i spent several weeks of my undergraduate psychology course-many decades ago-doing my best to talk nonsense. Our tutor explained that if we wished to study memory in a properly experimental manner, then we could only do so by finding neutral materials for memorising. There was no point in giving each member of the class a short story to read and then testing their capacity to remember its contents in a variety of experimental conditions, because people's capacity to remember what they'd read was affected by their previous knowledge of similar stories.
The only answer, he said, was nonsense syllables: long lists of newly constructed "words" that no one could ever have heard before. Words like Gep and Dop and Zib. But the problem was that such lists needed to be regularly up-dated because of the assaults upon their neutrality from new developments in slang, and the self-conscious activities of advertisers and acronym devisers.
So our task was to search through lists for nonsense syllables that had lost their meaninglessness and invent alternatives. My notes from the time record that in one session we disposed of the following contaminated syllables: Splif, Jif, Minj, Rac, Omo, and Bonk.
All of which helps to explain why my interest in psychological studies of memory over the last 20 years had been rather limited. Until, that is, I discovered a paper in the journal Psychology and Marketing by Brawn, Ellis and Loftus, called "Make My Memory: How Advertising Can Change Our Memories of the Past." What interested these experimenters was whether or not exposure to nostalgic advertisements about childhood experiences at Disney World could lead people to believe that those events had happened to them.
Subjects were initially asked to recall their own childhood visits to Disney and to indicate the likelihood that while there they had enjoyed a number of particular experiences. Among those listed was shaking hands with Bugs Bunny. (Clever stuff this-because Bugs Bunny is a Warner Brothers character who does not appear at Disney).
They were then shown simulated advertisements for Disney World called "Remember the Magic" which invited readers to go back to their childhood and remember what wonderful experiences they'd once enjoyed at Disney World-experiences which included shaking hands with Bugs Bunny.
And hey presto! A significant number of subjects who had previously thought it unlikely that they'd met the non-existent Bugs in their childhood visits, now remembered enjoying a jolly good handshake with him. In the words of the authors, "autobiographically focused advertising can make events (even impossible ones) seem more likely to have happened to us as children."
I'd rather like to believe Brawn, Ellis and Loftus. Their results do much to explain why so many people seem to believe that they not only enjoyed good plain wholesome bread during their childhood, but also spent their adolescent evenings happily quaffing pints of excellent bitter, and tapping their feet to the playing of a cockney pianist.
But these findings also raise questions about the extent to which any childhood memories can ever be our own. Our age is saturated not only with advertising images of the past, but with so many beautifully constructed dramas and seamless documentaries which claim to show what it was like to be young in previous decades. How many of us are ready, willing or able to hang on to our own messy, fragmented, mundane memories of such periods.
At times it hardly seems worth the effort. I was a teenager in Liverpool in the late 1950s. One of our favourite drinking dens at that time was The White Star. We went there chiefly because of the quality of the draught Bass and because, in the winter months, the place was romantically warmed by a large gas radiator.
Now, if you came out of The White Star and turned left and walked 100 yards, you'd find the Cavern Club. We knew all about it. We'd been told about the music you could hear there. We'd even been told about a group called The Beatles. But night after night, we'd walk out of The White Star, turn away from the Cavern and walk to the Temple Bar in Dale Street, where we could listen to the Merseysippi Jazz Band.
For years I've used this story to illustrate the general historical and biographical point that revolutions always tend to happen on the other side of the street. "Fancy coming along with us tonight to the Bastille? Or perhaps the Winter Palace?" "Not really. I promised myself an early night."
But I've finally yielded. Now that I've learned so much about the Cavern from the media, learned about how the condensation used to drip down onto the faces of the dancers from the ceiling, learned that you got your coat checked in by a cheeky girl called Cilla Black, it's become almost socially perverse to deny my presence at one of the 20th century's major cultural events.
The Cavern? I remember it well. So well, in fact, that if you press me for long enough I might tell you about that never-to-be-forgotten night when I shook hands with John Lennon. n
