When we have accurate memories of long-past events, these events are
almost always remarkable—that is, distinctive—in some way. For example, I
vividly remember a championship Little League baseball game in which I got
five hits and scored the winning run (a newspaper account verifies that my
memory is accurate). However, about all I remember from the many other Lit-
tle League games in which I played is that I was good at throwing and catching
but not so good at hitting.
Psychologists have studied memory of remarkable experiences by asking
people what they were doing on the occasion of some historically significant
event like the assassination of John F. Kennedy (Brown & Kulik, 1977; Pillemer,
1984). Usually people can describe what they were doing in great detail, al-
though ordinarily the psychologist is unable to check the accuracy of the per-
son’s account. Memory for a remarkable event, sometimes called aflashbulb
memory, is vivid (McCloskey, Wible, & Cohen, 1988) because the event is dis-
tinctive and because people talk about and think about the event much more
frequently than about other, more mundane, experiences.
It should be noted, though, that memory for what one was doing at the time
of a historically significant event is frequently wrong (McCloskey et al., 1988;
Neisser & Harsch, 1991). For example, Neisser and Harsch (1991) asked stu-
dents on the day after the Challenger disaster how they heard about the disas-
ter and asked them again 3 years later. On the test conducted 3 years after the
disaster, one third of the subjects gave inaccurate accounts, although they were
confident that their accounts were accurate.
Brain Stimulation and Accurate Memory Sometimes memory researchers cite
data that seem to indicate, as the record-keeping theory would have it, that
human memory does contain records of nearly all past experiences, although it
might ordinarily be hard to retrieve most of those records. Some of the most
compelling data comes from the research of a brain surgeon named Wilder
Penfield, who removed small portions of cortical tissue in order to prevent the
spread of seizures in epileptic patients (Penfield & Jasper, 1954; Penfield &
Perot, 1963). Ordinarily such patients are awake during the operation, because
the cortex is impervious to pain. Penfield needed to electrically stimulate vari-
ous portions of the cerebral cortex, in order to locate accurately the epileptic
site. When he did so, some of the patients described vivid recollections of
mostly trivial past experiences. Penfield reasoned that the cortex must therefore
keep a record of all past experiences and that forgetting must be due to re-
trieval failure.
After Penfield began to publish his findings, some psychologists questioned
his interpretations (Loftus & Loftus, 1980; Squire, 1987). First of all, only about
3% of Penfield’s patients ever reported remembering past experiences in re-
sponse to electrical stimulation. Furthermore, for those patients who did, the
evidence suggested that they were not accurately recalling an actual experience
but unintentionally fabricating one. One patient, for example, reported having
amemoryofplayingatalumberyard,butitturnedoutthepatienthadnever
been to the lumberyard. Another patient claimed to remember being born.
Recognition and Accurate Memory Another kind of data sometimes cited to
support the claim that the brain stores records of virtually all experiences, any
324 R. Kim Guenther