I’ve been binging on Perception, as how about a professor of neuropsychology who is also a paranoid schizophrenic. Trust me, it’s good.
Today’s episode (season 2, episode 2), is one that centers on how unreliable our perceptions are in showing what actually happened, rather than what we perceived.
So, how does that relate to 1/6 investigations?
Simply, at this point, asking the officers and other witnesses to testify about events is not likely to yield any reliable record of events. Worse, EVEN WITH VIDEO EVIDENCE AVAILABLE that would contradict their biases, people who have viewed the footage (however truncated and edited) have made their decision about the “truth”, and, being human, are not likely to change their mind about what “happened”.
Over-writing Memory sectors of the brain is quite difficult. Once something is encoded in the brain, it becomes remarkably hard to cut it out. Trust me on that one. I used to play Trivial Pursuit (until I experienced problems finding others to play against – turns out that winning every game is not conducive to fun for my opponents). What I learned is that, once I answered a question wrongly, on every occasion that I encountered that same question, I answered it wrongly – and with the same answer I’d provided before.
On one hand, I KNEW the answer was wrong. But the pull of my brain towards that answer was stronger than that knowledge. The synapses had engraved a chemical pathway to that answer that had a stronger pull than my conscious knowledge that the answer was wrong.
In that case, as in many others, I made a choice, and, in doing so, blocked off all possibility of making another, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.
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That’s why the great Thomas Sowell said,”It takes considerable knowledge to realize and admit you could be wrong on a topic.” (paraphrased).