is that memories can also be deliberately altered. You may have heard about a controversy back in the nineteen eighties, in which therapists helped patients recover repressed memories of abuse. Most of those recovered memories were discredited, but to the patient they became real. And it’s not just therapists who are guilty of this kind of manipulation. Attorneys do the same thing, and so do police officers. Sometimes it’s accidental, and sometimes it’s intentional.”

“How does that work?” Frost asked.

“Think about the video I showed you. The blue car races through the stop sign and gets into an accident. There were a variety of retail stores in the background. Which coffee shop was on the street? Do you remember? Think about it.”

Frost did. Finally, he said, “I think it was Starbucks.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, but I think so.”

“It wasn’t Seattle’s Best?”

“I don’t think it was. Why? Am I wrong? Was it really Seattle’s Best?”

“Actually, there was no coffee shop on the street at all,” Stein told him. “But if we went over this a few more times, you would swear to me that it was a Starbucks. You’d see it in your head. Most coffee shops are Starbucks, so if someone plants the suggestion that there was a coffee shop, people tend to leap to the conclusion that they saw a Starbucks. Even when it wasn’t there at all.”

“Sneaky.”

“No, it’s just how memory works. How fast do you think the blue car was going when it blew through the stop sign? Want to hazard a guess?”

Frost shrugged. “I’d say thirty-five miles an hour.”

“It was going twenty. The control group in my studies typically guesses twenty-five. You went much higher. Do you know why?”

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me,” Frost said, slightly irritated.

“I’ve described the blue car several times as zipping or racing through the intersection. ‘Blew through the stop sign.’ My characterization influences your brain. You sped up the car because of how I described the incident, not because of what you actually remembered.” Stein leaned forward and added, “In addition, you haven’t corrected me about two important details, even though I’ve made the same mistakes several times.”

“Namely?”

“The car in the video was dark green, not blue. And there was no stop sign at the intersection. It was a yield sign.”

Frost thought back to the video, and he realized to his dismay that he wasn’t sure if she was telling him the truth or not. Stein smiled at him with a slight turn of her lips.

“I’m not trying to make you feel like a fool, Inspector. It’s simply that this is how memory fails us. It’s highly suggestible. If an attorney or police officer did what I did to an accident witness, they’d be very likely to remember a blue car going through a stop sign the next time they tried to recall the incident. And that might be in a courtroom.”

“No offense, Dr. Stein, but you’re not exactly making me feel good about your memory treatments. The whole process sounds dangerous. I read that some of your colleagues have tried to drum you out of the profession because of what you’re doing.”

“You’re right,” Stein admitted. “Altering memories is very risky. Because of the dangers involved, the traditional viewpoint in psychiatry is that you should never do it. You can try to sever the emotional response from the memory, but you shouldn’t try to erase or replace the memory itself. Many therapists and scientists think our life is the product of our varied experiences, good and bad, and that we shouldn’t mess with that.”

“But you’re right, and they’re wrong?” Frost challenged her.

“Not necessarily. I just take a different view. I believe that a patient can decide for himself or herself how they want to be treated. It’s their life, not mine, not anybody else’s. The people who argue against assisted suicide aren’t the ones who have to experience debilitating pain or watch a family member suffer. It’s the same with painful memories. I’d rather empower the patient to live a better life, and if they want to do that by altering part of their past, that’s their choice. After all, a tumor is part of your life experience, too, isn’t it? But we wouldn’t hesitate to surgically remove it. So I don’t think memories are sacrosanct.”