2023-04-16 15:49:04
According to prosecutor Tarfusser, the key witness of the Erba massacre was the victim of suggestions that created a false memory of the facts. Because it happens to alter a lived event
According to the deputy prosecutor of the Milan court of appeal Cuno Tarfusserwho asked to reopen the case of the Erba massacre in which the spouses Olindo Romano and Rosa Bazzi were definitively sentenced, one of the contested evidences false memory of the eyewitness Mario Frigerio, also seriously injured, who had first spoken of a stranger with olive skin and then of his neighbor. For the magistrate, the acknowledgment made by the witness, Frigerio, who lost his wife Valeria Cherubini in the Erba massacre, is not reliable. The worsening of mental condition and the cognitive deficits manifested by Mario Frigerio during his hospital stay, the incorrect investigative interview techniques, full of numerous suggestionsimplemented on him and the clear violation of precise and well-known scientific laws on memory and face recognition demonstrate in an incontrovertible way that the memory concerning Olindo Romano as his aggressor a false memory and that Mario Frigerio was an unfit person to give valid testimony regarding the events that occurred on the evening of 11 December 2006, he writes in the document in which he requests revision.
What are false memories
But what are the false memories referred to by Cuno Tarfusser? They are called false memories or false memories the memories of something that never actually happened. The memory of a real event can be distorted by imaginary elements or enriched with details that did not actually happen, but which are useful for making the story coherent.
It may happen that a person but also groups of people, become convinced that an event occurred when it was actually distorted or altered. For example, the subject is convinced that he has experienced a situation, but in reality it is an invented memory, which derives from otherthe real memories whose fragments are aggregated: with memory distortion inauthentic memories are made up, recalling with absolute certainty something that never happened. A typical example is dj vu, that is, experiencing the sensation of having been to a place before or having seen a certain thing without actually having seen them. But sometimes people go beyond the sensation and sometimes report seeing places they’ve never been there.
Famous deceptions of memory
Oliver Sacks, the famous American neurologist and writer who died in 2017, also dealt with false memories. In The River of Conscience (Adelphi), a collection of essays published posthumously in 2018, Sacks tells of the explosion of an incendiary bomb in the garden of his house in England during World War II fixed firmly in his mind down to the smallest detail. Too bad the writer had never witnessed the scene. Many years later, his older brother, who at the time lived with him in a boarding school far from the site of the explosion, pointed this out to him. In the same chapter, Sacks also mentions a famous case involving the former president of the United States Ronald Reagan, who, during the presidential campaign of 1980, repeatedly told the harrowing story of the heroic pilot of a bomber hit by enemy fire during the last world war. Reagan could hardly hold back tears as he reconstructed the story, except not realizing that he was telling the story of the film Wing and a Prayer
And as mentioned, sometimes these false memories are collective. In scientific literature, for example, the case of that young man who, during the clashes of Piazza Tienanmen in China, in 1989, he imposed himself in front of the tanks to counter their advance. It is an iconic image, thanks to the famous photographs that went around the world. In the collective memory, the unknown rioter fell victim to the tanks, but he was not actually killed.
How false memories are formed
But why are false memories formed? Memory is not a static repository of all memories, but is influenced by a number of other internal and external factors: stress, emotions, alertness, nutrition, as well as alcohol and drug use. False memories occur more frequently in the presence of brain diseases (brain lesions, encephalitis, prolonged drug abuse, poor sleep quality, which affects the brain’s ability to process the information acquired during the day), but in reality they also occur in daily life and they come into play numerous factors that they can distort the memory.
First of all the perception: you think you see something that isn’t there because of aincorrect coding of a particular information. A typical example, for example, is witnessing a road accident in which the view was not perfect: not being able to provide details, the mind can intervene, even unconsciously, to fill information gaps with plausible news, but actually false. Me too’emotion can play tricks on you: the incidence of false memories is proportional to the emotional level you were feeling at that particular moment. Emotionally charged events are difficult to remember with pinpoint accuracy. L’wrong attribution another factor that comes into play: it happens that, completely unconsciously, events that happened separately are combined into a single story to make it coherent.
From a psychological point of view even possible encouraging a person to produce false memories: this can happen with thesuffered influence from loved ones or people in authority, in which we have esteem and trust that can lead us to remember experiences that we have never actually lived. Me too’hypnosis can help build a false memory, as well as the gaslightingi.e. a psychological manipulation in which the victims suffer mental abuse and are led to think that their memory is not reliable
April 16, 2023 (change April 16, 2023 | 3:48 pm)
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