folo

Well, I see that Don in NOLA is right: yesterday I did (without intending or expecting it) hijack NMC’s Judge-Coleman-on-Judge-Lackey thread. For that, my apologies. But my, what an interesting adventure, at least for me, my comment to Observer and the responses to it turned into.

You know, some people (e.g., Miz Gloria and Roz Cawley) blog mostly about themselves and what’s going on in their lives. Others (e.g., NMC and lotus) blog mostly about events of the day in one or more fields, and thereby only accidentally reveal themselves — including to themselves. Either approach can make for fine reading or horrible, depending on the blogger. In this post, I’m going to visit the first category first and return to the second, where I’m more comfortable, in the end . . .

Telling Observer of some research I vaguely (as it turned out, very vaguely) recalled reading about, some research that his or her and my very different “reads” of the world brought back to mind, was my only purpose yesterday. When I got back and saw others’ reactions to that comment — and that it had indeed hijacked the thread — I was taken aback. “Oh noes, they think I’m a loon!” came to mind. Luckily, a couple of friends and The Google were able to confirm that I hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing, only misremembered it.

But the way I misremembered surprises me. Turns out, I have more imagination than I’d have credited myself with, and what memory couldn’t come up with, imagination supplied; I just couldn’t tell which was which.

I knew I recalled a respectable study done by respectable scholars and reported in respectable publications — okay so far. But what accounts for the large difference between what actually happened and my nuttier version? How’d I come up with that cadaver research that never happened (or if it has, I haven’t read about it)? Where’d I get that “little thingamabob in the forebrain”?

Well, I don’t know, but I surmise that fuzzy recall of the LAT story’s mention of “the anterior cingulate cortex” explains it. From that, my imagination crafted some scientists studying a forebrain structure. And how would they do this? Why, by dissecting cadaver brains, of course.

So here I was, making an earnest attempt to remember something I’d some time ago read lightly about in a field of study with which I’m unfamiliar. The two most important points — that this study did record basic brain-response differences between liberals and conservatives, and that it didn’t assess one as superior to the other — I got right; the other details went way kablooie on me.

Okay. I write about this now not because I find my own mental processes so fascinating, I think you just have to hear about them (oh lawd!) — but that what happened to me and my poor old brain is a valuable lesson in witness reliability.

A witness on the stand in court is doing her dead-level best to tell you what she remembers. He’s telling exactly the sense he made of an experience. She isn’t lying. He isn’t intending to mislead. Trying their hardest to get it right, they may (or may not) have the main thrust down but still wander off into the ether around the edges. The jurors, judge, and lawyers must then bring their own fallible brains to bear in the task of new sense-making. We hope and have to trust that they too are acting out of good will and honesty, as people generally do (oops, is my liberalism showing? ). In the end, it can go right, wrong, or just weird, but it’s our very best shot at getting to what really happened.

And while hijacking a thread is poor bloggy form, a practice to avoid whenever possible, I hope you’ll forgive me for having blundered into something that did, in the end, prompt a rich discussion. (That’s what I like about this place: you never really know where it’s going next, just that it’ll usually be interesting.)

Anyhow, that’s how that went, and now back to your regularly-scheduled blog.