"My freshman science teacher asked us whether it was possible to describe the parabola of a trajectory, and we said it wasn't.
Then she reached into her desk and got a ball and threw it at a kid and he caught it, and that part amazed me, that somehow your brain can calculate all these motions and rules, but, even so, another part has to learn how to do it.
You have to be taught something you already know."
Ah, welcome to law school. The quote above is from "The Tenth Planet" by Alec Wilkinson, in The New Yorker, July 24, 2006, an article about an astronomy professor at Cal Tech, Mike Brown, who finds things, in the furthest reaches of outer space.
I love stuff like this. I tell law students that they know more law than they think. They just have trouble realizing that it's law when it's time to write their blue-book essays. Then they have trouble writing English, much less law. Something is going on that blocks the synapses and turns out junque, which is junk after it's been to law school.
The notion that there's good stuff in your brain, if only it could get out interests me because your brain also contains a lot of bad stuff that seems to have no trouble getting out at all. Why is this? Is it practical to know about this? Do lawyers need to know how the brain works?
Lawyers above all need to know how the brain works because we rely so much to prove our cases on what witnesses say that they recall.
But how do we really know whether what a witness says she recalls is really memory and not something made up to serve some purpose, like getting money, putting someone in jail, or pleasing authority figures such as parents, police, social workers, prosecutors, judges, juries, etc.?
Naturally I have some experience in dealing with such questions (or I wouldn't be interested and writing about it). My introduction came when a man I represented said he was innocent of charges brought by his ex-wife and her new boyfriend, her attorney, who she later married, out of the mouth of the parents' three-year old daughter.
The child showed no physical sign of any mistreatment, and told no coherent story of anything, but that didn't stop the authorities from taking off like a shot with a major criminal prosecution, despite the fact that when interviewed by police the child sat on her mother's lap and her mother translated her words to police from her native Arabic.
The jury trial alone took a month. The preparation took a year. The post-trial work, in which we tried to obtain a court order allowing the father to see his daughter took another several years. I hung the jury, succeeded in having all 61 felony counts dismissed after a six-month negotiation, but never succeeded in having a court restore visitation. The father never saw his child again and now she's an adult who in all likelihood continues to believe that her father molested and abandoned her, as preached by her mother and her second husband, the attorney, who won the civil part of the case, even after the court-appointed psychiatrist submitted a detailed report showing how the claim of abuse was a fabrication induced by a process of parental alienation.
Why did the court cut off all of the father's rights? Because, said the judge, the child had come to a position of rest with the mother and her attorney-husband, and to force her to resume visiting the father would be disturbing to her.
Why did the father not appeal? Because he'd remarried, started a new family, a new business, and he couldn't afford to continue to pursue his lost daughter.
How could a child of age three be taught to say something that was false, asked the prosecutor, back in 1984 when this case arose? It's very hard to potty-train a young child, claimed an alleged expert, a woman-attorney appointed by the county to represent the child, so how could the mother teach the child a false story? as the father claimed.
That was the $64,000 question, of course, and at the time, none of the two psychiatrists or psychologist we relied on was able to provide an answer.
I came up with one, however, by looking back to the Salem, 1692 witchcraft accusation outbreak where all of the charges were false (unless you believe in witches who make deals with your enemies, the neighbors, to harm you). This was paranoia city for the adults, and the kids picked up on it, feeding it right back to get the parents off their backs when caught playing spin-the-bottle and sexual games. Of course the parents were more than willing to believe because they were swallowing the same nonsense they'd taught the kids.
It took years of research by such people as Elizabeth Loftus and Stephen Ceci to demonstrate how this process of inducing false beliefs works with little kids when pressured by parents, and it doesn't take much, as kids are used to reading parents tone of voice, facial expression, and body language even before they can speak words.
In 1984, however, many adults lacked the brains they were born with and believed that if a child said something, it must be true. They forgot, however, that they often disbelieved children when they testified in juvenile court. Then they were lying. San Francisco General Hospital's Child Abuse and Sexual Assault Resource Center (CASARC) put out a brochure that said, "Always believe children who report this [sexual abuse]. Children NEVER lie about this problem." My client is lucky he wasn't sent to jail forever. He's buying lunch next week.
At this time, scientists tried to develop a better understanding as to how the mind worked when it came to remembering things.
Let me ask you a question. Can you remember seeing a sailboat on the bay or a lake somewhere from a long time ago? Were the sails white? How did you perform this feat of memory?
Did you just flash on a recollection you had stored in your computer brain?
Can you picture in your mind a long lost grandparent? Is there a place in your brain where you store images of grandparents?
Does your mind contain a grandparent section?
How about Hollywood stars? Do you have any Hollywood cells in your brain? How about characters from the Bible? Does your brain contain Moses or Jesus cells? Where are they exactly?
Back in the 1980s, the prevailing popular model of the mind was that it contained places in which such memories were recorded, as in a book, a video recorder, or computer. All you had to do was to call up the memory and you had it. Sometimes emotions got in the way, but if you eliminated that, you had it, because the memory was engraved in your brain like the words on a tombstone.
This idea was false however. Your brain was made of cells, connections of a sort between cells, chemicals that move from cell to another helping to fire electrical impulses across billions of brain cells, all dedicated to performing different functions in keeping you going and relating to the world properly.
What really happens when you say that you recall something is that you have called up bits and pieces of what you think, now, should be the memory of something that happened years ago. That sailboat may have had red sails.
Memory, it turns out, is like re-staging a Broadway play. You have to reproduce the set, the scenery, the characters who were present, the dialog, the music, the lighting, etc. This is impossible, of course, to do in your mind, so you come up with the best rendition that your mind allows, and what your mind allows is what today's situation requires so that you don't get in trouble.
This was the problem faced by the three-year-old daughter who was being held captive by a hostile mother who was backed by the attorney who was more interested in sleeping with her than anything else. That child was as effectively a captive as the 22 American Korean War "turncoat" soldiers who were beaten and fed by their North Korean captors. We get our word "brainwashing" from this experience. The daughter had turned on her father to please her mother, a classic reaction to Parental Alienation Syndrome.
For more about the new science and functioning of the brain, from the molecular to the psychological levels, see the volumes below, and the following articles by yours truly:
"In Search of Memory, the Emergence of a New Science of Mind" by Eric R. Kandel, winner of the Nobel Prize (W.W. Norton, 2006), and
"The Mind's Eye" by Michael S. Gazzaniga (U. California Press, 1998).