Sunday e-mail 21st July: What will you be remembered for?

To make God laugh, they say in Africa – make a plan.

I had a classic Crime & Psychology Sunday e-mail all lined up for you. It was good, I promise.  But then crime got in the way. So, too, did Psychology. Today, therefore - something else.

Our memories are terribly unreliable. That’s true whether we’re trying to remember childhood birthday parties, our shopping list, or major public events like, say, the death of Princess Diana or the attempted assassination, last week, of Donald Trump. Well, I’m sure your memory for last weekend is pretty clear. Doubtless you remember with some certainty where you were and what you were doing when you heard. But will you remember correctly in, say, five years? Or ten? What about fifteen?

In five years’ time, it’s possible that your confidence may remain unaffected while your accuracy falls. It’s possible, for sure – but how would you know? No one is likely to test you, just as they are unlikely to test you on the details of your childhood birthday parties.

No one will ever talk about Thomas Matthew Crooks’s childhood birthday parties now, except to comb them for clues to his adult personality. He has joined that exclusive group of Americans to whom we only ever refer by all three names – John Wilkes Booth; Lee Harvey Oswald; Gary Michael Heidnick; John Wayne Gacy. Members of this group do not have biographies. They have aetiologies, diagnoses, symptoms. Everything we remember, we remember for one reason only.

Some people commit crimes precisely because they want to be remembered for something -anything. They want to make a dent in other people’s memories. They take the fastest, stupidest, laziest option. I wrote about this phenomenon in my newsletter about Crime's Hierarchy of Needs.

How would you like to be remembered? There’s a question to provoke conversation among your own friends, admirers, and groupies. The people I know have made various suggestions: ‘That book I wrote’; ‘My research in epidemiology’; ‘Nothing at all, please!’

Historically, few of us have enjoyed much control. Think about that man from Pompeii who is famous even today (viral, even) for dying while masturbating. That’s it – a rich, full, ancient Roman life, no doubt, and we know just one humiliating fact about him. The novelist, Milan Kundera, wrote about ‘ridiculous immortality’. His example was the great astronomer Tycho Brahe, who is better remembered today for dying of a burst bladder than for his scientific accomplishments. Kundera has Goethe and Ernest Hemingway in heaven, debating why they are still famous. Are people still reading the books, or just reading about their authors?

Louie Witt, who was present at the Kennedy assassination, is remembered today for nothing more than holding an umbrella in an attempt to bring Neville Chamberlain to mind. (Chamberlain himself, of course, is mostly remembered for getting it all wrong about Hitler.) At least Witt did it on purpose. Abraham Zapruder’s name will never be forgotten, even though he was just trying out his new movie camera at the Presidential motorcade. His life was capsized and emptied. So were the lives of the people around him. And as for Badge Man…well, Badge Man wasn’t even there. JFK himself (to bring this paragraph full circle) surely couldn’t have imagined his life would ever be linked to a man whose headstone says William Bobo.

Donald Trump, it’s fair to say, would never have bet that Thomas Matthew Crooks would feature in his own legend: no more than Margaret Thatcher would have bet that the Irish Republican Army would feature so prominently in hers. The same is true of Robert Kennedy and Sirhan Sirhan. Franz Ferdinand simply could not have imagined being linked always and forever to a nobody like Gavrilo Princip.

Are you haunted by the thought of spilling cocoa on your nice linen shirt while you’re on the train to a political event, having to borrow a T-shirt from a friend that says something like ‘I Love Hamsters’ or ‘Bring Back Disco’, witnessing a major international incident, being interviewed on national television, and thereafter being known to history as ‘Hamster Guy’ or ‘The Bring-Back-Disco Fool? Of course you are. Thinking people everywhere share your fear. Me, I worry about having to borrow footwear off a clown who happens to be on the same train, and being remembered forever as ‘big yellow shoe man’. Or perhaps a TV documentary crew will be filming something in my hometown when I happen to walk into a lamp-post in the background. Who wants their headstone to say ‘Lamp-post Klutz’?

This week’s newsletter? We need something about time and chance, the slings and arrows of outrageous criminals. I hope you’ll enjoy THE FIVE STRANGEST EVENTS IN CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY. I know I enjoyed writing it. It was kind of amusing…but kind of a sobering experience, too.

Bang a blue button, please, or, even better, buy me a coffee!

Oh hell, why choose? Please do both!

This week’s bullet list features five interesting facts about memory:

·       Memory featured in one of the very first intelligence tests that psychologists ever devised: so old, it wasn’t even called an IQ test yet. James McKeen Cattell included on his test an item that he called ‘Number of Digits Remembered on Once Hearing’. It is said to be the only item on his test that correlates with a modern IQ score.

·       Some memories are so brief they don’t seem like memories at all. The feeling on your fingers when you take your hand away from the table’s edge? That’s your haptic memory. The look of a clockface when you move your gaze to a blank wall? That’s your iconic memory.

·       No matter what they used to tell you on TV cop shows, your memory doesn’t store everything. In fact, it might be more true to say it stores hardly anything. When you get the impression that you’re replaying a piece of videotape in your mind, you are really just rebuilding (‘reconstructing’) the memory. No wonder we so often get things wrong.

·       Psychologists think of memory as having three stages: encoding; storage; retrieval. To remember things optimally, try to make sure that the environment in which you encode is as similar as possible to the one in which you will be retrieving. Don’t revise for an exam on the beach, for instance. Do it in an examination hall. This is why police sometimes stage reconstructions of crimes.

·       There is little or nothing you can do to make your memory ‘better’ (whatever that means). Ignore the claims of charlatans. What you can do, is use your memory more efficiently by means of simple teachable tricks known as mnemonics. Doubtless you’ve encountered some yourself. Have you heard of memory palaces, for instance, or the Method of Loci? Master them as astound your friends!