Campbell’s claim that a sexual-assault victim’s memory consists of completely accurate but disorganized fragments contradicts fundamental scientific knowledge of the nature of memory, McNally told me. “The brain is not a videotape machine,” he said. “All of our memories are re-constructed. All of our memories are incomplete in that sense.” Each time we recall an event, it is being reassembled, and sometimes changed by the very process of recall.
What's shoddy about this? It's an important observation that has been proven time and again. Dismissing the entire piece as shoddy and circumspect is just as much of an agenda.
Are we certain that the malleability of memory has nothing to do with the high rate of innocent people on death row? It's supposedly about 4%. I wonder how many of them can be traced back to witnesses relying on memory rather than hard evidence implicating them.
That's not directly related to the piece, but the topic seems worth talking about.