AT OUR meeting on July 23, President Brian Melville reported that he had received a letter of thanks from the Chairman of the Rowing Club for our £325 towards their new boat, which the Club will match. Brian thanked Nige Jenkins for organising our donation.
Then, following some hilarious quotes by Clive Allen, we welcomed our guest speaker, Dr Katy Bellamy. Katy explained that she is a cognitive neuro scientist (no, most of us didn’t know what that was either) and had gained her PhD from Edinburgh University having grown up playing with Meccano sets rather than dolls and had wanted to be an astronaut.
Anyway, she explained how we remember things, or not as the case may be, and about false memory. Now I should say I hope my recollection of her presentation is not wildly inaccurate. Any mistakes are clearly my own!
She described, and quoted from, research conducted by Professors Bartlett and Loftus, whom she regarded highly. She reminded us that memory is a process of reconstruction by each of us individually, but that other people’s recollections often differed from ours. And here I was reminded of ‘Chinese whispers’. She told us about flash-bulb memories, which may be true to you, but can be wholly inaccurate, and how some people embroider their recollections. We do, don’t we? We usually retell stories in our own words rather than repeat verbatim what we’ve heard or read. She also told us about the American research into eye-witness accounts in criminal cases and how regression hypnotherapy is not acceptable in courts.
She concluded her fascinating and thought-provoking talk by saying that the brain is extremely lazy at remembering things, unless it’s absolutely critical to our survival. In response to questions, she said becoming forgetful is not necessarily acquired with great age, which reassured a number of us.
Ron Ind thanked Katy on our behalf and she happily joined us for our post-meeting discussions which we greatly appreciated.
Our own Cliff Blackborrow will have something special for us for our meeting on July 30 and then on August 6 we shall learn about bee-keeping.
CHRIS DONOUGH
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