In previous posts on The Forensic View, we have seen that eyewitness memories can be reconfigured in the direction of witness personal beliefs (Bartlett, 1932; Loftus, 1979; Sharps, 2022). This can happen not only to elements of eyewitness stories, but even to entire narratives.

But how can we account for these changes? Why do they happen?

It’s important to realize that no eyewitness account is a veridical representation of our surroundings, because the fact is that we don’t perceive our surroundings as such. We only perceive the part of our surroundings that our senses make possible.

We don’t perceive the ultraviolet light reflected from things we see, even though bees and some other animals do. With our 20000-Hertz capacity hearing, we hear things that frogs don’t (their capacity only reaches a few thousand Hertz; so, if you speak at a high pitch around frogs, they won’t know what you’re saying). And we’re completely deaf to sounds that our 79000-Hertz cats can hear without difficulty. Bats and dolphins are swooping around listening to well over 100000 Hertz of sound that are completely out of bounds to us. The normal human nervous system is essentially deaf and blind to much of the world around us.

Similar concepts apply to cognition, as well as to perception. You don’t actually need to speak at soprano pitches around frogs, assuming you’re concerned with the possibility of froggish conspiracies in the first place — their little froggy nervous systems do not have the capacity to understand the complex ideas expressed in human speech. In the same way, even human nervous systems have certain limitations on thought as well as........

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