Intro

The transcription is about a podcast episode named "Secrets of the Mind" where Annie interviews Noah, a student of Forensic Psychology at l'Université de Montréal, discussing memory's impact on legal decisions. Noah explains the seven sins of memory proposed by Harvard professor Daniel Shatner, including transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, persistence, bias, misattributions, and suggestibility, highlighting how memory flaws can affect judicial processes and eyewitness testimonies. Je pense que là ça va être chill, ça devrait être ça l'idée. Il est posé. Il est posé, ok. Parfait. Hi everyone! Welcome! T'es genre en train de mixer. Ben je commence pas grave un coup de voix au début. Ok, ok. T'es genre en train de passer. Là mon nez il fait un peu ça. Ok. On recommence. Oui. Ok, là je suis crampée. C'est bon. Hey, c'est plus dur que je pensais. Parce que ça me rappelle du adverb, mais c'est comme des fois plus dur parce que c'était 4000 mots à lire. Ouais, ouais. Ok, on y va. Ok. Ok. Hi everyone! Welcome back to another episode of our new podcast series, Secrets of the Mind. As usual, I'm your host, Annie, and today we have a special guest with us who will be discussing various facts about the broad theme of memory. I'm happy to introduce you to Noah, a student at l'Université de Montréal. I'll quickly start by asking what branch of psychology interests you the most? Hi Annie! I'm pretty happy to be on your podcast. As a matter of fact, I'm currently studying Forensic Psychology in one of my classes. One of my interests, even before entering this class, was always cognitive processes like memory. Memories can fail us more often than we realize, and it can have significant impacts on society. If I can give you an example, eye-witness errors can obviously have a great impact on legal decisions. I hear you. My friends always tell me how forgetful I can be. But can you clear something up for this podcast? How exactly can me forgetting where I left my keys last night have such drastic effects on society? Well, you already have part of the answer. In forensic psychology, memory plays a really big role in judicial processes, much bigger than simply forgetting something. As you can probably already know, in trials where the accused has potentially committed a severe crime, memory plays a very key role in the outcome of the final verdict. One of the most obvious examples is in testimonies from victims or potential witnesses. It's come to light that our memories can fail us in many ways. Interesting. I guess it can be a bit more important to remember things properly when you're in front of a judge and jury. How exactly can our memories fail us, though? That's a really good question. There are many definitions and concepts surrounding the flaws of our memories. If I may, I can present the seven sins of memories proposed by Harvard professor Daniel Shatner. What are the seven sins of memory? Well, the first four are more passive occurrences and are a bit less impactful on our judicial system. The first sin is transience, which basically means that our memories degrade over time. The second sin is absent-mindedness, which refers to the fact that when we're not really paying attention to an event, we're probably not going to recollect it very well. The third, blocking, refers to those annoying tip-of-the-tongue moments where you just can't seem to remember something that you know you know. And for the fourth sin, we have persistence. That's another frustrating feeling, basically, where you can't seem to forget a memory that keeps coming back. Oh, so basically how I can't forget how I tripped down the stairs on my way to prom night? Exactly. But this is where it gets even more interesting, especially in these last three sins. One commonly known one is bias. It's the fact that we might bring retrospective distortions without necessarily realizing it into our memories, and it'll depend on our beliefs and emotions. There's also misattributions, which can play a huge role in derailing ongoing investigations. Basically, it's when you attribute a memory to the wrong source. Like when I thought I knew a cool fun fact, but it ended up being something I saw on my Instagram Reels? That's right. But now imagine the same phenomenon when a witness is trying to identify a suspect in a police lineup and makes that same exact mistake. Yeah. I wouldn't want to be in that lineup, that's for sure. And there's also one last sin I'd like to discuss more in detail with the help of a few studies. It's called suggestibility, and frankly, it's one of my favorite topics. Let's dive right into it. On a kind of zen. Yes, that's it.