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Mixed memories

Anybody who has ever forgotten the name of someone just introduced knows that memory can be capricious. One constant is that memory lapses are more common among the elderly. But recent experiments by Scott D. Slotnick, a Boston College assistant professor of psychology, suggest that the aging mind may not so much be forgetting as calling up untrue memories.

In “Aging, Source Memory, and Misrecollections,” published in the January 2007 Journal of Experimental Psychology, Slotnick and coauthors from the University of Virginia contrast the standard “reduced memory” model of cognitive aging, which holds that older people often guess when they can’t recall specific details, with a “misrecollection hypothesis,” which posits that they remember, but jumble, details and “miscombine” features of different events, resulting in “convincing false recollections.”

Slotnick and his coauthors asked adult test subjects ages 18 to 23 and 60 to 80 to briefly view statements on a computer that were simultaneously spoken by either a male or female over headphones. After various timed delays, subjects viewed the statements again without the voice, in addition to new statements. They were asked to recall whether a statement was old or new and, if old, whether a male or female had spoken it. Finally, they were asked to express their confidence in each answer on a six-point scale, ranging from guessing to absolute certainty.

The researchers found that rather than bunching a larger portion of their wrong answers around a “guessing” level of certainty, the older adults “misrecollected” 23 percent of the statements in the study, with conviction. Young test-takers demonstrated virtually no such behavior.

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Free-market religion

When religions collide in the 21st century, will the competition for souls produce conflict or inspire tolerance? Much depends on economic development, writes Alan Wolfe, a Boston College professor of political science, who sees religious violence declining with the inevitable spread of secular values that accompanies free markets.

It is an “unassailable” given that “material progress will slowly erode religious­ fervor,” observes Wolfe in “And the Winner Is. . .” (Atlantic, March 2008). As examples, he cites Spain and Ireland, once among Europe’s most religious countries, now “among the least.” The big exception is the United States, both affluent and relatively devout. The American model of faith revival—set in a “free religious marketplace”—will come to dominate, Wolfe says. He points to the “maturing” U.S. evangelical movement, with its megachurches that now cater to “time-pressed professionals” and its responsive tilt toward environmentalism. “Where religions are flourishing, they are also generally evolving,” he says, with “entrepreneurs of the spirit . . . honing their messages and modulating many of their beliefs so as to appeal to the consumer.” Faiths compete for adherents by becoming less radical, more focused on worldly prosperity, and more tolerant of individual choice, says Wolfe. The result, from Latin America to Nigeria to Egypt, has been a growing focus on personal empowerment by religious movements, Pentecostal and Islamic alike.

Wolfe predicts that inflexible religious leaders will be outmatched by those who “swell their ranks through persuasion.” “Religious peace,” he writes, “will be the single most important consequence of the secular underpinning of today’s religious growth.”

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Dressed for success

The Old English word for silk is godweb, which suggests the role that the fabric played in signaling privilege, sanctity, and power in the Middle Ages, writes Robin Fleming, Boston College professor of history, in “Acquiring, Flaunting, and Destroying Silk in Late Anglo-Saxon England,” (Early Medieval Europe, May 2007). Historians have mostly ignored the fabric (under Henry VIII much of England’s ancient silk, being in the possession of the Church, was burned). But Fleming sifts through secondary evidence contained in medieval portraits, wills, illuminated manuscripts, homilies, letters, and tombs to track the material’s availability and evolving significance as it went from swathing relics and the bodies of deceased saints to garbing living churchmen and royalty and finally the merely affluent.

What was cloaked in silk was to be revered, and Fleming notes the fluidity of silk’s symbolism: “Kings who dressed themselves on ceremonial occasions in special silk and [silk-banded] clothes, taken from a repertoire of ecclesiastical wear, were making assertions about the priestly nature of their office,” she writes. And when monastic artists “wished to depict the awesome power of Christ and his saints they did so by dressing them in the same fine, silk brocades.”

Fleming describes how early English monarchs wore hand-me-down silks, the gifts of popes or German emperors who had easier access to Byzantium’s products. She relates that “around the middle of the 10th century the silk trade rapidly organized and intensified” so that colorful silks from Iran reached Britain more directly, by way of the Baltic. And she considers silk garments found in France (whose fashions influenced England’s) and Denmark (whose fashions England influenced).

In an age where most people wore “brown-, dun-, or russet-colored garb,” concludes Fleming, it mattered that the king of England “dressed like Elvis Presley.”

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Chris Berdik is a writer in Boston.

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